The healing power of the Hamptons

These are peripatetic times for the poor little Greek boy, up to the Hamptons for some sun-seeking among Wasp types, and then down to the nation’s capital for the memorial service of that wonderful humorist P.J. O’Rourke. By all means take the following with a grain of salt, but even 800 million years ago, when only micro-organisms slithered around the beaches, belonging to a private club was all-important, especially in the Hamptons. Never have I seen more chest-thumping, bandy-legged, bearded louts trash-talking as they pollute the beaches in this beautiful town. Southampton was once a luminous little village that served as a seaside refuge for New York’s civilised rich during the unbearable heat of urban summer. You know the sort of thing: white wooden houses, long green lawns, wicker chairs, yellow and white umbrellas and people who talked in what was known as Park Avenue lockjaw.

Back then, belonging to a private club was pure snobbism; now it’s a lifesaver. The barbarians have overrun the place, put up Hollywood-style monstrosities on the wide acres that once grew potatoes, and have driven prices through the roof. Staying at an old club that’s been around for a century, one I joined long ago, made my days and nights. None of the members used the ubiquitous F-word, but better yet, no mobile telephones are allowed within the common rooms and terraces, making the place feel like Tahiti when Paul Gauguin was around. A long weekend there restored my spirits, despite a night of debauchery followed by a hangover that would have been too much even for a Karamazov. Never mind. A sense of claustrophobic delirium takes over after a while in the Bagel, the light and shadow of the city summoning memories of being banged up. A long weekend by the sea is what the doctor always orders, and this time it really worked.

America has become a strange country to people like me who believe in myths. No one in Europe disputes who our progenitors were in the manner young know-it-alls in America do. Who were the pioneers, they ask rhetorically. It’s the kind of question posed by left-wing smart alecks and ignoramuses, out to divide and rule. According to the great classical historian Taki, people of different nationalities and backgrounds, with different histories and different customs, are all prescriptions for disaster. Except that it used to work in America. No longer. Keep your old customs and beliefs, is the order of the day. America’s past, so the prevailing orthodoxy goes, was racist, hence conformity to Americana is a no-no. The founding fathers are the first to fall, along with their statues. History in Europe goes pretty much unchallenged. Not so over here, where it is being rewritten as statues are torn down and places renamed.

Mind you, political polarisation is not new. It helped bring Hitler to power, not to mention Mussolini, Franco, Lenin and Mao. In South America strongmen were the norm, as they are in present-day Africa. The reason the UK and US have always been democratic is that authoritarians have never been given free rein. What is presently tolerated, however, are a new type of tyrants, the spin dictators that marginalise opponents using politically correct footsoldiers and cancellation, rather than the water cannon and the baton. These tyrants have managed to intimidate and subvert educators, journalists, TV media, Hollywood and politicians, something only Hitler and Stalin managed in their lifetime.

Will this woke anarcho-tyranny against Middle America succeed, or will it end up on the historical rubbish dump, as it deserves to? The great Greek classical historian thinks that the germ has spread among the young, and a basic abhorrence for anyone who doesn’t agree with them will grow exponentially until only a few old fools will be allowed to speak their minds, mostly among themselves. And while I’m at it, can any of you envision Winston Churchill or Harold Macmillan being called a liar by a woman interviewer dressed in gym clothes? Boris should have got up and ordered her to leave. When will my side learn not to give in?

Never mind. Perhaps things aren’t as bad as all that, but the fact that since the Texas massacre of children there have been two mass shootings a day in the United States makes one feel that the place is as safe and united as the West Bank. The mayor of the Bagel recently named a gun violence czar to stop gun violence, and the appointee czar has a conviction of first-degree manslaughter. And his outreach programme – which had received 26.6 million big ones in city funding since 2010 – was found to have significant financial irregularities. He is the city’s hope to stop the shooting, which is a bit like yours truly being appointed liquor and drug czar for London (not a bad idea incidentally).

Insane demands by each radical group, including ‘defund the police’, help make the US ungovernable. ‘Two Million New Faces in 16 Months’ is a headline that caught my eye, and it confirms the fact that America has lost control of its borders. Which brings me back to where I started. Private clubs will become safe havens sooner rather than later.

Women behaving badly: Ghost Lover, by Lisa Taddeo, reviewed

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women established her as a narrator of female desire in all its complexity. Her study of three real women and their sexual choices became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, showing how women sometimes collude in relationships that are destructive, or make decisions they later regret. Power imbalance, coercion and past trauma as well as lust were distilled in the essence of their desires.

Of course, sexual relationships can be complex for both sexes, but Taddeo’s project repudiated the easy 1990s stereotypes of ‘ladettes’ as being replicas of sex-without-ties lads. Animal, her fiction follow-up, depicted the raw anger and vengeance that loss and frustration may beget.

Ghost Lover is largely made up of stories previously published in American magazines. Some of the women in them have echoes of Taddeo herself in that they have lost a beloved Italian-American father young, then their mother. Several seek anaesthesia of the soul in casual sex. Once again, these women are complicit in the bad behaviour of men who subsequently damage them more. They tend to judge themselves not on intelligence or kindness but on slimness and beauty, so it’s difficult to find here the loving, nurturing female friendships that most real women hold dear. The barbed wire of competitiveness and critical ties cut the flesh, and the women seek to numb the pain with more rollercoaster sex.

The stories will chime, albeit uneasily, with those who have had bruising encounters with disingenuous, exploitative men and fremenies. Obsession, social-media stalking and mistaking sex for love are all sadly present in modern dating.

In ‘The One and Only’, angry, wealthy Ari exerts control in the only way she can: through small acts of sadism towards women she envies. But she has been the victim of abuse as a child; although the ‘Ghost Lover’ of the book’s title is a coquettish, coy app she has devised, it’s also the fear that’s always with her. Taddeo doesn’t justify Ari’s behaviour but demonstrates Auden’s aphorism: ‘Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.’

There are a few inaccuracies: it’s poly-cystics whose hormones predispose to plumpness, not endometriotics, while ‘herpetic’ doesn’t work to describe a fever. And occasionally the sardonic wisecracks create a barrier to accessing true emotion. But these are devastating stories of women’s pain, loss and compensatory behaviour. Taddeo is the 21st century’s more excoriating Edna O’Brien.

From teenage delinquent to man of letters: James Campbell’s remarkable career

The great age of the Scottish autodidact must have ended a century ago, but it had a prodigious impact while it lasted. To read John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) is to be plunged headfirst into a world of kenspeckle lads studying Nietzsche behind the crankshaft and miners quoting Burns to each other as they were winched up from the Lanarkshire coal face. If James Campbell (born 1951) isn’t quite a figure to rank with James Thompson the Younger (1834-82) or the Rev. George Gilfillan (1813-78), to name a couple of Gross’s exemplars, then he is certainly their spiritual heir – a man whose preliminary knowledge was picked up on his own and whose take on contemporary literature is all the more pointed for having been acquired outside the usual channels of school and university.

Gross turns up towards the end of Just Go Down to the Road (the title derived from a friendly Easter Ross shepherd’s advice on how to get a lift) as a reserved yet encouraging editor of the TLS with whom Campbell begins a four-decade engagement in the early 1980s. Before this introduction to the landscapes of modern Grub Street come a dozen or so chapters on the bohemian life, as lived out by a near-hoodlum (outright violence is narrowly avoided) who quits school the moment his termly report card becomes impossible to forge, takes an apprenticeship in the printing industry, grows his hair, leaves home – the Campbells are solidly respectable lower-middle class – and, in out-at-elbows hippy-era Glasgow, starts hanging out with some very strange people indeed.

You suspect at an early stage in the proceedings that something is going on here, and that all manner of prime cultural plums are about to be dredged up out of the adolescent bran tub; and, sure enough, the young Jim attracts formative influences like a Highland rambler going down under a swarm of midges. Billy Connolly, then part of a folk group called the Humblebums, sits in the doctor’s surgery; Big Bill Broonzy, the innovative but permanently stoned folk guitarist Davey Graham and the Incredible String Band are there on the record racks; and London calls, in the shape of Powis Square communes (the headquarters of the capital’s counter-culture, pre-gentrification) and an audience with Mick Farren, the lead singer of the legendary Social Deviants.

For all the wide-eyed reminiscence (‘I travelled without a rucksack, just a shoulder bag, which contained a sweater, an extra T-shirt, a copy of Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi and another paperback or two’), Campbell’s attitude to the Age of Aquarius is curiously double-edged. He takes far fewer drugs than anyone else around and is usually shrewd enough to gauge the future literary value of some of the places he inhabits. The Greek island of Spetses, for example (there’s a glorious photo of Campbell on a horse in which he seems to have stepped from a Vashti Bunyan album cover), is the setting for John Fowles’s The Magus (1966). Residence there will eventually enable him to blag one of his first literary commissions.

And so the road winds on – to a kibbutz, where the man in the hut next door who consents to accompany his guitar-picking on bongos is revealed to be Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac; back to Scotland, where Campbell becomes a non-student interviewer on a student magazine (‘I was just about to give myself a fix,’ Trocchi explains as he opens the door) before transferring to academe in his mid-twenties, and into the foothills of the literary life:

Eventually I reached an understanding that the kind of writing I liked kept its feet on the ground. It was a Scottish style: commonsensical, sceptical, impatient of cant, alert to the value of subterranean humour.

There is plenty of subterranean humour on display in Just Go Down to the Road, much of it to do with the vagrant entourage maintained by the American novelist James Baldwin, into whose house in the south of France Campbell finesses himself, whose articles he commissions (‘I’m working on it baby, I’m working on it’) and whose biography he ultimately writes. Ditto some beguiling glimpses into a bygone world of books. I was interested to discover that Craig Raine was once denied the deputy literary editorship of the New Statesman on the grounds that he was ‘too mad’.

The deep roots of global inequality

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.’

A glimmer of hope for the blue planet

You might think – with its feeding frenzies, vertiginous seamounts, perilous weather and deep history of the monstrous – that the ocean was a wild enough place as it is; but according to the environmentalist Charles Clover it has systematically been ‘de-wilded’ by decades of commercial overfishing, and our seas are now in urgent need of healing. I believe him.

When it comes to conservation, fish hold less appeal than terrestrial fauna: they are perceived as cold-blooded, mostly invisible, lacking in charisma, and often delicious – plus, for centuries, there existed the comfortable delusion that their stocks were inexhaustible (even a proof positive of divine benevolence). Now, thanks to ruinously efficient modern trawling techniques, poorly enforced regulations and sheer greed, this abundance is palpably at an end.

A wider awareness of the crisis, and the attempt to reverse international trends, was promoted by Clover’s previous book, his influential The End of the Line, and a subsequent documentary film which highlighted in particular the plight of bluefin tuna (a single specimen of which was once sold in Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market for £2.5 million) and explored the devastation to marine ecosystems caused by this industrial plundering of the seas. Its premiere in 2009 was memorably associated with a photograph of a naked Greta Scacchi hugging a large cod.

In several ways, Rewilding the Sea is a follow-up volume – indeed, it begins with the welcome reappearance of tunny off our own Western Isles – and charts the progress that has been made in the intervening period. Although urgent and sometimes indignant in tone, this is far from some shrill doom-sayer’s polemic. It describes ‘how things once thought impossible have happened,’ largely through the creation of marine reserves across the world, many of the ones the author charts having been championed by the Blue Marine Foundation (BLUE), a charity of which he was co-founder. ‘We have industrialised the sea, and lied about protecting it,’ is this excellent book’s pithy, incontestable premise.

Rewilding has become a fashionable buzzword, but it is not universally popular – try discussing with any of my hill-farming neighbours in Perthshire the prospect of reintroducing wolves, or the already thriving beaver colonies of Tayside (which I’m told would furnish a spectacular sporran). Clover takes its marine application to mean setting aside designated, and properly monitored, areas of the seas where nature can be allowed to take its course and repair damage to depleted habitats; but this approach does not always appeal to officialdom, which prefers analysis of data before taking action – and for that, he argues, we do not now have the luxury of time.

Another major problem is that even where agreements exist, they are feebly enforced. Around our own shores, some 97 per cent of protected areas are still being fished by some method, and it is anyway difficult to establish entirely ‘no-take’ zones. In Lyme Bay, where ‘England’s coral garden’ has been reduced to rubble by scallop-dredging, it took a 23-year campaign before the government imposed a restriction protecting 60 square miles, by which time biodiversity in the area was seriously threatened. In the words of the Dorset lobsterman Dave Sales (to whose memory the book is dedicated): ‘I think we overdone it a bit.’

Whether it be the sturgeon feeding grounds of Dogger Bank, the reseeding of oyster beds in the Solent or the protection of kelp forests off Bognor, conservation projects face the perennial challenge of reconciling their plans with traditional local fishing practices, but not all authorities are imaginative about this. When crofters alerted Marine Scotland to the location of a rare skate nursery off Skye, a no-fishing zone was set up that excluded them from even setting their creels – but that’s another type of Sturgeon problem. The spectre of bureaucracy haunts most of these interlocking case studies, and occasionally frustration proves too great. In 2020, when Greenpeace began dropping granite boulders in the North Sea to obstruct electric pulse trawlers, the author had his name inscribed on one. ‘I believe in the law,’ he writes, but ‘nature has its needs too.’

It is the human factor that makes this book so immediate, and Clover realises that there are only so many acronyms and statistics that the general reader can cope with before an eco story becomes as dry and unappetising as a bagful of Icelandic bitafiskur.

Especially heartening are his accounts of how certain relatively small local populations are confronting the depredations of heavily subsidised long-range industrial fleets, frequently from the ravenous East. The dramatic chapter ‘Jurassic Parks of the Sea’, concerns a project to protect the waters surrounding some of Britain’s 14 Overseas Territories, including Ascension Island (which I recall being the only place you could get a drink on the long, dry flight to the Falklands) and its remote sisters St Helena and Tristan da Cunha. Although islanders derived vital income from the selling of commercial licences, it was shown that the disastrously unsupervised industry, which involved trawlers as well as long-liners that finned live sharks, was damaging the whole biological web that also supported green turtles, land crabs, frigate birds and specimen wahoo. Eventually, the residents were persuaded to accept a UK government conservation scheme – helped this time by an image of Helena Bonham Carter embracing a yellowfin tuna. The total areas now protected extend to 1.5 million square miles.

In the Indian Ocean, another extensive reserve has been established around the Chagos archipelago, from which the British notoriously deported the entire population in 1973 as part of a military deal with the USA. It is home to 220 species of coral and 800 species of fish, but Mauritius is laying claim to it, and that’s a country with a truly dismal record of marine stewardship. However, further to the north, in the Maldives, there are signs that an enlightened government is aware of how tourist developments and pollution are threatening their precious reefs: a previous president even held a cabinet meeting underwater to flag up the dangers of rising sea levels.

The vast long-range fishing fleets of China and the EU are among Clover’s ‘Enemies of Progress’, as they shamelessly exceed their catch limits, especially around the African coasts. Trawlers release as much CO₂ as the global aviation industry, and their detrimental impact on the ability of the seabed and its denizens to soak up carbon is one of the book’s abiding themes. But Clover insists that rewilding is catching on, and its benefits are discernible. This is an important, intriguing and informative book, and I would like to share his admirable optimism. As the philosopher Francis Bacon remarked: ‘Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.’

Keir Starmer isn’t working

Silence. That is what we heard during Gloria de Piero’s recent focus group which she held for her GB News show in her old constituency of Ashfield, one of many Red Wall seats that fell to the Conservatives in 2019. Most participants had been Labour voters up to that election but felt the party had somehow let them down and ceased to represent the working class, especially with Jeremy Corbyn as leader. De Piero found them most talkative about how Boris Johnson had once appeared to be a different kind of politician, one whose promises they had believed but who they now felt had let them down, thanks to partygate. But when the former Labour MP asked her focus group about Keir Starmer there was, for what seemed an age, silence. When she prompted them further it was clear they saw Starmer as a figure who had emerged out of nowhere, and about whom they knew little. What they did know was that he was not an exceptional figure – that he was just like the rest of the Westminster political class.

Focus groups can reveal the texture of people’s thinking and this one echoed many others held during Johnson’s partygate crisis. These groups have exposed many 2019 Conservative voters’ disappointment towards, and even revulsion of, the Prime Minister. But they have also shown uncertainty about what Starmer and his party stand for. More conventional public opinion surveys confirm this impression: if the public now think very negatively about Boris Johnson as prime minister they still don’t think of Starmer in especially positive terms.

Only time will tell how successful Boris Johnson will be in drawing a line under partygate now he has won his vote of confidence. But if he is successful in addressing what he calls the ‘people’s priorities’ – and as memories of No. 10 parties fade – it will become vitally important that Keir Starmer dispels the ominous fog currently surrounding his public persona.

The beneficiary of popular dismay at Covid law-breaking in Downing Street, Starmer has after more than two years as Labour leader still failed to make a definite and positive impression on the country. By simply not being Jeremy Corbyn nor Boris Johnson, the Labour leader has helped his party achieve a sustained if hardly hegemonic poll lead since Christmas. This is of course a massive advance on Labour’s dire position at the 2019 general election. But while being the repository of protest votes against an unpopular prime minister can help a party win a few by-elections and do well in local government contests, it is no guarantee of gaining a majority in the House of Commons. Just ask Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband. Both saw mid-term opinion polls which suggested they were on the verge of becoming prime minister: each saw that mirage suddenly evaporate when a general election came into view and voters had to make some hard choices.

What difference will Labour make to the lives of the British people, especially those who abandoned the party in 2019, remains an open question. The possible answer actually lies lost in innumerable Labour policy documents and more conference speeches than you can shake a stick at. The party does not lack things to talk about; but Starmer has yet to find a way of talking about them that makes people sit up and think. And yet, instead of trying to find a way of best communicating what Starmer’s Labour can do for the country he is apparently writing a book which few apart from the snarky commentariat will read. It is the very last thing he needs to do.

Labour’s windfall tax proposal to curtail profits in the energy industry was a sign the party can develop policies that make a tangible difference – and this is recognised by many voters. But that has now been appropriated by the government and was in any case a measure for a short-term crisis. And it was just a revamped version of a New Labour policy from 1997. That the party has yet to find another way to demonstrate how it could make a concrete difference to people’s lives suggests that the policy might have been a one-off.

Parties can win general elections with leaders who make little positive impression on the public. In the 1960s Edward Heath as leader of the opposition looked desperately dowdy and stiff in comparison to the charismatic and sassy Prime Minister Harold Wilson. But despite being dismissed by most commentators Heath managed to win the 1970 general election leaving Wilson a shocked and shattered figure.

But that was in an era when party loyalties more than leaders mattered to voters. Today parties need leaders who can communicate a clear and simple message to an electorate now barely engaged with and often hostile to politics. Boris Johnson won in 2019 repeatedly promising he would ‘Get Brexit Done’: it was a spurious and highly contested assertion, but it cut through to voters. What is Starmer’s version? On the back of the Labour leader’s most recent so-so performance at Prime Minister’s Questions the sketch writer Rob Hutton sarcastically suggested it might be ‘Settle for Starmer. You’ve Had Worse.’ Maybe something slightly more inspiring will emerge closer to an election, which is no more than two years away. But with Johnson cranking up his government machine in the hope of putting partygate behind him, the awkward silences that follow Starmer’s name should concern all Labour MPs.

The Brexit Horizon debate is bad news for scientists

The UK and EU are currently locked in a debate about Britain’s participation in the Horizon Europe science funding programme, with the EU blocking the UK from taking part due to concerns about the Northern Ireland protocol.

The situation is very disappointing for scientists. Eighteen months ago, when the Brexit deal was signed in good faith, the UK government signed up to participate in the programme. This would have been a good thing. But it has now been turned into political football. As a result, 18 months later, scientists don’t know where they are. We’re apparently not in the programme, it looks like we’re out. But this row is running on and on, time is going by, and I’m just not sure how much longer Britain should wait.

In the past, the UK was a net beneficiary from the Horizon programme. But the truth is we’re now going to have to pay for everything we get out of it. So there’s no upside in terms of getting more money than we put in. Meanwhile the money we were going to contribute is already available. The Treasury has committed to a very generous science settlement to accommodate that. So the question is this: if we can’t join the Horizon programme – and that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen – can we build a parallel system which accomplishes all the things that Horizon does?

There are two things that Horizon does well. They’ve got a terrific fellowship programme, which is a much better fellowship programme than anything we currently run in the UK. But remember, we’re talking about £1.5 billion a year that the UK is putting forward in funding. So if we want to create one, we can create a fellowship programme. That’s not complicated, we can just get on and do it.

The second thing that Horizon provides is an easy way to collaborate with European scientists. And of course, collaboration is fundamental to all science activities. That’s one of the positive features of the programme. But I would argue that good science doesn’t just go on in Europe. It goes on in Canada, Australia, Japan, and the United States as well. We should be looking more widely for collaborations, and if we control the money, we would be able to do that. So I’m not sure we would be a lot worse off outside Horizon. In fact, we could be better off if we just set up our own programme.

There are lots of ways to collaborate – we don’t have to rely on Horizon. And at the moment there are lots of scientists who have extensive collaborations globally who don’t receive any Horizon funding at all.

George Freeman, the Minister for Science, is in Brussels today trying to trying to get the UK’s participation in Horizon across the line. But there’s a point at which this row could just run and run and run. And as the debate gets tied up with discussions about the Northern Ireland protocol, it might be years before it is fully settled. I don’t think that’s good for UK science. Which means if the UK government can’t get this settled pretty quickly, they need to think about a plan B instead, and set up our own version of Horizon.

Rishi Sunak promises more tax cuts… just not yet

After Boris Johnson faced a confidence vote by his own MPs, the Prime Minister has come under pressure to bring in changes to his government. This ranges from talk of a reshuffle to shaking up the No. 10 operation yet again. But the issue which has the broadest support among MPs calling for change is a desire for Johnson to cut taxes. MPs from across the party – from the One Nation wing’s Damien Green to the ERG’s Steve Baker – have suggested this ought to be done sooner rather than later.

However, it appears they will have to wait a little while longer. This evening Rishi Sunak spoke to Tory MPs at a meeting of the 1922 committee. The Chancellor addressed the issue – telling MPs in the room that he did want to cut tax – but it had to be done when the fiscal weather allows. Sunak said he would ‘never, on an act of blind faith, do them at the expense of the fundamental soundness of our economy or public finances’. The Chancellor cited the ‘largest personal tax cut in a decade’ in March as evidence he does want to cut taxes – adding that ‘tax cuts are the reward for a government that is prepared to make difficult choices elsewhere… I promise you we are.’

While not everyone in the room was thrilled by the timeline, MPs present report that Sunak signalled that the first priority would be business tax cuts in the autumn and then personal tax cuts after that. However, the Chancellor still received a decent reception – with supportive questions from MPs including Felicity Buchan and Mark Harper. One MP says they took from the meeting that the bulk of the party accepts the days of the magic money tree are over – spending discipline and lower taxes are instead vital going forward.

Emily Bridges is right about transgender cyclists

Transgender cyclist Emily Bridges doesn’t ‘want special treatment from anyone’. In an ITV interview, Bridges said: 

‘I just want the same opportunities as my fellow female athletes’.

As someone who transitioned a few years before Emily, I’d say Bridges is right: transgender people should not need special treatment. We are human beings, just like everyone else. In the UK, at least, trans people have specific and additional protections against discrimination and harassment. But these only become relevant if someone treats us less favourably because we are transgender. That has happened to me very rarely.

Yet in the debate about whether Bridges should be allowed to compete in women’s cycling races, one thing needs to be said: Bridges is not a female athlete. Female-ness is not a feeling in our heads; human beings are female if they are members of the sex that is characterised by ovaries and the production of ova. This shouldn’t be controversial to say; it is true of every sexually dimorphic species that has existed for the last billion years or so.

Sport is segregated by sex in disciplines where women – people with female bodies – would not win very much in open competition with men. In cycling, for example, Chris Hoy holds the world record for the Flying 500 metre time trial. He rode it in 24.758 seconds. The fastest any woman has managed is 28.970 seconds. That is a 17 per cent difference in a discipline where times are measured to a thousandth of a second.

Testosterone has an impact, of course, but history cannot be unpicked. Bridges retains the advantage of male puberty, which can mean a person has bigger lungs and stronger bones. 

‘The muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed,’ according to Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg in Sports Medicine. We should listen to them. We should also listen to Sajid Javid, the health secretary, when he says ‘it’s biological sex that matters’ when it comes to transgender people participating in sporting competitions.

Bridges complained about the negative impact of hormone therapy on performance. Bridges may have a point, but women’s sport should still be restricted to female athletes. It should not include members of the other sex whose times may have worsened following medical treatment. Would we countenance the inclusion of men whose testosterone may have been suppressed by treatment for prostate cancer? That seems unlikely. And if we don’t grant exceptions for such athletes, then we shouldn’t do so for transgender people who may have received medical treatment.

So who is to blame for this unfortunate situation? While Bridges has (perhaps unfairly) received much of the flak, the fault lies more with the sports governing bodies themselves. If these organisations had resisted the seemingly endless demands of transgender activism, this would not be an issue in the first place. Bridges could continue to compete alongside men, perhaps in a slightly lower category. Bridges could look forward to the many other opportunities that will arise for someone sufficiently confident and articulate to be interviewed at length on ITV.

Instead, this young, gifted cyclist has been thrust into the centre of a ferocious dispute over transgender inclusion that shows no sign of resolution. Reports of online abuse – including threats of physical violence – are to be deplored. But valid criticism is part of a democratic society. My view is clear: transwomen like me should not compete in events for women, and Bridges was wrong to take advantage of rules that have permitted it.

PMQs: Boris let slip his re-election strategy

PMQs started with a bump. The Speaker called Dame Angela Eagle whose tone was acidic but quietly conversational. ‘This week’s events demonstrated just how loathed this Prime Minister is,’ said the dame. ‘And that’s only in his own party.’ A decent gag that won big laughs – and not just from the opposition. But Boris didn’t crumple. Anyone who hoped to see him slouching like a wounded elephant to the bone-yard was disappointed. His brush with death has sharpened his relish for the fight.

‘I thank her very much for her question. And in a long political career – so far! – I have picked up political opponents all over. That’s because this government has done some very big and very remarkable things.’ Translation: ‘I’m still here. In fact, I’ve barely started.’

There were cries of ‘shsh!’ from Labour as the Speaker called Andrew Mitchell, a top Tory disloyalist. Mitchell has the perpetually wounded air of a clever pupil who failed to make Head Boy even though his parents bought the school a new boat-house. But he disappointed Labour by asking about the Commonwealth summit in Rwanda. He revealed that Britain is home to numerous alleged war criminals who have skulked in our midst for an enjoyable 16 years. And he wondered if the Prime Minister’s plane might find space for those accused of atrocities over there? No, apparently. Not even in economy. But Boris promised to mention them at some banquet or other.

Sir Keir avoided the no-confidence vote and accused Boris of failing the NHS. Not a great day for the Labour leader. He rambled and smirked and preened too much. All fake joviality and premature triumphalism. ‘Oh dear, Prime Minister,’ he scolded. ‘Dear, dear, dear.’

He gets the finger-wagging Covid-marshal persona brilliantly but who wants a robotic crosspatch like him as PM? His team of hearse-chasers had been out in force looking for NHS blunders to blame on Boris. It seems poor taste to toss a medical tragedy across the floor and ask the PM to explain why this operation was cancelled or that patient went private. The worst case was a son whose mother died while waiting for a non-existent ambulance. What’s astonishing is that the poor man phoned six times in the hope that a paramedic might turn up. Most people would just get an Uber because they regard the ambulance service as a mirage, a bit like the Second Coming. It’s a consoling fantasy for the bemused and ignorant.

Ian Blackford of the SNP made a good joke for once. He said that the Tories always shout him down when he calls for Boris’s resignation. ‘It turns out that 41 per cent of them have been cheering me on.’

Boris thanked him for his ‘characteristically warm words’ and praised Blackford for unwittingly boosting the union.‘He is the Araldite that’s keeping our kingdom together.’ And he turned Blackford’s calls for ‘independence’ on their head. ‘Our country is independent!’ bellowed Boris. ‘And the only way that independence would ever be reversed would be through the disaster of a Labour-SNP coalition.’

Pundits differ in their predictions but it’s clear what Boris thinks. Next year’s general election campaign has begun. He wants to scare middle England with the prospect of a wreckers’ pact between rejoiner Starmer and indyfan Sturgeon who will undo Brexit and force Britain back into the globalist bootcamp of Brussels. Not a bad strategy.

Boris can’t wish the tax burden away

After an uncomfortably close confidence vote for the Prime Minister on Monday, Boris Johnson’s premiership still hobbles along. But for how much longer? It seems the PM’s latest strategy is to find favour with his party again by promising bread-and-butter Tory policies: mainly tax cuts.

Speaking to Tory MPs just hours before this week’s confidence vote, Johnson was making all the right noises: to boost the economy post-pandemic, he said, it was time to ‘drive supply side reform on Conservative principles and to cut taxes and to drive investment in the UK.’ Since the vote, Johnson has continued to harp on about cutting taxes, reportedly telling the Cabinet that cuts were coming down the track. A statement on economic growth is also expected from Johnson and his Chancellor Rishi Sunak next week – though details are limited, and the emphasis from No10 is that tax cuts will come ‘down the line’, not right away.

The problem for Johnson is that his government hasn’t simply been slow to slash taxes; it’s been proactively raising taxes for well over a year now. Johnson has overseen the tax burden reaching its highest level in 71 years. On the current trajectory, this will rise to a 77-year-high by 2025-26.

The Prime Minister can make the case, as his Chancellor has been doing since his March Budget last year, that some of these tax hikes have been necessary to deal with the economic fallout from the pandemic; especially to protect the public finances from inflation (i.e. higher debt interest payments) which have been rising dramatically. But it’s well known that the more recent tax hikes, particularly the National Insurance levy introduced in April, were brought in to cover the Prime Minister’s spending habits: in this case, his desire to cover the costs of social care for the asset-wealthy, to protect them from having to sell their homes to pay for care.

Spending cuts have more or less been off-limits since Johnson entered Downing Street. He’s been afraid to be pegged with the label of ‘austerity’ and so prefers to borrow – and tax – over trimming the size of the state.

Where has all this got us? Today the puts it into perspective, marking 8th June as ‘Tax Freedom Day’, which comes a week later than last year due to recent tax grabs. With 43.29 per cent of net national income now going to the Treasury, it takes 159 days for Brits to stop working for the state and start working for themselves. It’s the latest Tax Freedom Day since official records began in 1995.

This kind of financial burden doesn’t just cause short-term pain by fuelling the cost-of-living crunch; it has serious ramifications for Britain’s economic future too. Alongside Tax Freedom Day comes a warning from OECD the that the UK is set to experience the worst economic growth amongst developed nations next year, as the economy stagnates due to the ‘rising cost of living’ and ‘depressed demand.’ As well, the OECD forecasts that when inflation does fall, it won’t be back down to record low levels, but could still be close to 5 per cent by the end of 2023.

If forecasts are even somewhat reflected in reality, the PM will have very little choice but to start making hard decisions about priorities and where savings can be made. That’s going to require action, not simply making the right sounds around the Cabinet table. This is where the pressure point lies: for quite a while now, Johnson has managed to get away with branding his party the ‘low tax’ party while simultaneously raising taxes. But it seems his own party may not let him get away with it anymore.

Still, if Johnson wants tax cuts he’s going to have to budge, either on the size of the state or on his trepidation to bring in serious supply-side reforms.

Starmer’s PMQs performance was oddly flat

It’s not unusual for a Labour leader to attack the government over the NHS at Prime Minister’s Questions. Neither is it a topic of low salience at the moment, given the size of the backlog. But it was nonetheless Sir Keir Starmer’s subject choice today was curious because it was precisely what Boris Johnson wanted to talk about, rather than the things he is trying to move on from. It’s ‘health week’ in the Downing Street grid, and apparently in Starmer’s too.

To be fair to the Labour leader, he clearly hoped that his questions to Johnson would show health week up for being a bunch of gimmicky announcements that will do little to address the crisis the NHS is in at present. Currently, people are having to resort to crowdfunders in order to pay for private treatment while waiting an unacceptably long time for the NHS to get to them. To that end, Starmer included case studies of patients who’d done just that, and of a man who’d called an ambulance repeatedly for his mother, who then died while still waiting for one to turn up. These were moving and not uncommon. Starmer’s line on it was that these people ‘deserved better than a wanting and inadequate government utterly unable to improve our NHS’. He also pointed to the enormous backlog in maintenance of NHS buildings (which has got so serious that some are considered unsafe), as well as the long waits in A&E, and to the concerns in government about the delivery of the 48 ‘new hospitals’. And the opening attack was on the own goal scored by Culture Secretary and former health minister Nadine Dorries when as part of her diatribe against Jeremy Hunt for being disloyal to Johnson, she appeared to admit that the Conservatives had left Britain inadequately prepared for the pandemic.

All of those are serious points and ones that will reverberate all the way to the next election. But Starmer did not make these points well. Far from pointing out the Tories’ own goals, he allowed them to score a few more. ‘This line of criticism is satirical,’ jeered Johnson, joking that Labour was attacking a hospital building programme when they were the ‘authors of the PFI scheme’ (they weren’t, but never mind). He also laughed to the chamber that Starmer’s ‘line of attack is not working’. He told MPs more than they wanted to know about the 48 new hospitals (which also aren’t new, but never mind that either), about the numbers of nurses the government is recruiting (which also won’t resolve the workforce crisis) and then about the Conservatives’ wider achievements.

Starmer is a keen footballer whose fellow players say takes the game very seriously without showing much flair. Today he chose not to go for the open goal of a Prime Minister with little authority left over his governing party. Either he did so because he was clumsy – or because he sees the benefit in not finishing Johnson off just yet.

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.