The utter shamelessness of Britain’s rail unions

In what other industry could demand collapse by a tenth and yet the staff still think that they have a right to an above inflation pay rise and no job losses? Rail privatisation was supposed to put an end to union militancy and to relieve taxpayers of the financial risk of running the railways. Patently, it has achieved neither objective. Three national rail strikes have been declared for later in the month, to compound strikes on the London underground.

Meanwhile, taxpayers will contribute £16 billion this year to propping up an industry in which demand for its services have collapsed. In the week to 22 May (before the effect of last week’s bank holidays) usage of national rail services averaged 89 per cent of what it did before the pandemic. As far as the tube is concerned, usage was 76 per cent of that of early March 2020.

So why is the RMT demanding pay rises of 11 per cent – 2 per cent over the official measure of inflation, the Consumer Prices Index – while refusing to countenance any job losses? It is hardly as if rail staff don’t already get a remarkably good deal. This year the base salary for a tube driver is £57,290 – and that is before overtime is taken into account. In 2018 it was revealed that nine drivers of the London Underground earned in excess of £100,000. As for drivers on national rail services, employment website Glassdoor puts their average salary at £54,000. This is far out of line with, say, salaries paid to nurses – which is just over £33,000 according to the Royal College of Nursing.

The sad truth is that since rail privatisation unions have grown more, not less, militant and have succeeded in extracting huge pay rises from their notionally private employers. They have succeeded in doing so because the government has carried on supporting the rail industry as if it were in public ownership. Even prior to the pandemic, the government handed out grants to bail out companies when passenger numbers fell beneath forecast levels. Come the pandemic, the rail industry was bailed out massively so that staff could be kept on at full pay even when few services were running. Ever since privatisation, rail companies have found it easier to cave into union demands and then go cap in hand to the government rather than risk the disruption of strikes. As for public-owned TfL, it is still indulging unions with the kinds of restrictive practices that died out in most industries in the 1970s – thanks to a deal with the unions in 2008 tube drivers’ jobs are not openly advertised. The government loves to dictate anti-discriminatory employment policies on other industries, yet tolerates this arrangement.

Sooner or later something will have to give. Workers in other industries who have lost jobs or income as a result of the pandemic are surely going to run out if sympathy for a group of workers which has responded to its favoured status by calling national strikes.

Moreover, with more people now working from home, the unions’ power to cause mayhem is diminishing. Even if they prefer people to be in the office, most companies will now have established procedures for many staff to work from home when necessary. A national rail strike is going to cause very much less disruption compared with what it would have done in 2019.

Sooner or later, the government is going to have to take on the rail unions just as Mrs Thatcher took on the NUM. There will never be a better opportunity than now. Boris Johnson is said to be looking for some ‘red meat’ policies to throw his disgruntled backbench MPs. Standing up against the rail unions – while accelerating plans to automate the tube, so doing away with the expense and militancy of drivers for good – could be one of them.

Banning greeting cards won’t keep spice out of our prisons

The last time inspectors visited HMP The Mount in 2018, the place was awash with drugs. The prevalence of the psychoactive substance ‘bird killer’, and the violence associated with it, meant nearly half of all prisoners there reported feeling unsafe. This insidious drug, collectively known as ‘spice’, was smuggled past officers in the form of letters and cards invisibly impregnated with the stuff which prisoners then smoked or licked. Wings and landings filled with zombified inmates in a haze of toxic smoke that felled officers were not an uncommon sight. The addictive qualities of this junk resulted in a spiral of debt, predation and lawlessness that threw rehabilitation out the cell window.

So the news that this large Hertfordshire medium-security jail is banning all cards and photographs to inmates, except those generated remotely via commercial outlets such as Moonpig and Freeprints, represents a welcome effort to remove the awful scourge of synthetic drugs that disfigures prisons with brutality and despair. Up to a point.

Family contact helps prisoners stay in touch with loved ones and connected to the outside world. Research by the Ministry of Justice shows the odds of reoffending are substantially reduced when prisoners who had family visits were compared with those who had none. But not all families can afford the cost and commitment of visits to prisoners often held a long way from home. So, cards and photographs assume an even greater importance, especially those handmade by children. We should loosen these emotional bonds only with extreme care and, if possible, temporarily.

Now, instead of the real thing, prisoners will be given photocopies of any handwritten cards sent to them. The prison service could also potentially be a huge source of revenue for Moonpig et al. Let’s hope, without much expectation, that someone within HQ has negotiated a bulk discount to make sure that this regrettable but necessary initiative is affordable for hard-pressed families and that the other methods of electronic communication such as video conferencing are boosted to compensate.

Nevertheless, the latest report by the independent monitors of HMP The Mount suggests that despite the still-pervasive Covid lockdown across it and many other jails, drugs including spice remain available. While the manner in which drugs find their way into prisons will include the methods HMP The Mount is trying to stamp out, fewer visitors in prisons means that drugs must be coming in to our jails through other ways;  packages thrown over the perimeter and brought in by a small minority of corrupt staff must also feature in the problem. The rampant drugs economy in our prisons is so large and so lucrative that the threat will constantly evolve against countermeasures.

It is not impossible to make jails drug-free, just very expensive to do so. Removing some from the grasp of organised crime will probably require blood on the carpet in terms of pushback and disorder. But there are at last signs that, with the deployment of airport-style scanners and other technology to most closed prisons, we will begin to get a grip on supply lines. The relentless demand for drugs by those banged up is unlikely to go away though unless, at the same time, prisons return to being purposeful places that allow people to address their offending behaviour, get the treatment they need and give them skills for a successful life on release. For prisons, rehabilitation should be a primary focus.

The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor, spoke recently of a post-covid ‘torpor’ with classrooms and workshops standing empty while prisoners that should be in them are locked up for as much as 23 hours a day. We now have hastily recruited prison officers whose experience of dealing with inmates is mainly through the hatch on their cell doors. We have prisons so deprived of staff who have left because of high violence, poor support and low pay that even if there’s the will to unfreeze this collective solitary confinement there’s no way to do it safely. This should matter to us all.

Jails awash with violence, indolence and despair will not stop future victims and cannot help prisoners realise their own potential. We’re paying for it and victims will meet the consequences in due course. The Mount is taking commendable steps against one aspect of this foul triumvirate but we need a proper response from the government to get prisons open again and safe for all.

Welcome to the age of post-Covid nihilism

Amid the recent orgy of violence across America, it was the carjackings that finally got me.

Lost amid all the mass shootings and gang slayings of late has been another wave of crime: vehicle thefts. In Washington DC, carjackings in 2021 were up by a third over 2019, while in nearby Alexandria a motorist made national news after he shot two boys at a gas station who were trying to lift his car. In Chicago, 1,900 vehicles were jacked just last year, which is eye-wateringly high even by that city’s grim standards.

These thefts are almost all committed by teens, often at gunpoint. And whereas the point of a carjacking a decade ago might have been to sell off the parts for cash, the purpose now is better defined as ‘for the lulz’. Thieves have taken to posting videos of their ill-begotten prizes on social media. Sometimes the cars are even found later, abandoned and unharmed, taken for only a joyride. One community organiser told the New York Times that carjacking has become like ‘a sport’.

What stands out about these heists is what stands out generally about this summer of rage: the caprice, the anomie, the sheer pointlessness of it all. Such has been everything from Salvador Ramos’s rampage in Uvalde to last weekend’s shootout in Philadelphia that saw innocent bar-goers blasted. Law-abiding sorts, what Gil Sewall calls ‘Functional America’, like to think that violent crime happens for reasons that are both remote and sensible, gangs and drug lords with their own rules who would never reach all the way into the burbs. The thought of senseless attacks, people victimised at random, is far more chilling.

Yet that seems to be what’s happening here. How were there 12 mass shootings in America last weekend alone? How has the murder rate spiked 40 per cent since 2019? The answer is surely a mosaic, from soft-on-crime DAs to a massive proliferation of guns to the riots of 2020 (Baltimore still hasn’t recovered from the unrest after Freddie Gray’s death in 2015). Yet one particularly bloody tile catches the eye time and again: the pandemic. Covid lockdowns effectively imprisoned restless adolescents while paradoxically making it easier for them to skip school. That pent-up energy had to come out somewhere, and so it has.

This is the other side of the Covid story, the one we don’t like to talk about. While Saint Fauci and his harem of Karens insisted it was easy – all you had to do was wear a mask, all you had to do was order from DoorDash and not think about the dude who actually had to drop off your vegan chimichangas – the edges of our society were bleeding. The usual avenues of hope, from classrooms to after-school sports, were blocked off. And so some teens instead got their kicks lifting Subarus. It wasn’t just them. Think of the lonely and shut-in twentysomething who began drinking alone, or the working-from-home empty-nester who found herself drawn in to lurid Reddit conspiracy boards.

The common denominator here is nihilism, a sense that nothing matters, or that there isn’t anything to matter. Thucydides wrote of a horrible plague that ravaged Athens during the Peloponnesian war, which he said heralded ‘the beginnings of a state of unprecedented lawlessness’ in which ‘no fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence’. Certainly the crime here in America isn’t quite so unprecedented – this has always been a violent country – but our own Covid plague does seem to have hollowed out something essential. Stripped of meaning and uncertain about the future, some have filled the void with bloodshed.

None of this, by the way, is meant to distract from the issue of guns. America’s abundance of firearms are no doubt fuelling this madness. And why not cast a critical eye upon our mass media too? Season one of Stranger Things began with nerdy kids playing Dungeons and Dragons; season four kicks off with the bloody corpses of children strewn across a lab. Hollywood’s obsession with gratuitous violence can seem at times like a dark caricature of the violent nihilism building outside.

Still, you can’t blame it all on the movies, or even the guns. There have been plenty of hideous episodes in this crime wave where a gun was never used. On Capitol Hill, a man attacked a random passerby with a brick, then threw another at his baby in a stroller (both are okay). In Portland, rioters have targeted police with laser pointers, blinding them perhaps forever. The difference, as the gun controllers will tell you, is that none of those victims died from bullet wounds, which is true. But again, the inherent senselessness behind these acts deserves a conversation all its own.

Moral panics are as much a part of the American experience as amber waves of grain. If you hear someone shrieking IT COULD KILL YOUR CHILDREN, chances are it can’t and hasn’t and won’t. Yet in this case, the hand-wringing has just cause. There is an inhumanity at work in this country that’s as stark as anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. And it may be that the solution lies all the way back with those teenage carjackers. Generation Z has been particularly pummelled by Covid lockdowns, with polls finding Zoomers struggling to advance their careers, date, maintain friendships, and keep up their mental health.

Yet if we’re going to fully recover from this, it will take a younger generation, weary of unrest and gridlock, determined to build something in the void. Whether our exhausted young can yet manage this remains to be seen. But then that’s the good thing about living in a free society: if nihilism has room to thrive, so too does reform, correction, and hope.

Vardy backs Carrie

Carrie Johnson hasn’t been seen much around Westminster recently, as her embattled husband tries to rescue his flailing premiership. But last weekend, the couple dressed up in their finery to mark the Platinum Jubilee. While the pair faced a, er, mixed reaction when they appeared at the thanksgiving service at St Paul’s, it seems that Carrie’s Labour red outfit won her one fan at least. 

For underneath a picture of the Johnsons on Instagram, another famous wife voiced her approval. Rebekah Vardy – partner of footballer Jamie and currently embroiled in the ‘Wagatha Christie trial’ – posted on Carrie’s account: ‘You look stunning Carrie’ replete with a heart and two kisses. It’s good to see that the controversies of the past haven’t blunted Vardy’s Insta game. Wags of a feather stick together.

Elsewhere, Tories on Twitter have been falling over themselves to show solidarity with Ukraine. But Mr S wonders if Lincoln MP Karl McCartney went too far earlier this week when he ‘liked’ a tweet about ‘beautiful Slavic girl singles’ seeking ‘older partners.’ 

McCartney, 53, has now ‘unliked’ the post from ‘SofiaDate’ which urged followers to ‘start a chat with…pretty Slavic ladies.’ At the beginning of Putin’s invasion, the longtime backbencher declared: ‘I am hopeful that a positive resolution for the people of Ukraine will be found soon.’ Is this what he had in mind…?

Why Ukrainians like me still love Boris Johnson

When Boris Johnson and Ukraine’s president Zelensky walked through the streets of our capital in April, they came across a man. Astonished and emotional, he begged Zelensky: 

‘Please tell Boris that we will be grateful for the rest of our lives. Britain saved us. God, I’m so happy…My children and grandchildren will remember this forever. This memory will live through the centuries.’

These words sum up how many Ukrainians feel. For all his troubles at home, Boris Johnson remains more popular in Ukraine than many of our own politicians, with the possible exception of Zelensky himself. During the first day of the war, shocked and bound by fear in the face of the Russian onslaught, Ukrainians waited for the world to respond. But nothing happened. ‘Are they really going to watch us die and just stay aside?’, my friend asked. I’ll remember his words for the rest of my life. That’s when Boris took a stand.

When it came to facing down Putin’s Russia, few world leaders used such uncompromising rhetoric as Boris Johnson. Almost no other country has helped us with weapons and diplomacy as much as Britain has. In our nightmare, Ukraine found a true friend: Boris’s Britain has ensured we do not feel alone. For that, Ukrainians like me are deeply grateful.

In Britain, Boris Johnson’s face is plastered over the front pages of newspapers for all the wrong reasons. His face is everywhere in Ukraine, too. But here he remains a hero. Memes, gifs, photos, and drawings with Boris Johnson circulate in our WhatsApp chats daily. In Ukraine, we call him Johnsonuk. That’s because this -uk ending is typical for Ukrainian surnames, and his Instagram account @borisjohnsonuk may be interpreted as such. Boris Johnsonuk sounds like a name of a neighbour, a friend or any other person you may come across in our country. There is even a pastry named after him in one of Kyiv’s cafes.

In Chernihiv, north east of Kyiv, which has come under heavy Russian bombardment, Boris Johnson has even been ordained to the Cossacks, a hall of fame of Ukraine’s national heroes. The Chernihiv Cossack community of St. Catherine’s Church in the city has given Boris the honour of a new name, Boris Chuprina. A pair of artists, Darya Dobryakova and Yuriy Kutilov, have painted Boris as ‘Cossack Mamay’, our mystical folklore character. A copy of the painting is on its way to London; perhaps it may soon find a home on the lavishly-wallpapered walls of Downing Street itself.

Ukrainians have been keeping a close eye on political events in Britain and the fallout from the Tory confidence vote. Our media covered the situation widely. Why? Because many Ukrainians are nervous about what happens in Westminster. Britain is a key ally for our country; can we rely on Boris’s successor to come to our aid in the swift manner in which he has? 

‘Why can’t we just have Boris for ourselves if they are not grateful for him? He would be cherished here,’ my friend joked on WhatsApp. It came as a burst of relief for us to hear that Boris is safe, at least for now.

The UK is a place familiar to Ukrainian schoolchildren; it’s a land of William Shakespeare, kings and queens, knights’ glory, honesty, and other abstract, even childishly naive things. But for us, in times of horrors and darkness, Boris Johnson proved that these virtues can really be brought to life. It’s no wonder that an image depicting Boris in medieval armour has proved so popular online for Ukrainians.

When you are in a fight for your life, as Ukraine is today, you quickly come to realise who your friends are. Many Tory MPs want to kick Boris out of Downing Street, but whatever sins he has committed, he will always be a friend to Ukraine. In Boris’s letter to the children of Ukraine, he wrote: 

‘Whatever happens, however long it takes, we in the UK will never forget you, and will always be proud to call you our friends.’ 

Each time I saw this letter reposted in my friends’ social media feeds, I thought back to that man Boris met in the centre of Kyiv. ‘This memory will live through the centuries,’ he said. He’s right.

Spectator competition winners: how not to write a letter of condolence

In Competition No. 3252, you were invited to write a letter of condolence on the mis-fortune of an acquaintance which, intentionally or not, would have the effect of lowering rather than raising the spirits.

An example of how not to write a condolence letter, according to New York-based funeral director Amy Cunningham, was Nancy Mitford’s upbeat ending to a letter to her cousin, who had just lost her husband: ‘It’s nice that Decca is coming over for a long visit. Why don’t you come to Versailles with her – I would put her in a hotel and you could stay with me. Think of it.’ It doesn’t seem all that bad to me, but those looking for inspiration on how to craft the perfectly pitched expression of sympathy should, Cunningham said, turn instead to sad, sweet Emily Dickinson.

Honourable mentions to Lydia Tyler, Sue Pickard and Ben Hale; £25 each to the best of a mischievous bunch, printed below.

Dear Steve,  Look, I’m so sorry, mate. I’ve just this minute heard the news that Catherine’s left you. I’d hate that to happen to anyone, but especially you, my best mate. You, me and Catherine, we go back such a long way, don’t we? She’s always been such a lovely girl – I can’t begin to imagine how you feel right now. She’s clever, funny, beautiful, kind. She’s just an all-round good egg. Okay, I guess you’ve had a few bumps in the road lately, but we all have those, don’t we? When you feel down, Steve, just remember all the good times. Anyway I’d better sign off now as I have to pick her up from the station and help her unpack. I’ll look after her, I promise. And if there’s ever anything Catherine and I can do for you, Steve my old mate, just give us a call.  David Silverman

Dear Kelvin   I was gutted to hear that you and Karen totalled your camper-van on the Lake District trip, and that you missed out on Windermere. I remember visiting it as a child – those mysterious, calming waters, and the wildlife – otters! Red squirrels! Red deer! We used to picnic daily and sail early each evening. Fabulous. You must both give it another go when you’ve recovered from all the operations, especially the reconstructive facial surgery. How lucky we are to live in times when such things are possible. I’m no great believer in God, as you know, but I am sure he’ll be looking after you, and we send you our prayers.   Hermione and I are off on a jolly soon, in our own van – not a patch on yours, no mod cons for us, alas! We’ll pick some daffs in your honour and send you postcards. Chin up! Henry  Bill Greenwell

Wanda and I were so sorry to hear the sad news that you’ve tested positive for Covid. As you may recall, we had to stay home from her Uncle Algy’s funeral, and her Aunt Yvonne’s eight or nine months later, when the virus killed both of them in the pre-vaccine days of the pandemic, and graveside mingling would have been ill-advised. We’ve been more fortunate with the disease recently. Our daughter, her husband and their three children all managed to get infected, but our son-in-law is the only one showing any worrisome ‘long Covid’ signs. As for the two of us, the tests themselves are the worst we’ve suffered to date, and we shall continue welcoming the swabs up our noses for as long as it takes to weather all this. Discomfort and indignity are a small price to pay for the blessings of public health. Best wishes to you.  Chris O’Carroll

We were devastated to hear your daughter Mimi has been dissuaded – by that supercilious Noël Coward, of all people! – from joining the theatrical profession. And after you’d put so much work in on her, too. We’re no impresarios but my Norman never lets me forget her performance as Fourth Shepherd in the school Nativity. Her line – and your prompting and direction of it – were the only things in the production that made it clean through his tinnitus. Mr Coward was right about Mimi’s expressive hands; anyone of vision would have cast them as Lady Macbeth’s or at least given her the title role in Dear Octopus. My Norman says don’t worry: even the lumpier type of girl can make it as a secretary now. If you must see her performing in the West End, I believe Selfridges are auditioning demonstrators for the new Hoover range.  Adrian Fry

I’d like to offer my condolences on your loss, although it must be a relief in some ways. Nursing him must have been a burden. At least you won’t have to grieve. You’ve been doing that by inches since he was injured. Perhaps you’d bring our ladder back some time soon. I’m sure you’ve been busy since he fell off it, but now with time on your hands… and my husband would like to get on with painting our soffits. They’re looking a bit grubby. We thought white again. Must keep things going so’s not to let the neighbourhood down and it’s nice weather just now for painting – dry, not too hot, not too cold.   Well, I must get on. Just thought I’d pop a note. I mean, what are neighbours for?   Dorothy Pope

When you told me your ‘bad news’ last night I commiserated, but I begin to think I was too hasty. On one hand, your mother has been, to put it plainly, swindled out of your family’s savings; on the other, at her advanced age she is unaware of what she has done. She is not suffering. And perhaps you, in your wisdom, can learn from her simplicity. There is much pleasure in a lesser life, as I have found. Since my own jolly adventures in Macao and Las Vegas, I have been, I think, a cheerful chappie, never downbeat, never preachy. I am glad in a way that you can join me in a life that is exiguous, yet still content. I know I cannot help you, but I believe I can comfort you and cheer you, and remain – Your best (and poorest) friend,  Roger Rengold

No. 3255: measure for measure

You are invited to submit a poem about imperial measures. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 22 June.

Nigeria’s Christians are relentlessly under attack

Dozens of Christian worshippers, including several children, were killed in a gun raid on a church in Nigeria’s Owo town on Sunday. Initial estimates place the death toll at around least 70 parishioners but that number is set to rise, given that the church in question, St Francis Catholic Church, has one of the largest parishes in the southwestern state of Ondo.

Nigeria is experiencing an epidemic of terror attacks. Over the last six months, gunmen have killed 48 in the northwestern Zamfara state, massacred over 100 villagers in Plateau state, and raided trains and buses leaving dozens dead and hundreds missing. At least 3,000 Nigerians were killed and 1,500 abducted in the first quarter of 2022 alone, according to the Nigeria Security Tracker.

Most of the recent attacks are carried out by ‘bandits’: local militants that are currently spearheading Nigeria’s abduction spree. However, just as local kidnapping gangs have borrowed Boko Haram’s modus operandi to abduct schoolchildren, various militants are increasingly following the jihadist rulebook to spread terror in Nigeria.

Jihadists affiliated with Boko Haram or the Islamic State in West African Province (ISWAP) – which on 6 June reportedly torched trucks and abducted passengers in the village of Lawan Mainari in northeastern Borno – have been the predominant perpetrators of terror attacks in the country. This is despite an ongoing turf war between the two groups.

Nigeria’s jihadist groups are being abetted in their quest to uphold militant Islam by radical Islamist mobs, with a growing number of lynching incidents triggered by accusations of blasphemy. It is Christians, who form just under half (46 per cent) of the population to the 53 per cent of Muslims, who have borne the brunt of this violence.

In May, Deborah Samuel was brutally stoned and burned to death by fellow students in Sokoto state over a WhatsApp voice note deemed to be sacrilegious against the prophet Muhammad. Sound engineer David Imoh was also lynched last month in Lagos. Following the lynching incidents, churches across the state were targeted, with more anti-Christian violence ensuing. Samuel Kanu, the head of the Methodist Church in the country, was kidnapped last week. A week before that, two Catholic priests were in the northwestern state of Katsina.

According to some statistics, at least 4,650 Christians were killed in Nigeria last year. Over 45,000 have been murdered since July 2009, when Boko Haram first rose up in the region. But while the majority of these Christian killings over the past decade or so have been carried out by Boko Haram and ISWAP, it isn’t just the jihadist groups that are hunting down the religious community.

Militants from the Fulani community, an ethnic Muslim group, have also increasingly targeted Nigerian Christians in recent years. Many locals, including Ondo lawmaker Adeyemi Olayemi, believe that Sunday’s terror attack – which is yet to be officially claimed – was also carried out by Fulani militants. In December, a ‘Fulani association’ even issued an open warning to churches in Zamfara, saying they risked attacks if they continued to worship.

Fulani gunmen have also frequently attacked churches, murdering scores of Christians, along with killing and abducting pastors. Between 2017 and 2020, Fulani herdsmen launched 654 attacks and killed 2,539 Nigerians. While the Fulani attackers began as herders using violence to capture farmlands from rival groups, including the predominantly Christian Berom, in the country’s Middle Belt, their violence has taken a religionist turn in recent years.

The farmland tussles, which were already split along ethno-religious lines owing to tribe identities, have been radically Islamised along the Middle Belt, which divides the Muslim-majority north from the Christian-majority south. The rise of Boko Haram has rekindled the aspirations of Fulani jihad, a throwback to the 18^th and 19^th century uprisings in western Africa led by the Fulani against the Hausa kingdom, with Fulani militia today increasingly alluding to Islamist and jihadist rhetoric.

Meanwhile, Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari, a retired army general whose 2015 election and 2019 re-election were based on vows to bolster the security of an increasingly volatile Nigeria, is not only overseeing multipronged violence in his country but, in some people’s view, has not done enough to combat it. For many, Buhari’s hardening authoritarian streak is inevitably drawing back to his 1983 military coup, which saw him rule the country for two years, amid hollow vows that he’s now a ‘converted democrat’ while threatening to curb the freedom of the press and social media. Buhari has been accused of going soft on Fulani militia, leaning towards an Islamist narrative and even standing behind ex-jihadist sympathisers in his government. Buhari has rejected the criticisms against him, including the suggestion he condones any killings and previously noted there have been successes in the security sector in spite of the challenges the administration faces.

It is evident that to truly eliminate terror outfits in Nigeria, a clear political will to stick to secular democratic values, in addition to a security revamp, is needed. With Christians being targeted in both the Sharia-governed states and elsewhere, the ideological narratives of radical Islam in Nigeria need to be uprooted. Failing this, Nigeria’s most vulnerable will continue to be relentlessly targeted in an increasingly Islamised nation, where the lines between jihadist groups and other militia are becoming blurrier every day.

The trouble with Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty, the French economist who shot to fame for writing a colossal work of economics that many people bought but few actually read, recently received some advice. ‘What you write is interesting,’ a friend told him, ‘but couldn’t you make it a little shorter?’ Piketty has answered the call for brevity with a book which by his standards is the equivalent of a Post-it note. It’s certainly ‘brief’ – but is it a ‘history of equality’?

Alas, no. What we have instead is an eye-wateringly left-wing manifesto for dismantling economic inequality, both domestically and internationally. ‘Inequality is first of all a social, historical and political construction,’ Piketty writes, and the best way to tackle it is by creating ‘a new form of democratic socialism, decentralised and self-managing, ecological and multicultural, making it possible to structure a different world that is far more emancipatory and egalitarian.’

To start with, we need higher taxes. Much higher. Piketty notes: ‘Confiscatory tax rates have been an immense historical success.’ Any worries that this might crush business formation or choke economic growth are misplaced, as ‘it is the battle for equality and education that has made economic development and human progress possible, and not the veneration of property, stability and inequality’.

Inheritance also needs reform. It should be taxed and shared out, so everyone gets a piece. We need inheritance for all, along with a universal basic income and guaranteed employment, with the aim being ‘the gradual decommercialisation of the economy’. If that fixes inequality within countries, the inequality between countries can be reduced by liquidating the institutions of globalisation, such as the IMF, OECD and World Bank. Instead, we need a new set of transnational organisations with powers to levy taxes on the world’s largest corporations. The proceeds would be shared with poorer states, particularly the West’s former colonies.

In the sections where Piketty finally touches on the history of inequality, he turns his attention to the age of empire, and to the hideous injustices of that time, many of which, he says, still affect lives. ‘Colonialism and military domination permitted western countries to organise the world economy to their benefit,’ he writes, in a sentence that has the feel of tautology about it – the West dominated because it was dominant. This leads him to ponder ‘the reasons for the fiscal and military superiority developed in Europe’, which enabled countries such as Britain, France and Spain to exploit other nations.

At this point you can sense Piketty’s discomfort. An analysis of the deeper origins of European dominance would involve accepting that rapid economic advancement doesn’t only result from the drive for social and economic equality. It can come from more acquisitive instincts, which are politically unacceptable to a collectivist like him.

As a result, he condemns the West for being dominant and for driving global inequality, but is unable to say how it came to dominate in the first place. It is a significant gap in the argument.

Oded Galor, an economist from Brown University, locates his investigation into inequality in precisely the terrain where Piketty daren’t look. At the centre of his argument is the idea of the Malthusian Trap, a problem encountered by agricultural civilisations from ancient times up to the industrial revolution.

A village that successfully cultivates crops will at first experience a surplus of food. This will allow its inhabitants to sustain more children and the population will increase. But that puts a greater strain on the food supply and the standard of living falls. In this cruel cycle, progress leads to failure. An extreme example is the culture of Easter Island, which flourished, consumed all the island’s resources, and collapsed.

Societies remained stuck in this cycle for thousands of years. But then something happened, a change, ‘triggering the phase transition in which the human species escaped from this poverty trap’, Galor writes. Suddenly ‘the Malthusian equilibrium quite mysteriously vanished and tremendous growth ensued’. The countries that escaped surged ahead. Those that did not were trapped in poverty. This, he argues, is at the root of the global inequality that we see around us now.

The escape was triggered by the industrial revolution, with its combination of population growth and new technology. Larger populations are, Galor writes, ‘more likely to generate both a greater demand for new goods, tools and practices, as well as exceptional individuals capable of inventing them’. This coincides with an emphasis on the value of education, which in turn drives more invention in a self-reinforcing cycle of improvement and growth.

The Journey of Humanity really comes alive when Galor digs into the deepest roots of inequality, explaining that ancient societies with agriculture based on grain developed faster than those based on tubers such as cassava, sweet potatoes and yams. ‘Grains could be more easily measured, transported, stored and therefore taxed,’ he writes, which led to societies that were complex and hierarchical. ‘Thus, the suitability of soil for either grains or tubers meaningfully influenced the formation of states.’

Even within grain-producing civilisations, the type of grain cultivated had deep implications for a society’s character and long-term prospects. The cultivation of rice, for example, ‘requires large-scale and therefore shared irrigation systems’. This has tended to form a more ‘collectivist, interdependent culture’. However, ‘land that is suitable for the cultivation of wheat, which requires a lower degree of cooperation, has contributed to the emergence of more individualistic cultures’.

According to Galor, global inequality is not simply a political or economic construct. It emerges from factors including geography, the volatility of weather systems, the incidence of disease and the presence of cultivable plant species at particular latitudes.

He does not shy away from the terrible abuses of the colonial period but, unlike Piketty, he presents them not as the originators of global inequality but as an expression of a much deeper global unevenness.

The only people who will nod along with Piketty’s analysis will be those who already share his outlook. The central arguments of his book are not intended to convince the undecided, but are a restatement of a set of familiar hard-left ideas, almost all of which are impossible to implement. And what value can we ascribe to politically unfeasible ideas? A Brief History of Equality is certainly learned, but it feels closed-minded, unoriginal and parochial when set beside Galor’s deeply rewarding and fascinating exploration.

What Boris needs to do to survive

Most people date the beginning of Boris Johnson’s current woes to the start of the partygate scandal, and especially to the revelations from 10 January 2022 onwards about the ‘bring your own booze’ event that Johnson himself had attended.

But Johnson’s problems can also be seen as having started at an earlier date and from a different source. In mid-December Lord Frost resigned from Johnson’s Cabinet, rejecting the additional restrictions proposed in response to Omicron, a few days after Steve Baker and the Covid Recovery Group had led about 100 backbenchers in a revolt against new measures. This meant Boris felt he had to take proposals for a Christmas 2021 lockdown to Cabinet, where it was rejected.

These events burnt the reservoir of goodwill that Boris had built up by reopening fully in July 2021, rejecting the prognostications of doom at the time, and by refusing any additional restrictions in September and October 2021. When new restrictions were introduced in December, I wrote condemning them for this publication and tweeted: ‘This is not good enough, Boris Johnson. Just simply not good enough. Might be time for the Conservative Party to start thinking about an alternative.’ Since then we have had ministerial resignations, huge backbench revolts and commentators suggesting Boris’s removal is not all simply down to partygate.

His fundamental problems are twofold: he has no underlying vision and he has no answer to the great policy issue of the day. If he is to survive as prime minister he needs to address both of these.

First, the vision. What does Boris want to be PM for? We’ve left the EU – Brexit got done. So now what? He’s had three years in office and no one has the foggiest idea. It’s been a year since Covid restrictions were removed, so he doesn’t have that excuse any more. What is a Boris premiership trying to achieve? People ask where the think-tank pamphlets are with proposals for a Conservative government. But without having any idea what they’re supposed to be thinking about, how can think-tankers help him?

Boris’s goal was said to be something to do with ‘Levelling up’. That is as vapid a soundbite as there’s ever been. Even soundbites like the ‘Big Society’ offered some vague idea of their objective. No one knows what the point of a Boris Johnson premiership is supposed to be other than keeping Boris Johnson in office.

He needs to tell us what sort of society he wants Britain to be, what sort of economy he wants us to have, what sort of place we should have in the world, what sort of technologies he imagines us researching, what sort of culture we should seek to develop and spread. For his party to operate in harmony around him, there has to be a melody. At present he is offering us nothing.

Secondly, he needs an answer to the great issue of the day: inflation. Not having an economic policy, and having no stated goal for what inflation should be this year or next – let alone any policy for getting it down – when inflation is headed towards 10 per cent is simply inadequate. He appears to hope to blame the whole thing on the Bank of England, or the Russians, or rapacious capitalists – anyone but taking responsibility for doing something about it himself. In the US, Joe Biden’s government has an explicit anti-inflation policy. In the UK the government has nothing. Giveaways to help people cope with the consequences of inflation are not a substitute for having a policy to actually get inflation down. A ‘Conservative’ government that doesn’t think double-digit inflation matters enough to have a policy for what it should be and how to get it down is not worthy of the name.

To create, promote and implement a new vision (whatever it will be) and to produce a goal and policy for inflation, Boris needs new personnel. Sunak isn’t up to it. Many of his other senior cabinet colleagues are tainted by the past three years of shambolic drift. He needs a large cabinet reshuffle.

A new vision will probably imply other policies – on energy, green issues, housing, ‘woke’ issues, immigration and more – that will be unpopular. But Boris doesn’t have the option of being liked any more. He is hated and he will always be hated. His only choices are to be a PM who was hated, did nothing of substance after his first two months and was turfed out, or a hated PM who tried something and was either vindicated or rejected swiftly.

It’s time to go big or go home, Boris. Artful shambling is no longer enough.

Boris Johnson should quit now to save his career

The greased piglet will soon be sausages. That, at least, seems the obvious outcome of this week’s Tory party confidence vote. With over 40 per cent of his MPs in open revolt against him, even Boris Johnson, the great political escapologist, is running out of road. He may have survived now. But with two by-election losses looming in the Red and Blue Walls, a cost-of-living crisis spiralling out of control, and MPs manoeuvring against him, this reprieve looks temporary.

The Conservative party has still not entirely recovered from Margaret Thatcher’s defenestration 30-odd years ago, and nobody would want to repeat the six months of agony and the electoral shellacking that it finally took for Theresa May to go. Least of all, surely, Johnson himself. The author of The Churchill Factor should know that staggering on with a party and country against him will hardly make for the best material for future historians.

But Johnson has another option: to resign. He may wish to fight on, but he shall be doing so on the stickiest wicket. By contrast, resigning would allow him to be the master of his own destiny. He would give himself the greatest chance of both ensuring his premiership gets the best reputation possible, and of building up support for a return to the top. After all, it was Churchill who said that history would be kind to him, for he intended to write it – and even Johnson can’t write and govern.

Imagine what Johnson would do if he resigned. He could finally finish his long-promised Shakespeare book, plugging a hole in his finances while reminding the public he wasn’t always just a politician. He can ditch his relatively small prime ministerial salary and resume his column at the Daily Telegraph. He can churn out a bestselling memoir or two, giving his take on the last few years. And he can lead the attack on his successor, who will face a particularly different political period.

By the next election, the Conservatives will have been in power for 14 years. No party in modern British history has succeeded in even being the largest at five successive elections, let alone winning a majority. What’s more, all the economic signals are bad: inflation is spiralling, interest rates are going up, and a passion for fiscal incontinence has ensured taxes have reached their highest level in 70-odd years. Few would bet on the Tories being in power come 2025.

Leaving Downing Street now would enable Johnson to position himself as the Government’s critic-in-chief – and the prince across the water. Without the responsibility of running the country weighing him down, he could pin the blame for high taxes and low growth on his reticent colleagues or global conditions. He could have the heads of his readers everywhere nodding vigorously, rather than butting his own against the limited imaginations of Whitehall and the Treasury.

In doing so, Johnson would again be imitating Churchill. Blenheim’s favourite son resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in 1931 over Dominion status for India. He established himself as Baldwin and Chamberlain’s leading opponent over everything from Wallis Simpson to appeasement – as well as writing his lucrative history of Marlborough. When war broke out, he was vindicated and back in government. Within a year, he was prime minister. Cometh the hour, cometh the amateur historian.

Returning to the backbenches will allow Johnson to mirror Margaret Thatcher in crafting a narrative of having been forced out by his own ungrateful MPs. Snap surveys by YouGov and ConservativeHome yesterday suggested around half of Conservative members want him gone. But the #BackBoris crowd remains strong, and will happily accept, as Johnson’s successors get in increasing difficulty, that the original sin was his removal. Partygate will fade in the public imagination.

Johnson has done it before. His resignation from the Cabinet over the Chequers Deal in 2018 had plenty permanently writing off his chances of reaching the premiership. Yet a year or so spent writing his column and getting flack over burkas and letterboxes didn’t stop him from being the obvious candidate when May humiliated her party at the European elections. If the next leader faces a similar rout at the next general election, Johnson could be the clear alternative again.

So resigning now would not have to mean Johnson forever departing into political oblivion. A few years on the backbenches where he could recover his voice would do him – and his finances – no world of good. Paradoxically, if you want Boris Johnson to remain a leading force in the Conservative party for many years to come, you should back his resignation now. Better that than he is forced out after a few more months of cost-of-living crises, Partygate woes, and Tory infighting.

A new era of Welsh football has begun

As Britain toasted seven decades of the Queen’s reign outside Buckingham Palace, the Welsh basked in their 1600-year survival. Dafydd Iwan, the republican nationalist folk singer, bellowed Yma O Hyd around the Cardiff City Stadium as Wales took on Ukraine in their World Cup qualifier. A simple title – We’re Still Here – makes you want to weep and, then, fight. 

What was once a marginal protest tune, composed at the height of Thatcherism after Wales rejected devolution in 1979, is now an apt anthem for spurring on Welsh footballers. Until recent years they were not a celebrated or well-known species but Gareth Bale, Aaron Ramsey and Joe Allen have changed all that. A surprising ascent during Euro 2016 (when the country reached the semi-finals) created excitement for the future. What has been missing until now is a coveted spot at the World Cup.

Thanks to a deflected free-kick from Gareth Bale on Sunday night, 64 years of hurt will soon be over. Naturally, the Welsh feel slightly guilty to have beaten Ukraine to reach the tournament, although ruthlessness during ninety minutes is a common trait for Wales’s footballers.

Explaining Wales’s sporting phenomenon is not simply down to Bale’s left-foot. ‘Yma O Hyd,’ the defender Connor Roberts proudly announced last year, ‘I listen to that every game. It just puts a little bit of fire in the belly and makes me want to run a bit more.’ It is a sentiment reportedly shared among large parts of the Welsh squad. Patriotism in Wales is more wrapped up in football than it ever used to be. If you want to see Wales in its most raw, individual form football games are where to go.

Once it was rugby that provided an escape from Anglicisation and poverty for most of the twentieth century, helped by the glories of the 1970s. But now growing numbers of youngsters in Wales are choosing football over rugby as their sport of choice, spurring an interest in the national team.

The Red Wall, as Welsh football supporters are known, represents the changing mood best. Egged on by the Football Association for Wales (FAW) and Welsh-language broadcaster S4C they travel around Europe – and soon, Qatar – as radical ambassadors of their country. Their mantra, Independent Football Nation, resonates even with those who pay little attention to politics. It is an inclusive and diverse fanbase, bound tightly by sport and, of course, Welsh history and culture.

This sporting rebirth has bubbled over into a not-so-quiet revolution. Now, Wales is firmly on the European map; soon it will be on the global stage. When the team went to Sweden over six decades ago, Wales had few institutions to fall back on – no parliament and barely a capital city to call home. The growth of Welsh football has shown that a confident, diverse and – in footballing terms at least – independent country is again ready to take on the world’s best. And whatever happens in Qatar, Iwan’s prophetic message will still ring true: Ry’n ni yma o hyd.

Car washing is making a comeback

‘Moisture is a car’s worst enemy, Gerald. So why are you washing it?’

So says Julie Walters in the 1985 comedy Car Trouble in which she plays frustrated housewife Jacqueline, whose pernickety husband has transferred his affection to an obsessively pampered Jaguar E-Type.

The Sunday morning scene in which Gerald lovingly polishes the car’s famously phallic bonnet (Jacqueline refers to his ‘penis substitute’ more than once) is one that once took place in streets and suburban driveways the length and breadth of Britain.

But now the sight of someone cleaning their own car with foaming water, sponge and chamois leather is a rare one. Such manual labour is deemed too trivial, grubby and time-wasting for today’s modern professional, especially since every conurbation now offers its own version of the team from the best film dedicated to the subject – Car Wash, 1976 – who will usually give your wheels a once-over for a fiver.

It was the rise of such set-ups combined with the popularity of the forecourt jet wash that caused the demise of the at-home Sunday ritual. Although there were signs that it might be revived during the mid-1990s when the Telegraph magazine produced a double page spread showing A-listers ‘keeping it real’ by washing their own cars in the street.

Among them was Madonna who was photographed stretching coquettishly to soap her roof, an image that prompted a once highly successful celebrity acquaintance of mine to attempt a rekindling of fame by sponging-off her ageing Mercedes in the hope that the car wash paparazzi might be lurking. They weren’t.

But hold that hosepipe – because self car-washing has actually made a mighty comeback in some circles. Except it’s not called ‘washing’ any more, but ‘detailing’ and, according to a newly-published book called Hand Wash Only, you’ll be needing a whole lot more than a bucket of water and a few old rags if you’re planning to get into it properly.

Running to 143 pages the book (subtitled ‘a beginner’s guide to detailing and car care’) speaks at length of the ‘wash kit list’, the ‘decontamination kit list’, the ‘correction kit list’, the ‘protection kit list, ’ the ‘engine bay kit list’ and the ‘interior kit list’.

If the image illustrating all of the above is accurate, a whole other garage is required just to accommodate the ‘kit,’ and more than a superficial understanding of chemistry might be useful, too, so you can get to grips with the removal of ‘hydrocarbons’, ‘bonded contaminants’ and ‘fallout’.

And as for polishing – before even thinking about that, you’ll need to know your paint type and thickness and then brush-up on your glossary. After all, no one wants to confuse their pig tails with their fisheyes or their orange peel with their road rash, do they?

It’s no longer a manual job either. These days, you’ll need a polishing machine and a selection of pads (wool, foam, microfiber), a suitable arsenal of polishing compounds – and then something to protect and seal the paint.

All that, of course, is just for starters. The book offers further chapters on interior restoration, odour removal and glass, wheel and engine cleaning. Even the correct methods of headlamp buffing and tyre polishing are addressed in detail.

Once seen as a job that you paid your children 50 pence to do, car cleaning has, it seems, turned into a multi-million dollar business that has spawned specialist operators around the world – some of which even take brand new supercars off the showroom floor and ‘detail’ them before their owners will even consider slipping behind the wheel.

The art of sympathetically returning an apparently mouldering wreck to a vehicle that sparkles has also been proven to make irresistible YouTube viewing.

Since it was posted in 2019, one 18-minute video showing a Mercedes-Benz sports car being professionally washed for the first time in 37 years has attracted more than 21 million views, while 14 million have watched similar footage showing a ‘barn find’ Datsun brought back to life having lainbeneath a layer of filth since the 1970s.

They really are well worth watching.

Especially if you’re looking for another excuse to avoid washing the bloody car.

Hand Wash Only, a beginner’s guide to detailing and car care is produced by Pro Detailer magazine (Amazon, £12.95)

Boris’s moment of maximum danger is yet to come

Much as Boris Johnson wants to ‘bash on’, deliver popular populist policies, and characterise Monday’s confidence vote as the catharsis that purges him and his party of the partygate poison, his struggle to re-establish his credibility and authority will be the challenge of his life.

First of all, most of the 148 Tory MPs who rejected him cannot be bought off, because they typically want him out not for the policies he espouses but rather for what they see as his character flaws – and they are doubtful he can change his spots. I asked one rebel what was the new plan, after the rebels failed to muster the 180 votes needed to unseat him. The answer: 

‘A process for securing 30 extra votes.’

A few rebels have said today that they will try to bury their qualms and do the unity thing. A hard core of them are biding their time. This fills some of those close to Johnson with the most profound gloom. ‘It will end very badly,’ said one minister.

So the next existential threat to the PM (forgive the cliche) will be the verdict of the Privileges Committee investigation into whether Johnson willingly and knowingly lied to Parliament when he told MPs there were no illegal parties and no Covid rules were broken. Even those Tory MPs who are the PM’s greatest fans concede the evidence looks bleak for him. And although the ministerial code of conduct is widely seen to have had some of its sharper teeth removed with a redraft, it still says in terms that any minister who knowingly lies to parliament is expected to resign.

So if the Privileges Committee concludes he lied on purpose, but Johnson continues to insist it was an accident, what then? The code’s entire authority stems from the power of the premier, as the sole individual who can enforce it. So the PM would have to decide to ignore his own protestations of innocence and sack himself on the basis that the Privileges Committee did not believe him. Would he really do that? And by the way, is it healthy that such an important set of rules for ensuring we’re governed honestly and decently are only as effective as the determination of any prime minister to enforce them?

But even if the PM were to reject the Privileges Committee verdict, that would not be the end of the matter. Because any such verdict, including a possible sanction, has to be endorsed by the full House of Commons, either ‘on the nod’, without a formal vote (the norm), or with a vote.

Let’s say there’s a vote to suspend the PM from the Commons, possibly for just a single day, for the crime of lying. That really would be the ultimate humiliation for any premier. ‘It would be curtains for Boris,’ said a Tory MP who has seen leaders come and go over a few decades.

It all means that the next time the Tory rebels have a chance to throw out the PM, perhaps, will be that expected vote – probably in early November – to confirm whether Johnson lied by design or because the fates conspired against him. And although the government has a healthy working majority of 75, it would shrink to minus one if just 38 Tory MPs were to vote with the opposition.

Yesterday Boris Johnson saw 148 of his colleagues vote for the chaos of a leadership election rather than to keep him in Number 10. Most of them won’t be swayed by appeals to be loyal to the leader and party. Also, votes on Privileges Committee reports are supposed to be conscience votes for MPs, not votes whipped along party lines.

To put all this in the nutshell, the moment of maximum danger for Johnson is yet to come and will be that formal Commons judgement on whether he is a liar.

The EU’s phone charger rule will stifle innovation

Who could argue with the words of the EU’s internal market commissioner Thierry Breton when he says: ‘a common charger is common sense for the many electronic devices in our daily lives’? No longer, it seems, will we have to fiddle around with several different cables, and curse when we have brought the along the wrong one on holiday. M. Breton has just succeeded in introducing a directive which, from 2024, will oblige the manufacturers of all electronic devices on sale in the EU to use the same model of charger. The directive – yet to be rubber-stamped by the European parliament – will ‘increase convenience and cut waste’, as well as apparently saving consumers €250 million (£210 million) a year (although given that the population of the EU is 447 million that doesn’t promise much of a saving per consumer).

For once we can look upon an EU directive from the outside. So should we be upset that we are no longer part of the EU and therefore unable to benefit from the convenience of a single, European charger? Or should we be glad not to be part of it? 

In practical terms, we probably will end up mostly using the single EU model charger. Manufacturers are likely to want to produce standardised products across the EU and therefore will sell in Britain what they are compelled to sell in France and Germany – unless the UK government legislates for a different sort of charger, in which case manufacturers will have to produce unique products for the UK market, at added expense.

Most likely, then, we will be benefitting from the extra convenience of the single EU charger. But we should be wary of cheering this kind of initiative, which rather typifies the difference between the EU and the American way of doing things. The problem with over-legislating for standards is that it stifles innovation and leads to ossification of technology in our lives. Just imagine that you were compelled still to use the charger that came with your first phone, 25 years ago. Would you enjoy carrying that around, even if it would charge your phone, laptop and Kindle? Like so many things, chargers have shrunk in size and weight as manufacturers have improved them. They have experimented with new connections, new adapters, new plugs. Could that have happened, or happened so easily, had the EU legislated for a standard charger in, say, 1999?

The EU may be more consumer-friendly in many respects than the US, but it has to ask itself: why are all the tech giants American? Why is there no European equivalent of Microsoft or Apple? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while the EU may be more consumer-friendly, the US is a lot more innovation-friendly. In the tech age, the US comes up with most of the ideas – while the EU tries to civilise them.

Where does that leave post-Brexit Britain? It would be naïve to think that staying out of European directives on phone chargers and the like will suddenly spawn British tech giants – in Britain’s case the problem is not so much innovation as companies which lack the global ambitions of their American cousins, and whose entrepreneurs are tempted to sell up too soon to create global giants. But we do need to be thinking: how can we use the advantages of our new status of being beyond the range of EU directives? If we can’t do that then there was no point in Brexit.

Shame on Cineworld for cancelling The Lady of Heaven

Bradford was chosen last week as the UK’s City of Culture for 2025. This week, Bradford Cineworld – as well as a number of other cinemas around the country – announced that a new movie called The Lady of Heaven was being pulled from schedules following protests by angry Muslims. So is this what we can expect from a City of Culture in 21st-century Britain – the creation of all kinds of culture, except for anything that might offend some adherents to the Islamic faith?

The fuss and fury over The Lady of Heaven has been incredibly revealing. This is a British-produced epic historical drama about Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. It was written by the Shia cleric Yasser Al-Habib. The film has been slammed by some Muslim observers. Some say it will whip up Shia/Sunni sectarian tensions. Others condemn it for depicting Muhammad. Iran has banned it for being ‘divisive’.

There were protests outside cinemas in the UK following its release last week. It all brought to mind the Christian protests outside cinemas that showed Monty Python’s Life of Brian in 1979. (Though, entirely predictably, the high-minded liberals and leftists who would have condemned that 1970s Christian touchiness as backward and ridiculous have been quiet as mice over the Muslim fury that has greeted The Lady of Heaven.)

What is most striking about the noisy protests outside the cinemas showing this supposedly sinful film is how much the protesters sound like the godless woke mob.

‘It’s not OK to offend 1.8 billion’, declared one placard. At the protest outside the Cineworld in Bradford, one man said through a megaphone: 

‘We are very offended. We have a right not to be insulted.’

This may be a sternly religious individual but he sounded for all the world like one of those blue-haired radicals who is forever chasing off his/her/their campus any speaker that dares to go against the grain and cause offence.

Radical Muslims who believe they should have the right to crush culture that offends their religious sensibilities have clearly learned a thing or two from the secular cancel-culture brigade. They’ve dispensed with the fire-and-brimstone case for punishing those who blaspheme against their faith. Instead they’ve embraced the very modern idea that we all have the right to be protected from offence. Which we don’t, by the way.

This confirms that today’s censorious culture, in which everyone from gender-critical feminists to pro-life societies on campus are being cancelled for causing offence, has emboldened regressive elements in society. The cancellation frenzy has resuscitated ideas that really ought to have died out in the 20th century, if not earlier. This includes the idea of blasphemy, the notion that it ought to be a punishable offence to mock or simply just depict gods and prophets.

Alarmingly, cinema managers have capitulated to the theocratic mobs that have gathered outside their premises. In one of the most disturbing video clips I have seen so far this year, a cinema employee in Sheffield uses a megaphone to tell protesters that the film has been withdrawn from the schedule. ‘Allahu Akbar!’, the crowd yells in victory.

This is chilling. Call me an old-fashioned secular democrat, but isn’t it completely wrong, and morally perverse, to allow small numbers of religious hotheads to determine what the rest of us can see and watch? This grants a veto to fundamentalists, allowing them to shape public culture to their own tastes and prejudices. It is profoundly illiberal.

It is cowardly too. Cineworld has cancelled all screenings of The Lady of Heaven, saying it did so to ‘ensure the safety of our staff and customers’. Shame on them. These are meant to be arenas of culture, spaces for audiences to watch all kinds of movies, from the twee to the controversial. And yet they have now capitulated to an angry mob and allowed protestors to dictate what can and cannot be shown in cinemas in 2022. What an extraordinary dereliction of duty.

It isn’t The Lady of Heaven that is shocking (and anyway, moviemakers should be perfectly at liberty to shock as much as they please). No, it’s the fact that in modern Britain, small numbers of Islamic activists can compel an entire cinema chain to dump a movie that they don’t like. This suggests our culture is being held hostage to intolerant minorities. And people say cancel culture is a myth.

To that protester who said ‘We have a right not to be insulted’ – no you don’t. None of us does. Muslims, Christians, Scientologists, trans activists, Remainers, Brexiteers, whatever: none of us has the right not to be offended. Occasionally feeling offended is the price we pay for living in a free society. And what a tiny price it is! To feel slighted or wounded every now and then is an infinitesimally small levy for living in a society in which all of us – yes, including angry Islamic protesters – enjoy the liberty to express ourselves in public.

The Lady of Heaven controversy hasn’t caused much media or political traction yet, but it really should. This feels like a sequel to the Salman Rushdie affair. Cinemas ditching a film at the behest of furious theocratic protesters? What have we become? More importantly, what has become of freedom?

Drakeford adds to Labour’s trans troubles

It’s not just in Westminster that Labour is having difficulties with transgender issues. Over in Wales, Mark Drakeford’s barmy army has been wrestling with the same debate, amid claims from Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi that LGBT charity Stonewall has ‘dictated policy’ to her colleagues at Cardiff Bay. And the Welsh Tories have clearly spotted an opportunity here for some clear blue water between the two parties.

For last Tuesday, Tory Laura Anne Jones popped up in the Senedd to lob a grenade at Drakeford at First Ministers’ Questions. The blonde bombshell probed her opponent about just how the Welsh government intends to protect women’s rights in sports as ‘we have a situation where women athletes are so disheartened that they are pulling out of their own female categories.’ She continued by asking:

First Minister, do you believe that trans athletes should compete in female sports? However you feel on this issue, to resolve it, it is fundamental that one can define a woman. So, First Minister, can you do something that many other Labour politicians have failed to do so far, which is define a woman?

Up stepped Drakeford to deliver his reply. And – following in the tradition of Labour MPs in London being unable to answer whether a woman has a penis or not – the First Minister showed that anything Westminster can do, Wales can do better. Asked to define a woman, this was his response:

My starting point is the same as Penny Mordaunt’s—the UK Minister responsible at the time—who said that the UK Government’s starting point was that transgender women are women. That’s my starting point in this debate. It is a difficult area where people feel very strongly on different sides of an argument, and an argument that divides people who agree on most other things. What I say to the Member is that in such a potentially divisive issue, the responsibility of elected representatives is not to stand on the certainties of their own convictions, but instead to work hard to look for opportunities for dialogue, to find ways of promoting understanding rather than conflict, and to demonstrate respect rather than to look for exclusion. I do not understand the point that the Member makes—that you can be too inclusive. To me, inclusivity is absolutely what we should be aiming for here. The way to resolve those challenging issues that she’s identified—and I’ve got no objection at all to her identifying them—is not to assume that because we ourselves may have strong views, that allows us to cast doubt on the sincerity of views held strongly by others. It’s only by dialogue and by understanding that you can reach a conclusion to the sorts of questions the Member has raised.

So, er, that’s a ‘no’ then to the original question. One perhaps for the women of Wales to consider, perhaps, next time they cast their votes. You can watch the full exchange below:

The feminist case for Love Island

Love Island, which started again last night, flirts with virtue just a little more obviously each year. The show is racially diverse, and overwhelmingly working class, despite featuring the odd medic. Hugo Hammond, who was born with a club foot, became the show’s first disabled contestant last year. The latest series features a deaf contestant, Tasha Ghouri, a ‘dancer’ with a perfect body. If the show looks more representative, don’t be deceived: there’s nothing virtuous about Love Island. But that doesn’t mean we should hold this against its beautiful, young contestants.

Despite the name, Love Island isn’t about love. It’s about money, and specifically, about how to monetise your body. This is why the ‘body diversity’ we see only goes so far; Love Island never includes people who fall outside the market parameters of the saleable physique. 

The larger women have flat bellies and enormous bums and boobs; they qualify as curvy, somewhere on the Kardashian spectrum, and bankable on Instagram. For most of them, feeling sensitive about not being naturally skinny will be part of their ‘story’. But any struggles with body confidence appear to have been stamped on pretty firmly by the time they agree to tumble down slides into pools of ultra-thick jello, in bikinis, for an audience of millions.

Naturally, it is tempting to grumble and head-shake about the sheer physical transactionalism of Love Island and the world – a huge online edifice of influencers, promotions, sales, hustle – it represents. This temptation is particularly strong right now, amidst a season of vigorous head shaking about all the ways that modern, boob-baring sexual culture harms women.

For the new breed of ‘traditional’ feminists like Louise Perry, author of the recent polemic The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Love Island is unlikely to make essential viewing. Perry’s book is a salvo against just the kind of advanced sexual neoliberalism that the ITV show, with its sex, hustle, bodies, and instant gratification, represents. Such sexual transactionalism, her book suggests, only benefits men; gratifying their ‘innate’ appetites and sensibilities just as they distort and insult women’s.

I look at Love Island differently. Yes, it’s artificial and openly venal. And it uses women’s bodies in an absolutely jaw-dropping way. But, as a Love Island contestant might say, ‘crack on’. Why? Because the truth is, I like to see working-class women hustling and getting rich on their own terms, however shallow and, for people like me, unsettling those terms are. I am glad that cold hard market economics, trading to some extent as they always will in human flesh and sex, has produced such a vast and dynamic reality TV industry that people working dull, often thankless jobs at home, but willing to sell aspects of themselves (something we all do to varying degrees) can get rich quick by the dozen. 

I like to see the spectacle of women, for the first time in history, able to use their bodies like banks without the fear of crushing stigma or the violence that some claim is around every corner for women today. Anyone who has ever watched the likes of Millie Court, last year’s winner, or the terrifying Faye Winter, who came second with sweetheart Teddy, would find it hard to imagine these women being pushed around; one mainly sees noisy, untrammelled personality, dollar signs and the pleasures they bring. It could be worse.

The problem with proscriptive social theories about women is that their proponents think they know best; over and above the little ladies whose honour they are trying to defend. So when women cavort on screen in string bikinis and thongs for cash and fame – or participate in casual sex or hookup culture, monetise their bodies on porn sites (which the internet has made possible in the safety of one’s own home) or, more gently on Instagram – they must have been forced into it by malign patriarchal forces and dark male appetites. They can’t have chosen, in any meaningful sense, to do any of this; they are labouring under false consciousness and a world rigged against them.

Is this true? It might be. But it’s not our business one way or the other. And if we actually believe women to be capable of thought, agency, making decisions and weighing up the consequences, we have to assume they know what they’re doing, and that either it works for them, or they know if and when it doesn’t. 

As the new flock of Love Islanders limber up their hot bodies, preparing to make a splash, they will all – every single one of them – be chuckling on their way to the bank. But women using their bodies to make money, in whatever form, makes people uncomfortable because we still aren’t happy with the basic transaction of sex for money. Yet in puncturing the dreadful import of bulging boobs and bums, of promiscuity, the sexual revolution in the West has done more than make it possible for women to enjoy as much sex as they want with little danger: it’s given them a way to get both rich and famous in a highly regulated, safe environment.

If Love Island seems the Faustian bargain of the century, perhaps it is; but those tut tutting at its ethics ought to remember that one woman’s fall from grace is another’s down payment on a house and a non-stop supply of champagne.

The real problem with the NHS Netflix plan

Another day, another ridiculous Boris Johnson statement. This morning, the cabinet discussed whether the NHS was to become like Netflix, and predictably everyone has got very excited. It’s worth having a look at what actually happened at the meeting, though. The official readout is that Sajid Javid — not Johnson ― updated ministers on ‘the scale of the challenge post-pandemic — saying we had a Blockbuster healthcare system in the age of Netflix’. He then elaborated on this: ‘He said it was no longer simply an option to stick with the status quo. He said large-scale changes were needed in areas such as the use of technology and data to help frontline workers deliver the high-quality service the public expects.’

What is he on about? Is he really planning to turn the health service into a monthly subscription service that ends up in a fair bit of debt while not really giving you what you were looking for anyway? It’s quite clear that what Javid is talking about here is technology and the problems that the NHS is having in adjusting to the digital age. It is not a ridiculous statement to make, nor is it something with which the NHS top brass disagrees. In October the newly-appointed chief executive of NHS England Amanda Pritchard told MPs on the Health and Social Care Select Committee that a large section of the NHS was lagging behind the modern world:

We would absolutely agree that if we want to achieve a modern, efficient health service, we will not do it if we are not able to put that digital underpinning in place. There are two big things that are the focus at the moment. One is frontline digitisation. About a fifth of trusts in the NHS are still largely paper-based. We have some that are absolutely at the other end, but that is a very important thing to be able to fix if we are to achieve some of the interconnectivity we were talking about earlier.

Paper-based trusts: at least Blockbuster had VHS. There are lots of reasons why parts of the NHS have been slow to embrace even basic technology. One is the siloed way in which those parts often work, without reference to others — though Covid and in particular the vaccine rollout have done a great deal to crack some of those silos open. But another is that capital spending on health in the UK is extremely low in comparison to other European countries: about half the share of GDP. This means we have much lower numbers of CT and MRI scanners, for instance. But it also means that IT — which makes up around 10 per cent of capital spending in NHS Trusts — is rather under-resourced.

In her Select Committee appearance, Pritchard went on to say ‘the point you will be all too aware of is that we can only go at the pace we have funding available’. That’s hardly a surprise from an NHS boss: they ask for money more often than they have hot dinners. But this is where things really get awkward for the Netflix NHS: after today’s cabinet meeting, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman clarified that ‘there is no further investment beyond obviously… the funding envelope already set out by the Chancellor’. The money — if there is any real money to underpin this ‘transformation’ – seems to be coming from a planned £4.5 billion annual saving through productivity, which is, if not a magic money tree of a similar species to tackling tax avoidance and cutting red tape, quite an ask.

In summary, it’s a typical Boris Johnson policy on the day after his bruising vote of confidence result: eye-catching without much substance. Still, it’s much easier for everyone to miss asking the really revealing questions about capital spending because they are so busy making up scare stories about a Netflix-style subscription to the NHS.

How the Tories can avoid a repeat of their confidence vote conundrum

Boris Johnson insists that his victory in last night’s confidence vote means he will be able to ‘draw a line under issues our opponents want to talk about’. But what the result actually shows, as Boris undoubtedly knows, is that even some of those who backed him in the vote now want him gone.

Why? Shortly after the debacle, Matthew Parris in the Times hit the nail on the head. One minister had, he wrote, let the cat out of the bag when he (or she) confided to him: ‘He’s appalling: he’s got to go’ before trooping in to vote against the no-confidence motion with gritted teeth. It is a racing certainty that there are many others who thought, and acted, in just the same way: without doubt many more than the 32 who would have had to switch sides to change the result.

The problem, of course, is that for anyone on the government payroll (a group comprising something over 160 MPs), this exercise in party democracy was not exactly either free or fair. Whatever their real opinions, loyalty made it difficult for them to attack the boss who had hired them. Because of the secrecy of the ballot we obviously don’t know exactly which MPs voted which way. But informed guesses are that among backbenchers there was a majority of anything up to 75 per cent who wanted him out. In other words, Boris is now a leader who has lost the trust of most of his foot-soldiers and is being sustained in office by little more than the loyalty of those beholden to him for a job.

This is bad for both Boris and the party. The naysayers who put their heads over the parapet included not only patrician southerners, which one might have expected, but prominent Red Wallers such as Dehenna Davison from Bishop Auckland and Aaron Bell from Newcastle-under-Lyme. The future of the Tory party depends on MPs such as them. No wonder Monday’s vote is being gleefully hailed as the best possible news for Labour.

What will happen to Boris in the next few weeks, and how far Labour can exploit it, is anyone’s guess. But the Tories have a more immediate difficulty. It is vital to find a way to ensure that Monday’s debacle never happens again. On this, one radical idea in particular may be worth contemplating. Why not change the rules for no-confidence ballots aimed at triggering a leadership election, and say that in future only backbenchers can vote in them, to the exclusion of government place-holders?

This solution, which would undoubtedly have produced a different result this week, may seem bizarre. But if you look at it more closely, there are a surprising number of arguments in favour of it.

To begin with, members of the government are in an invidious position when it comes to leadership challenges. Appointed to paid office by the very leader whose position is at stake, their loyalties will be impossibly split in a vote concerned with the fortunes of the party as a whole. Is it unfair to disenfranchise them? Hardly. After all, they already have vastly more power proportionately over the leader than ordinary backbenchers, since few if any leaders could weather a full ministerial revolt: there is no need to give them more.

Secondly, backbenchers know their electors. Unlike ministers, who often have fairly safe seats and are inevitably shielded from a good deal of constituency drudgery by pressure of work, the humble backbench MP is all too aware of what their constituents think from surgery to surgery, from outraged email to outraged email. They are also painfully conscious that their job depends on how far they can convince those constituents, especially since they are more likely to have been recently elected and therefore still to have a name to make for themselves and their party. A party leadership that fails to address the concerns of its rank and file is likely to find itself not only out of touch, but also, in due course, out of office. Anything that makes that leadership sit up and take notice of such people can only be a good thing.

Thirdly, the habit of all party leaders – Labour as well as Tory – of seeing backbenchers as a kind of cannon-fodder, relatively unimportant and if necessary expendable, does not help party morale; nor does it encourage able people to put themselves forward as candidates or remain as MPs if elected. Knowledge by Conservative ministers and party leaders that they potentially hold their positions at the pleasure of the backbenchers who do most of the political heavy lifting at constituency level is a useful counter to such insouciance. A political culture in which ministers have to keep a watch on what concerns ordinary MPs, rather than being able to keep discreet tabs on them by vague promises of office provided they do not rock the boat, can only be a good thing.

Perhaps most important, however, is the perception of the public. People are already chary of voting Tory: whatever they think of individual candidates, many now see Boris, fairly or unfairly, as shallow and shifty. Monday’s vote, however, has now seriously tarred the party itself. It will inevitably be seen, especially in Wakefield and Honiton, as one where elite and out-of-touch MPs rally round a flawed Prime Minister out of little more than feelings of atavistic loyalty.

This is exactly the image the Conservatives must suppress if they want to revitalise the radical, activist conservatism with which Boris wowed the electorate in 2019. A well-publicised commitment to break the hold of the elite and empower ordinary constituency MPs – the politicians that the vast majority of electors in Conservative seats come across from day to day – to keep the leadership in order, and to call it to account if it misbehaves, would do an enormous amount to restore voters’ confidence. Even before Boris eventually limps wounded off the stage, this needs to be be at the top of the Tory agenda.

Things are about to get even worse for Boris Johnson

A round of tax cuts? A splurge of infrastructure spending? Or perhaps a whizzy way of subsidising housing? Boris Johnson could even decide to forgive student debts, and hand out a massive Christmas bonus for pensioners, craftily dressed up as a cost-of-living rebate. 

There are no doubt lots of such ideas being kicked around in Downing Street today to relaunch the Johnson premiership and save Boris’s skin after a huge rebellion by Tory backbenchers. But here’s the problem for the PM: the economy is about to turn toxic. The dismal reality is that Boris isn’t going to be able to spend his way out of this scrape.

Instead Johnson will have to come up with something else – that doesn’t cost much money – to relaunch his premiership if he is to do anything more than limp on for a few more months until he is finally replaced. And yet whatever ruse he comes up with, he will have to do so against a backdrop of an economy that is getting worse and worse all the time. 

Inflation is still rising, hitting an alarming nine per cent last month, but there is no reason to suppose it will necessarily stop there. Prices are rising by 20 per cent annually in Estonia, and by more than ten per cent in the Netherlands. As price rises outpace wage hikes, living standards are about to get crushed. That bleak scenario can already be seen materialising in falling retail spending. The reality is that people are shopping less because they feel poorer.

Even worse, sterling is still falling, touching $1.24 against the pound yesterday. As the UK’s economy shrinks, and its political system looks more and more dysfunctional to global investors, it is likely to keep on falling. That will push inflation even higher, especially for oil and gas (both priced in dollars and mostly imported). 

To make matters bleaker for Boris, the Bank of England will soon have to start significantly raising interest rates, hurting home owners as fixed rate deals expire. Perhaps most significantly of all, a gathering recession across the euro-zone, with industrial output already tumbling in Germany and France, could soon hit. That will only increase the pressure on the UK economy. Very soon tax revenues will be falling and benefits spending rising, as always happens in a downturn. The Chancellor will have to start spending less, not more. It adds up to a toxic combination that will hardly make the Prime Minister more popular.

Johnson – whose default approach is to splash the cash – can’t spend his way out of trouble this time. The money simply won’t be there. And any attempt to borrow it – or get the Bank of England to finance it with another round of quantitative easing – will only make the problem worse by driving the pound even lower. It is also too late now for any structural reforms to work in time to save the PM. If Boris had started on a round of tax cutting and deregulation on winning a big majority in 2019 it might be bearing fruit by now, and he wouldn’t be in such a mess. Yet the time for that has already expired. 

If Johnson is ousted, there will be many explanations for his demise. But a crashing, toxic economy will be the main one – and it is too late to do anything about it now.