Subscriber announcement: When Reaction scaled back to just this newsletter hosting my writing, I said I would take a few months to figure it out. Was the pricing right for my newsletter which is usually about 2-3000 words long each time? Gratifyingly, most subscribers seem to think it is worth it. Thank you. A few have said no, with the rest of Reaction not there, they don’t want to stay. And for new potential subscribers, with many people feeling generally squeezed in this economy, it clearly makes sense to align the pricing with other writers I know who write at a similar length on different topics.

So, as of today, I’m reducing the price of the annual subscription from £80 per year to £60 and the monthly option from £8 to £7 per month. If you have taken out or renewed an annual subscription since the start of August 2025 we will - if you want - refund you the difference of £20. Just email fiona@reaction.life and the team will sort.

If you are a free subscriber and want to upgrade to paid to read this newsletter every week? Well, it is now even better value… what are you waiting for?

Anyway, thank you for reading. Substack right now seems to be full of pieces about the death of reading with the obvious implication that writing is becoming a waste of time, which it isn’t. The longterm link between reading and thinking is so obvious, and the effects of replacing it with a purely visual culture resting on endless video scrolling are so destructive, that as many of us as possible should carry on doing the opposite.

The old joke that economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions is a good joke because it is rooted in the truth that there is always someone, somewhere, predicting that the economy is about to collapse. An investor or analyst or commentator can usually be found at any given moment who will say that one aspect or all aspects of the economy - government debt, corporate debt, employment, the stock market - are in such a state that, just you wait, there is about to be an explosion.

Several times in the last decade I’ve had - and it turned out to be wrong - that financial crisis tremor feeling many of us learned to identify in the run up to the 2008 disaster. Just because there is a tremor it does not mean an earthquake comes next.

It was like that with tremors in the early 2000s when I remember standing smoking a cigarette alongside the late great Bill Jamieson in Edinburgh on the balcony at the then new Scotsman building (don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore). It was the day of one of Gordon Brown’s budgets when the New Labour Chancellor was in his pomp and his enemies were being crushed. Bill was a fantastic City commentator, and we agreed Brown was making hubristic mistakes by increasing spending too much and boasting about how he had ended boom and bust, an impossibility.

The real economy was apparently doing well in the early 2000s, so in the good times government debt should be on track to go down quite a bit rather than rise. Yet according to Brown’s team that didn’t matter because it seemed as though the boom - particularly in finance - would go on for ever. Perhaps critics such as Bill and me were just stuck in our ways and wrong? Perhaps Brown and his friend Alan Greenspan, the governor of the US Fed, had rewritten the rules of economics so successfully we did not yet understand? Even the Dotcom bubble bursting a few years before had been managed successfully. I remember us laughing that budget day and saying we must be mistaken, and yet… Likewise, in subsequent years when the bank profits of Edinburgh’s banks got bigger and bigger by the billion, Bill used to say “wow… wow” and shake his head with a worried look on his face. Could the boom really last?

And then look what happened. Bill’s gut instincts had been right, just four or five years too early.

Several times in the last decade I’ve felt the financial crisis tremors and it came to nothing. A few years ago a friend in the City showed me his workings on the rise of private credit and excessive risks, and it looked worrying. On another occasion, a leading economist gave me lecture on the dead cert unsustainable nature of US government debt back when it was around $30 trillion. It is now at $38 trillion and I spent more than a week in the US this month, the restaurants were still full, New York’s Metropolitan Opera House was packed and sold out on a Saturday afternoon and places such as Texas are booming.

That one state, Texas, is the eight largest economy in the world with an estimated GDP of $2.7 trillion. It grew at 3.7% last year and the population has increased by more than 50% in the last quarter of a century to 31.9m today. Voracious Texas is booming and I doubt even a bursting of the financial markets bubble will change that longterm.

Sensing the impact of the Covid pandemic doesn’t count as a financial crisis tremor, as it was a sudden natural event, or perhaps unnatural event, and governments mobilised like it was a war. Though after dinner in late January 2020 one of my favourite City analysts did show me the app he used to track Chinese shipping. Look, he said, everything has stopped. And the same week an entrepreneur who shipped most of the stock for his business from China told me cheerfully at lunch that within two months the global economy would be in shutdown.

Read more

Ahead of my newsletter tomorrow morning, here is my very quick take on a political disaster in Wales. This post is free to read, and if you would like to upgrade so you can read the newsletter, you can do so here.

Subscribe now

What happened in the Welsh valleys last night was an earthquake, and it is worth acknowledging the scale of it before considering the full impact and likely aftershocks. Caerphilly has been Labour since forever, since the party became the dominant force on the left of British politics, and in the by-election for the Senedd (what used to be the Welsh assembly) Labour could not even muster 4,000 votes. The party was crushed by the left-wing Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru. The insurgent Reform came second and the Tories came nowhere.

In line with the justified complaint usually made by the veteran Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, who says that the failure of the media to provide, prominently, the basic numbers on elections symbolises its wider problems. He’s right. There is a blizzard of analysis and live blogs and everything else when the starting point should be the numbers. Give us the main numbers, mate, as Lynton says.

Here we go…

Plaid got 15,961 or 47.4% of the vote. A swing of 19%.

Reform secured 12,113, 36% of the vote. A swing of 34.2%.

Labour ended up with just 3,713 votes, 11% of the vote.

The others got almost nothing at all.

This weekend I’m in Scotland where Labour has similar problems and I’ve written my newsletter on financial crises warning signals, and something on the ridiculous mess the UK has got itself into on China policy. But Caerphilly is worth noting.

Yes, it’s a by-election and there have been many by-election shocks in British politics down the decades. It is possible that one or more of the old parties reassert themselves either before or after the next general election in 2028 or 2029.

On the latest edition of the Not Another One podcast I record with Steve Richards, Tim Montgomerie and Miranda Green, Steve says that the lesson from Caerphilly is that left-wing voters will vote tactically to block Reform. It’s a good point. Tactical voting to stop Farage is going to be a major feature.

But my main conclusion from the by-election is that voters having smashed the Tories now want to smash Labour. This is partly about protest. It is also about punishment for what most voters see as the abject failure of the two old parties on the economy, public services, migration and social cohesion.

This result leaves Labour trapped in an almost impossible position, pursued by Reform to its right and the rising Greens (extremely left-wing), Plaid (extremely left-wing) and the SNP (extremely incompetent and sanctimonious). Even Farage flirts with the left on economics and nationalisation.

Even if Keir Starmer decided that what the country needs is the immigration crisis dealt with robustly, cheaper electricity bills via a scaling back of net zero, pro-growth deregulation to encourage epic amounts of building, control and the reduction of welfare spending, and an entrepreneurial wave encouraged by tax simplification and even business tax reductions, even if he decided to give the correct answer a go, the guy is stuck with a party that wouldn’t let him. All the pressure will be for him to go left, to satisfy places such as Caerphilly where hacked off voters have concluded that the government isn’t spending enough (!) even when we have record borrowing.

This weekend it seems likely Labour will elect Lucy Powell as deputy leader. Powell was fired from the cabinet by Starmer, of course. Her elevation by the membership will only increase the pressure from that wing of the Labour party - the left-wing eco-fanatic Milibandite wing - for positions and policies that appeal to voters switching to the Greens and Plaid, and maybe even Corbyn’s breakaway fringe party. We must reunite the left, will be the cry from Powell, urged on by many of her colleagues, and some of them in the cabinet. Don’t chase Farage, go left! Which, obviously, increases the chances of the left of centre vote being divided between a Labour party facing existential collapse, the Greens, the Lib Dems and nationalists. A dream scenario for Reform and Farage in which they can win a general election with roughly 33% of the vote.

Meanwhile, our over-taxed and over-borrowed economy trundles along towards the edge of the cliff.

Welcome to my weekly newsletter, which went out to paying subscribers yesterday. This week, I’m making the lead item free to read as a sample, and beyond that the stuff on books, Menzies Campbell and the tyranny of WhatsApp is for paying subscribers. If you enjoy my newsletter and want to upgrade, well, that would be much appreciated.

A friend who works in tech in a senior capacity made an observation so striking, yet simple, the other day that it made me wonder why the rest of us have not grasped the economic and cultural import of such a basic concept.

The language of AI is going to be primarily English, he said, and trained on texts largely written in English. While other countries are developing multilingual LLMs (Large Language Models) and versions in French and Chinese, Artificial Intelligence “leans” English.

As the Apple Machine Learning Research project puts it:

“Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed with English as the primary language, and even the few that are multilingual tend to exhibit strong English-centric biases.”

Just as English is the world’s most spoken language, with 1.5 billion souls speaking it as a first or second language, with Chinese in second place, English is the global business code. Even though China is developing its own LLMs and may yet win the race to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) - though let’s pray it does not - the common denominator language of international trade and exports will be English, not Mandarin.

That outsiders see this helps explain the slew of American big tech investments in the UK, particularly of late. During the recent State visit of President Trump assorted deals were announced.

The Americans are not doing this out of a spirit of sentimental Anglophilia or a love of Downton Abbey, though soft power helps. Britain has the people because it still has a disproportionate number of top rank universities, particularly compared to other large European countries, and we produce skilled technologists, software engineers and innovators who will help produce growth, if big government doesn’t get in the way.

Tech is a rare bright spot in Britain at the moment, where there is an all enveloping air of gloom around politics and business.

A Labour government that should have come in and realised with the economy starting to recover it needed to do nothing at all that might jeopardise growth instead pursued policies via the Treasury that have made the situation worse.

Inflation has decoupled from the European path in the last year after a UK public sector spending splurge and tax rises on business that are passed on to consumers. The state is spending too much and the parts of the economy that can grow us out of the mess are over taxed.

Meanwhile, an administration elected with a landslide majority appears to be coming apart at the seams little more than a year later. Andy Burnham - Andy Burnham! - is being touted as an alternative Prime Minister, which if it ever happens will be a development beyond surreal. Burnham has been a Blairite, a Brownite, a Corbynite, and now a who knows what. He is the media-obsessed mayor of Manchester, though the credit for that great city’s success and revival does not go to the mayor of the “combined local authorities.”

Nationally, the populist party Reform, led by Nigel Farage, is leading in the opinion polls and it looks as though the two old parties may be dying, the Tories because of their record on immigration and assorted shenanigans, and Labour perhaps because Tony Blair and the modernisation project delayed the long term decline of a party rooted in organised labour which no longer exists in the way it did in the 1960s.

The voters are furious and disillusioned with the lot of them, though not enough of us are in a mood to be told the truth or vote for anyone explaining that welfare bills, entitlements and spending must be cut.

Oh, and we are in a war era and not spending enough on defence to deal with the looming war of the future, of which we have been given a glimpse in recent weeks when Russia buzzes European airspace with drones and cyber warfare rages against businesses and national critical infrastructure.

And yet, we have serious advantages and strengths in depth.

This is not some vainglorious, flag waving attempt to claim that all we have to do is sit back because our future success is guaranteed thanks to innate British genius. It is simply the case that even if we are in a mess, and my goodness we are in a mess, we have a gift for reinvention and our language being the language of the next economic wave means we have extraordinary opportunities if we grab them and if - another big if - our political class stops producing policies which make recovery harder.

On holiday on Italy, I read Tom McTague’s terrific deep history of Brexit, a balanced account of the years from 1945 to 2016, during which Britain struggled to work out its relationship with the rest of Europe. Even accounting for confirmation bias, as a Brexiteer it confirmed my view that we were as a more individualist minded crowd, with a different legal tradition, ill-suited to the integrationist project and lying to ourselves from the start about what the EU project is really for.

In the age of AI, with the high regulation EU struggling to adapt to what is coming, being outside the EU regulatory orbit is a huge advantage. It would be quite mad, having left, to now volunteer to have Brussels set the rules for our industries of the future. Instead we should develop the technological relationship with the US and other like minded nations (some in the EU), while having as good a relationship with our neighbours as is feasible outside the bloc.

McTague’s captivating new book - Between the Waves - drew me back automatically in the final days of holiday towards my favourite fiction, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, for perhaps the tenth time. Sword of Honour is ostensibly a grimly amusing declinist book, in which all that Guy, the main character, values and loves is traduced. Incompetent Britain sinks into penury and pettifogging bureaucracy as the barbarous Soviet Union is mid-War put on a pedestal.

In the closing pages of Sword Honour and in the epilogue, there is hope, there is redemption and recovery. Life begins anew deep in the English countryside. England, Britain carries on and things turn out very conveniently for Guy.

Not okay computer

Existing AI is far from infallible. In Venice on the 7 September on the first leg of our

Italian holiday, as tourists we found the perfect spot to watch the Regatta, the annual festival of traditional racing and pageantry. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection - the museum in an uncompleted palazzo right on the Grand Canal - has a canal-facing terrace in front of the gallery space. Inside is the collection of 20th century art bought by Guggenheim in Europe just before and during the outbreak of the Second World War. Famously, her collection had been intended for a gallery space in Paris and had to be moved to the south of France to escape by a matter of days the impending arrival of the Nazis. Then it was evacuated to New York. After the War she brought the uncompleted palazzo and moved the art there. Also famously, Guggenheim had a hyperactive love life. There were more than 1,000 partners, she said.

On a more mundane level, her gallery today has the best museum cafe going.

Standing on the terrace after lunch, watching the boats warm up for that afternoon’s Regatta, we wondered when the races proper might begin. How long would we have to wait? Did we care that much about the racing or is one Venetian traditional boat much like another and had we got the general idea in the warm up and should go elsewhere for a Campari Spritz? We had got the general idea.

Even so on the way out I decided to check and asked Google what time the races would start that afternoon. The AI Overview on my smartphone told me: “There are no races at the Venice Regatta Storico today, 7 September, as the main event is held on the first Sunday of September, which this year already passed on 1 September.”

Er, no… the previous Sunday was the 31 August organisers and there it was the Regatta 2025 right in front of us clearly happening in real life. Google AI was wrong.

The computer was also wrong during our holiday when it came to securing tickets to see Radiohead on their short tour later this year. Having attained an access code, and then another access code, it kept blocking me, and thousands of others judging by the furious response later on social media, on the basis that we were “bots” when we were not. On finally making it through, ten times in a row I selected seats successfully and then at the moment of payment they were “no longer available.”

Radiohead’s best album is the landmark OK Computer from 1997, with its prescient, dystopian lyrics about what awaits us in the future in a consumerist, doped-up, digital world coming into being about… now.

Perhaps none of the “tour” or the doomed ticketing system is real, said a disappointed friend who also failed to secure tickets to see the greatest band of their generation. The tour and ticketing must be an art installation, which would be very Radiohead.

What’s up with WhatsApp

On Friday I made the mistake of calling an old friend who was overdue a rant having finally surrendered to the demands made by his family that he join WhatsApp, the extremely useful yet insidious messaging application that now dominates most of the time we humans spend awake. After a few days he reports that WhatsApp is driving him mad. Why - he asks - are people sending him all these messages? What is the point when the correspondents sending the messages are often telling him things he already knows or duplicating information and then replying to each other with funny little squiggles, love hearts, or mini-cartoon characters (emojis)?

What - he explodes - is going on with the ****ing world?

It is a very good question. What is going on with the world?

In anthropological terms, my friend being new to the WhatsApp communication revolution makes him resemble Rip Van Winkle, the American-Dutch gentleman who fell asleep for two decades and woke up having missed the original American revolution. Or he is a member of an ancient lost tribe, emerging from the forest blinking in wonder at the flashing lights and trinkets of the tech transformation.

Or more properly his bafflement and fury is a straightforward reminder that, before WhatsApp and other such messaging applications took over, the world in certain ways was a better, nicer place to live.

WhatsApp was only launched as recently as 2009. In October 2010 it had just 50 million users. When it was bought by Facebook in 2014 it had 500 million active users. Then, Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp and set about making it the dominant global messaging app. Today it has three billion users.

The upsides of being a user are obvious, not least ease of contact with family, children and friends to check on their wellbeing and make arrangements. And there is the chance to share jokes and observations.

The downside is that it (and other social media) has turned many of us into hopeless smartphone addicts, engaged in endless rolling conversations online.

The WhatsApp phenomenon only made sense to my friend when it was pointed out that he must have noticed the regular drum beat of stories in the newspapers about the rise in mental health conditions, reports of a “busyness” epidemic, dire productivity, much of the population no longer having sex, distracted youngsters finding it hard to form relationships that become households, and so on. And most of us in the country constantly on our smartphones, poking away at the pathetic little screens. Now he is on WhatsApp has he noticed a potential connection - I asked my friend - between these growing social problems and the ubiquity of smartphones, social media and WhatsApp itself?

Ah, he said.

Ming the merciful

The death at 84 of Menzies “Ming” Campbell, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, on Friday is the end of an era for a very particular kind of Scottish politics embedded in Britain. Fraser Nelson wrote a good tribute to the “vanishing gentleman politician” on his Substack in which he said: “He spoke carefully, dressed properly, lived dutifully and carried himself with an integrity that now seems from another age. It did not make him a great party leader, but it did make him a great public servant. In his gentleness, his ambition, his decency, he embodied the kind of politician we once took for granted - and sorely miss now.”

Campbell was at Glasgow University in the early 1960s alongside the late Labour leader John Smith, who died in 1994, and former Scottish First Minister Donald Dewar, who died in 2000, and Derry Irvine, the original mentor of Tony Blair and former Lord Chancellor.

When Scottish devolution in the 1990s was being implemented and in the years immediately afterwards I was pretty critical in print of Ming and that crowd who had told us with such confidence that a Scottish Parliament would be a great success and see off the Scottish Nationalists.

In a spirit of youthful exuberance, I was immoderate and spiteful in my criticism. Many years later, we talked about that time and he was gracious and humane. When the London Defence Conference launched he sought us out and wanted to attend, and wrote an encouraging note afterwards saying London and Europe needed a conference like this.

As Fraser Nelson said: he embodied the kind of politician we once took for granted - and sorely miss now.

What I’m reading

A lot, during our holiday in Italy. As well as all of Tom McTague’s deep Brexit history and Waugh’s Sword of Honour, I reread my friend Gerald Warner’s outstanding new novel A Fateful Promise.

The third volume of Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin’s biography is coming soon and having spent some time with the great historian in the last week, I’ve gone back to the beginning by rereading volume one. A biography of Stalin is really a history of the world in that period, taking in revolution, technology, warfare, industry, diplomacy, ideas and mass murder, as the author says. Kotkin is a master stylist, blending biography and intellectual history. Indeed, near the beginning is the best and most succinct description in just a few pages of the intellectual development of that terrible system - socialism.

And if you like Prince - or if you are interested in the music of the 1980s - I highly recommend my friend Johnnie McKie’s ace new book - Prince: A Sign O’ the Times - about the making of his greatest album.

Have a good weekend.

Read more

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever”.

It’s become a cliché, wheeled out every time someone mutters about state overreach. As has the term Orwellian, now so overused it’s almost lost meaning. But recent revelations demand we take a fresh look—because Orwell’s soothsaying, his condemnation of a time and place defined by Stalinism is no longer theoretical. It’s happening.

Seditious underground national newspapers report that the government is now quietly pressuring tech companies to remove content that critiques sensitive policy areas -immigration, two-tier policing, rising public anger in white working-class communities. These aren't isolated complaints about online harm. They're part of a creeping effort to police opinion, shape perception, and suppress dissent.

It's the thin end of a wedge that should alarm anyone who still believes in open debate.

In 1984, Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And that’s precisely what’s happening. Today’s Ministry of Truth doesn’t need secret police. It has tech firms, algorithms, and regulatory bodies doing the job. A tweet disappears. A video is delisted. A search result vanishes. And so the version of reality that challenges official orthodoxy simply ceases to exist. It is vapourised. Winston has dropped it into the memory hole, never to return.

But this isn’t just digital. It’s institutional. Schools send girls home for wearing a Union Jack dress. They fire teachers who suggest on social media that Lucy Connolly was harshly done by. Councils quietly drop national flags or Christian holidays on the basis of vicarious offence rarely actually felt.

There are academics who teach a view of British history that draws lazy, false parallels between empire and the Third Reich. Ambiguity has become “thought crime” and complexity is no longer permitted. British history is painted not as a struggle or an evolution by turns glorious, desperate, perfidious or heroic but as sin. A founding and original sin.

The result is cultural gaslighting. Our past is not merely questioned—it’s being rewritten, discredited, and eventually, forgotten. Orwell saw it coming: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

That endless present is now. You carry the telescreen in your pocket. You track yourself. You hand over your location, your biometrics, your preferences—all for convenience. And in exchange, you get curated compliance.

But what happens when a generation no longer sees its country as worth defending—culturally, morally, or even conceptually? Polling increasingly shows a disconnection between the young and the idea of the nation itself. Many no longer view Britain as a shared inheritance, but as a mistake to be corrected, or worse, a shame to be disavowed.

This isn’t entirely their fault. If you’re taught from the age of five that your national story is one of theft, cruelty, and shame—if your history is only ever presented as burden rather than bond—then why would you feel loyalty? Why would you feel pride? If all you ever hear is that the country is broken, colonial, racist, toxic—why would you want to belong to it?

"Give me the boy (or child) until he is seven and I will give you the man", as St Ignatius of the Jesuits said. Now, the state has him until he’s at least 18.

This is not just a failure of education. It is a deliberate act of cultural disinheritance. A young person who cannot name a single British Prime Minister before 1997 but can recite the crimes of the empire by rote is not educated. They are conditioned. And the result is not just alienation. It is apathy. As Orwell knew, if you erase the past and undermine the present, you sap the desire to battle for the future.

Meanwhile, the political Left— theoretically Orwell’s own tribe— has turned against the working class it once claimed to represent. The shelf-stackers, bus drivers, welders and labourers are now dismissed as angry, parochial, problematic. As Orwell might have put it today: “All voices are equal, but some voices are more equal than others.” An entrenched snobbery Orwell recognised in his own lifetime.

“The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik... or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings... with a social position to safeguard and a nice house to live in.”

The real danger though is not in the easy dismissal of working class patriotism, working class social conservatism or, indeed, working class concerns. It's state-endorsed forgetfulness.

Memory warfare, and, as far as I can remember, we’re losing.

One can find an unlikely echo beyond Orwell in Game of Thrones where the Night King seeks to erase memory itself—“because without memory, there is no future”. Eternal night is what happens the past is unmade and when no record exists outside the approved narrative. A people, unanchored, are doomed to cultural drift. To darkness unilluminated by the comfort of fire and affirming tale.

So the boot on the face is no longer needed. We are being silenced not with force, but with fatigue. Not with bans, but with benevolence. Not with censorship, but with “safety.”

This is the new Room 101: a room in which once I worked at BBC Broadcasting House and which, apocryphally or otherwise, was where Orwell once did too. Forming as he did so, an idea for the Ministry of Truth.

Invisibly, politely, now installed by us and via app. And all, very, Orwellian.

In spite of the spasmodic make-busy activity by cabinet ministers since parliament rose, it is safe to say that we are now into the summer holiday period, when even the most self-promoting politicians may contrive to stay out of our faces for the next few weeks.

It is an opportune moment then to look back on the first year of this Labour government, to review what has happened and to trace what patterns are emerging from the activities of the UK’s new political masters.

By common consent, things have not gone well for Sir Keir Starmer’s government. No government in possession of a substantial majority can claim otherwise when after just twelve months it finds itself stuck in second place behind an upstart new party, not just in opinion polls but in “real” local elections and a Westminster by-election.

Of course a lot may change in the four years left until the last possible general election but Sir Keir Starmer is not in a happy place. One analysis which is growing in popularity is that the electorate has lost faith in both traditional parties of government. The Conservatives comprehensively trashed themselves by leaving the country feeling poorer and broken after their fourteen years in power. Now Labour has failed to change things for the better, or even generate a sense of hope, for all the “Change” promised during its recent successful election bid.

The centre is not holding, the argument goes, so the voters are tempted to the extremes – Reform UK on the right, and on the left the Greens, Moslem independents and, quite possibly, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party. All of whom enjoyed some success getting MPs elected in 2024.

The flaw in this way of thinking is that Sir Keir Starmer is no centrist. He has turned out to be the most divisive political leader of modern times. He may flip around and execute U-turns but he is always sanctimoniously convinced that he’s right, whatever his latest position, and that his opponents are wrong.

He is more of a senior barrister than a politician – great at taking a side - for the prosecution one week the defence the next - but utterly incapable of bringing the nation together by generating harmony.

Tony Blair engagingly welcomed everyone into New Labour’s “big tent”. Even before becoming Prime Minister, David Cameron pleaded: “We are in this together”. Starmer’s tactic has been to set sections of the public against each other. Hostility begets polarisation.

This government’s original sin was the commitment not to use the main levers of taxation, income tax, VAT or employee’s national insurance. “Working people” were infantilised, told that they would be looked after, but would not have to play a part directly in repairing the economy.

During the campaign, Labour politicians treated any questions about their tax intentions as “gotchas”, rather than informed enquiries from interviewers who could see plainly the state of the national finances. Consequently, when Labour came into power and belatedly discovered “black holes”, it had already boxed itself out of options to do anything major to fill them up.

Instead, revenue raids were attempted against interest groups who were portrayed as somehow undeserving recipients of Treasury generosity.

Non-doms, users of private education, farmers, business, are obvious targets for a dogmatic socialist government; targeting them played to the instincts of many in the Labour party. Although the measures are unlikely to generate the projected income, much needed by the Exchequer.

Once fired-up on the idea of fiscal goodies and baddies, there was no way that Labour MPs were going to tolerate cuts aimed at those they regard as their clients – pensioners and benefit claimants. Inevitably, demands for a wealth tax are mounting on the Labour side, in spite of its proven failure in other countries.

Just this week, the petty divisiveness continued. Civil service internships are to be awarded only to those from underprivileged backgrounds. Social engineering is deemed more important than any notion of merit.

The Prime Minister has adopted the same self-defeating black and white approach to foreign policy. He chose to “kiss the ass” of Donald Trump repeatedly, when others, including Von der Leyen of the EU, Carney of Canada, and Japan have secured similar “deals”, while preserving their dignity. There is no indication that Starmer’s friendship with the president has resulted in any influence over his actions.

To his credit, Sir Keir has continued the policy of his Conservative predecessors of standing staunchly behind Ukraine. But he has chosen not to explain to the nation why this is so necessary. A prime minister’s “first duty” may be to protect the nation but he will find it a lot easier to do so if the electorate is warned of the clear and present danger from Putin’s Russia. Most of the promised increase in defence spending remains unfunded. The portion which is funded has come from the foreign aid budget, even though Labour usually sees this as the other edge of the same blade, and the most appealing aspect of foreign interventionism. The impression is left that the Prime Minister lacks strong feelings on these existential questions.

The same goes for Starmer on immigration and Israel/Gaza. For all his talk of smashing the gangs, the boats have not been stopped. On the wider questions of immigration, it is unclear what the prime minister thinks about it. He floated and then withdrew a suggestion that societal diversity could result in an “island of strangers”. In the process, he merely fanned the flames of argument on both sides, rather than tamping down the dangers.

British leadership has been lacking on the Middle East as well. In truth, the UK has scant influence beyond the attitudes it strikes in international diplomacy. For many months, the government has sensibly worked with allied governments and tension is clearly mounting in the face of the horrific situation in Gaza. Starmer is also under intense political pressure from pro-Palestinians within the Labour party and outside it. The majority of UN members already favour lip service to Palestinian statehood – although this seems ever further from becoming a reality. Allies including France and Canada also expressed the intention of recognising Palestinian statehood. Only the UK government did it so ineptly, demanding an unconditional ceasefire from Israel while laying down no conditions on Hamas, not even a formal request that they release the remaining Israeli hostages.

No-one has been satisfied by the prime minister’s shift of position, except for Hamas which responded by pledging no ceasefire on its side until a Palestinian state is established. Starmer’s new stance is too little, too late for pro-Palestinian factions, and an unhelpful complication to those looking for a more balanced settlement.

Keir Starmer won a loveless landslide, garnering barely a third of votes cast. He inherited a country in dire straits, with decaying public services and no easy sources of ready funds to balance the books. None of that was his fault. Unfortunately this prime minister has yet to rise to the task of finding a narrative to unite the nation and lead it forward. At least he still has some time on his side.

This is a depressing column with which to end my contributions to Reaction. We have decided to close the website as currently produced by the end of this week. I thank all of you for reading my columns on this site over the years. Please look out for my work elsewhere, including on my own personal Substack.

At first sight, Labour quiet man Pat McFadden appears to have little in common with Tory loudmouth Dominic Cummings, Number 10’s number one disrupter in the Boris Johnson era.

But it now transpires they share a contempt for the current make-up of the civil service and a determination to reimagine it in their own image.

Read more

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes makes perhaps his most famous deduction. After a champion racehorse is stolen and its trainer murdered, Holmes notes that the watchdog didn’t bark during the night — and that, said Holmes, was proof “the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”

Since then, “the dog that didn’t bark” has become a useful way of talking about things that should have happened but didn’t.

Such as this week, when Donald Trump didn’t hit a golf ball.

Read more

Queen Mary I of England famously said in 1558, “When I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais engraved on my heart.” It’s odds on that Ed Miliband is commenting along similar lines to his family and friends at the moment although it will be “£300” that they will find engraved there.

How can we be so sure of this? Well, the Prime Minister’s communications team have recently been briefing the press along the lines that the Prime Minister too, like everyone else, is curious to see how Miliband’s promise of taking £300 a year off consumers’ energy bills can be met. The short answer – and Miliband is as aware of this as anyone else – is that it can’t be. And it definitely can’t be after Miliband’s department recently published the maximum prices they are prepared to pay for power from renewable sources in the next bidding round (called AR7). The prices are astounding – the highest prices offered in the past decade despite the major advances in renewable technology.

Maybe Miliband is cleverer than all of us. After all, a high maximum strike price will, at the very least, get a lot of people involved in the auction and maybe all this competition will see the maximum price that is actually paid being well below the department’s suggestion. Alas not – because this isn’t the reason that Miliband has issued such high strike prices. He has to make sure that AR7 is a success otherwise he won’t meet his 2030 clean power target. In fact, because of this target, virtually every company that bids will get something from the auction which rather undermines the purpose of the auction in the first place. As a result, the £300 that Miliband has touted so often is likely to represent a price rise rather than a price cut.

The rise in bills is just part of the problem that Miliband, and by extension, Sir Keir Starmer, faces. By offering such a high strike price, Miliband and his team are undermining the idea that renewables are cheaper than gas which is both a bad thing in itself and an argument that they have relied on from the start.

Miliband has repeatedly said that the reason for high energy bills in the UK is that the price of power is driven by the gas price. And he’s not entirely wrong - although he’d be as well to go after how UK energy is charged and the structure of consumers’ bills – but he will be wrong in the future when projects from AR7 come on stream. In the past year, the average price of power, driven by gas pricing, has been £72 per MegaWatt/hour (MWh); under the new scheme, the maximum price for offshore wind will be £113 per MWh while the Climate Change forecast for offshore wind is £38 per MWh. Those are, self-evidently, massive discrepancies which the Poor Bloody Consumer is going to have to pay.

So something is going to have to give. Miliband may have to revisit his pricing at the risk of the auction failing, which has happened before under the Tories when the maximum strike price was too low. The Prime Minister may have to intervene which would certainly put his relationship with Miliband under severe strain and may end up with a major Labour big beast seething on the backbenches. Or, as seems most likely, neither man acts and Labour will have to change how they sell Net Zero to the voters by telling them that, despite the pain, lower emissions are a public good in themselves and worth paying for given what we're seeing around the world.

On a cool and blustery July day in London, it doesn’t feel like a very good argument but, as things stand, it’s likely the only argument they’re going to have. As the denizens of Calais might have said to Queen Mary’s men as they left French shores, bonne chance, mes braves. You’re going to need it.

A dying habit – sometimes mercifully – is the British tendency to work Monty Python into everyday conversation at any opportunity. There are brief flare-ups, of course. At the height of the transgender wars, Life of Brian’s Stan – who wanted to be Loretta – was still being wheeled out as John Cleese’s Reg chided him for “wanting to have babies”.

“Where’s the foetus going to gestate? Are you going to keep it in a box?”

Which rather proves there’s nothing new under the sun – even if, at the time, it was the comedy of the absurd.

And talking of cardboard boxes, anyone caught overstating the poverty of childhood is still met with the line of self-made northerners claiming living in one was “luxury”.

But what was once endemic in national life has, like plague, declined to the point of near extinction.

Showing the strain still lingers, however, is the fact that I thought of Monty Python the other day as I scrolled the pages of His Majesty’s Daily Telegraph – a term I’ve used since spotting a picture of the monarch reading the print edition in the state carriage in Charles Moore’s office.

Fans of Life of Brian will remember Jerusalem’s Speaker’s Corner of prophets, each competing to conjure the most grotesque visions of imminent doom. Cynical passers-by lapped it up as local colour while anyone attempting a moderate view of what Jehovah had in store was booed from their makeshift platforms.

Each day, the Telegraph can match it. Columnist after columnist points his or her bony finger at us and, with messianic fervour, warns us like the Ancient Mariner that we must take heed or Britain pays. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been predicting economic apocalypse for so long that, like that supervolcano under Yellowstone, it must surely one day go up – it’s already millions of years overdue.

To a point, one can easily accept this as the black addiction to which most journalists are prey. A focus on the day of judgement while the rest of the world largely nods along with it as “what they do”, not taking their bleak prognostications entirely seriously.

I do it myself. Trying constantly to shake the feeling that there is an increasingly obvious accumulative truth to what they’re saying – while finding it doesn’t quite square with observable day-to-day life.

Of course, there are signs. Getting ahead is increasingly difficult. The roads are shocking – pockmarked by abandoned excavations and overburdened. I trust the judgement of the police decreasingly and to the point that, when they screech by, there seems something performative to it. “Off-colour tweet! Request immediate backup!”

Pubs are closing. Eating out has become an exercise in overpriced mediocrity. Life can be joyless.

But, like the Telegraph itself, there’s never a shortage of attractive alternative viewpoints. Twenty undiscovered Greek islands about to be ruined by this article. Expensive car reviews. A modern man’s guide to stylish swimwear. All reassuringly insouciant. Reassuringly middle class in their preoccupations and all replete with the internal contradiction of “how to boost your cash ISA” while simultaneously predicting global fiscal catastrophe.

I try too to put things in historical perspective. It is by no means the first time in my life that the world has seemed bleak in outlook. America was at war in Vietnam throughout my childhood. Israel and the Arab world went at it hammer and tongs repeatedly. Energy was in crisis with queues at the petrol stations and lights going out.

Russia lurked just across the Iron Curtain and then invaded Afghanistan. Nuclear proliferation was punk-lampooned by Not The Nine O’Clock News in their “seminal” All Out Superpower Confrontation and Britain’s economics have lurched between the gross incompetence of the 70s, the triumphs of the 80s, the Black Wednesdays of the early 90s and the “prudence” of the Gordon Brown years.

We have, collectively, lived with the “Loony Left” before as well. Red Ken and his Corbyn-like love of all shades terrorist – from the PIRA to the PLO – and his notably off-colour views on Jewishness.

That it is striking doctors rather than striking miners that now blight the national effort is only a reflection of the national shift from the blue to the white collar. Same shit, different decade.

Meanwhile, an intransigent civil service at the ostensible service of craven politicians was parodied across a decade in the 80s sitcoms Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. Jim Hacker’s crusade against government waste still goes on or, more likely, still sits on Sir Humphrey’s desk waiting to be dealt with “in the fullness of time.”

In another comic continuity, the police were also in the line of fire – with Gryff Rhys Jones stood bone-headed before Rowan Atkinson’s dressing down as Constable Savage, the bigoted black-basher of the Special Patrol Group.

And as civil unrest unfurls across the country, The Smiths got there first, singing: “Panic in the streets of London, panic on the streets of Birmingham…”

Even the state of the roads has its echoes. Remember John Major and his cones hotline? Yes, perhaps the only thing about his administration that one does remember. That and David Mellor’s Chelsea kit.

So it would be easy to conclude that, whatever the Telegraph thinks, it was ever thus. Life’s rich tapestry. A contextual rollercoaster of ups and downs, catastrophe ever at our shoulder but rarely materialising in its extreme manifestation and generally greeted, as Britain was once wont to do, with a lightly cynical humour. Triumph and disaster treated as Kipling urged, as twin impostors, just the same.

But here’s the difference – and it matters: This time, there is no one left to believe in.

Not really. Not in the way that matters.

The rituals and roles remain – the Cabinet reshuffles, the Select Committees, the breathless radio interviews outside Portcullis House – but the conviction has drained away. Today’s political class is marked neither by ideology nor even pragmatism, but by a kind of managerial fatalism: the sense that real decisions are impossible, that power lies elsewhere, and that success consists not in action, but in avoidance.

You can see it in the outsourcing of hard choices – to lawyers, to regulators, to the markets, to “the science.” You can feel it in the way immigration policy lurches between legal blockages and moral squeamishness; how economic strategy is forever at the mercy of what “the markets” might tolerate; and how even the most basic functions of state – law, order, borders, infrastructure – seem beyond its grasp.

And while in past decades, our national neuroses were at least tempered by a shared culture – often built, strangely, on the scaffolding of humour – that too has eroded. The old reflex to laugh first and rage later has been replaced by a new kind of brittle earnestness, where everyone is forever offended or afraid, and satire risks being mistaken for sedition.

In this vacuum of purpose, the Telegraph prophets have become our new soothsayers – preaching doom not as warning, but as background noise. We are so over-exposed to the language of collapse that we no longer notice the real thing creeping in: the slow institutional rot, the decay of public trust, the nagging suspicion that no one, anywhere, is driving the boat. Except perhaps a people smuggler.

So yes, it was ever thus – and yet, no, it wasn’t. Not quite like this. Because what’s new is not the chaos. It’s the absence of anyone meaningfully trying to master it. Not the loss of control, but the shrug that comes with it. Not the noise of decline, but the silence of resignation.

That’s the real national emergency – the quiet one. The one with no sirens.

But somewhere between Stan wanting to be Loretta and Sir Humphrey stalling on waste reduction, there was a country capable of serious disagreement, laced with seriousness. I hope to God it still is.

Wherever you find early civilisation, you will find ochre. It’s the oxide of the Earth’s most abundant element, iron, and, in its various forms, it can create different pigments. Aboriginal Australians have used yellow ochre for at least 40,000 years, although red ochre is the most widely used, especially among the indigenous people of the land that Christopher Columbus mistakenly identified in 1492 as the “East Indies”.

Tribes there used it to paint their bodies red, symbolic of power, earth, blood, and passion. It was this practice that led European settlers to start referring to those people as “Red Indians” and that was a name that persisted until the mid-to-late twentieth century, when it began to be rightly and widely recognised as a racial epithet.

Read more

Reform UK gained its first foothold in the Welsh parliament today after Tory Senedd member Laura Anne Jones announced her defection, declaring Nigel Farage to be “a great man”. 

Jones, a Member of the Senedd for South Wales East, confirmed her move at the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show alongside Farage, claiming: "I've just suddenly felt that the Conservative party was unrecognisable to me. It wasn't the party that I joined over three decades ago”. 

Reform UK, she added, "is listening to the people of Great Britain". 

Asked if she would be Reform's leader in Wales in the run-up to the Senedd election, Jones teased: "We'll have to see what happens, won't we."

Her defection comes a year after she was stripped of her position as the Tory party’s culture spokesperson for writing “no chinky spies for me!” in a WhatsApp chat. She has also been under investigation by the Senedd's standards commissioner Douglas Bain, a probe believed to be related to allegations of bullying. Jones has neither confirmed nor denied this, saying: “The standards process is confidential”.

Jones is the third prominent politician to jump ship from the Tories to Reform this month, following the defections of former Secretary of State for Wales, David Jones, and former party Chairman, Jake Berry.

Senedd Conservative leader, Darren Millar, said voters in South Wales East will feel "very let down by her announcement".

The defection - which means the Conservatives are down to 14 politicians in the Welsh Parliament - is undoubtedly a blow for Kemi Badenoch, and an unwelcome distraction from her shadow cabinet reshuffle today which brought James Cleverly back to the front bench. 

Perhaps even more significant is what it forebodes for Labour, which has led every single devolved Welsh government.

Next May, voters across Wales will head to the polls to elect a new Senedd for the seventh time since devolution was first established in 1999. Current polling indicates that a dramatic political reconfiguration looms, in which Welsh Labour’s dominance will come to an abrupt end. 

Reform has a good chance of being the largest party in Wales after next May's Senedd election. A poll conducted earlier this month by More in Common for Sky News puts Farage’s party in the lead with 28% of the vote, followed closely by Plaid Cymru on 26%, with Labour in third place on 23% and the Conservatives languishing behind with 10% of the vote.

This same poll also found that less than half (48%) of Labour’s 2024 voters would still back the party in a Senedd election if it were held today. The largest losses for Labour were to Plaid Cymru (15%), followed by Reform on 11%. 

Farage has been especially keen to target voters from the valleys of South Wales, residing in the post-industrial towns that were heavily hit by the decline of the coal industry. Last month, the Reform UK leader unveiled his big plan to reindustrialise the region by re-opening the coal mines and the Port Talbot steelworks, Britain’s largest steel plant which closed last year. 

Labour First Minister of Wales, Eluned Morgan, has dismissed Farage’s coal mine plan as “absolute nonsense”, insisting people in Wales “don’t want to see their grandchildren going back down the pits.” Next May will give us a better indication if she’s right. 

The upcoming Senedd election will also be the first to use a proportional election system. This change makes it harder to predict the outcome, though some say a system based on percentage of vote share could further benefit an insurgent party such as Reform. 

We can expect fiery debate amongst Welsh Labour politicians as to the correct strategy to stem their predicted losses: while they are under pressure to curb the rise of Reform, if the party leans any more to the right, Plaid Cymru stands to gain. 

Big changes are afoot. Not only has Labour led every Welsh government since devolution was established 25 years ago, it has also been the biggest party in Wales in every election since 1922, giving it the longest winning streak of any political party in the world. That streak could soon be coming to an end.

Caitlin Allen

Deputy Editor

ON REACTION TODAY

Adam Boulton

Lords reform scratches a partisan itch without delivering worthwhile change

READ HERE

ALSO KNOW

Gazans starved to death by Israel - An estimated 33 Palestinians, including 12 children, have died of starvation and malnutrition in the past two days alone, according to Gaza’s health ministry. This brings the total number of deaths due to malnutrition to 101, of which 80 are children, since the beginning of the war in 2023. Israeli gunfire and military strikes have killed a further 72 Palestinians over the last day.

New UK government borrowing figures higher than expected - June’s public finances data shows that borrowing rose to £20.7bn last month, £3.5bn more than anticipated by the OBR and the second-highest borrowing figure for any June on record excluding 2020 during the pandemic.

Cleverly returns to Tory frontbencher amid reshuffle - Former Tory leader hopeful, James Cleverly, has been appointed today as shadow housing secretary, meaning he will replace Kevin Hollinrake and shadow Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner. Under Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s reshuffle, Hollinrake will become party chairman while current chair Nigel Huddlestone will become shadow culture secretary.

Nukes deployed to UK for first time in over a decade - The US has deployed tactical nuclear weapons to Britain this week for the first time in over a decade, according to the UK Defence Journal. These weapons were reportedly transferred to RAF Lakenhealth in Suffolk, having been flown from the US Air Force Nuclear Weapons Centre at Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico. US and UK government officials are yet to comment.

FIVE THINGS

1. How much is the defence deal with the EU going to cost Britain? Eliot Wilson in The Spectator.

2. The Syrian state is unravelling, warns James Snell in Engelsberg Ideas.

3. Matan Chorev and Joel Predd in Foreign Affairs: America should assume the worst about AI.

4. Why we have no new ideas. Kit Wilson says we appear to have reasoned our way into an intellectual dead end, in The Critic.

5. What the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” means. Vinson Cunningham in The New Yorker.

One news story always comes round with the arrival of the summer recess in Westminster.

Members of the House of Lords gently remind us that, as legislators, they work harder than MPs. They sit for longer and take shorter holidays. As usual, the Lords is sitting for a few days longer than the Commons this July. When they come back, the Lords will take fewer days off for party conferences and the half term break.

Peers, of course, do not have constituencies to attend to – though the expertise which they hope to offer depends on many of those active in the upper house also having other demanding jobs in the private, public and charitable sectors.

This year, their lordships are putting in the hours in parliament to the point of overload.

Unlike MPs, Lords have not adopted a “family friendly” working pattern. For months now, they have been sitting late into the night, three or four days a week, with three-line whips mandating attendance. Friday sittings are becoming common. This pressure of business is unprecedented and is expected to last until the end of this year at least.

There may not be much public sympathy for those elevated to “the best club in London” but the breakdown of “normal channels” to manage business in the Lords amounts to a massive and exhausting waste of time for everyone involved, including ministers. The likes of science minister Patrick Vallance, for example, surely have better things to do than hang around idly into the small hours waiting for votes to be called, or not called.

Frustration is widespread among the Lords’ lobby fodder and it is unlikely to dissipate over the summer. Not least because frequent clashes over votes are ultimately redundant. Labour’s massive majority in the Commons simply reverses any unwelcome message sent down from the red leather benches.

Stubbornness, stupidity, lack of ambition and self-interest on all party-political sides are to blame for the deterioration of relations in the Lords, which threatens to undermine its traditional function as the more considered and less partisan branch of the legislature.

The immediate cause of the breakdown is Sir Keir Starmer’s determination to abolish the remaining 90 or so hereditary peers. The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill is now going through parliament.

The new Labour government is in a much weaker position to get its legislation through without hassle in the Lords than the previous Conservative governments.

The Tories may have been hammered in last year’s general election but they remain the largest party group in the upper house. After fourteen years of Conservative government, Tory Lords also developed an arrogant reflex to get their own way in the upper chamber.

The Conservatives can easily defeat Labour in the Lords, especially when joined by the Liberal Democrats. Their ability to do so, quite possibly in an ambush, is what is keeping Labour Lords up late in the Palace of Westminster night after night.

Attempts to broker a truce between reasonable men and women have failed.

The Conservatives rejected an early offer for the hereditaries simply to die out by not being replaced in exclusive by-elections of their peer group (sorry!) when vacancies occur.

Now with their socialist hackles up, the Labour faction are refusing a compromise to covert the dozen or so Tory hereditaries presently on the front bench into life peers.

It is easy to see why the Conservatives don’t like the change. Over half, 46, of the 92 so-called “excepted hereditary peers” who are set for the chop are Tories. Another 33 are cross benchers. Labour and the Liberal Democrats have only four each.

Even after this bill goes through, the Conservatives will still be the single largest group in the Lords with a voting strength of some 240, compared to 210 for Labour, 150 cross benchers and 70 Liberal Democrats.

So the hereditaries are gone, not much will change in the balance of power in the Lords except the toxic partisan ill will now being generated. The Lords will still have 719 members, including 26 Church of England bishops.

The suspicion must be that both party leaderships are happy to engage in this token fight, while avoiding the really difficult issue of full reform of the unelected second chamber.

The arrangement to keep 92 hereditaries with voting rights was struck in 1999 by the Blair government. The then Lord Cranborne, now Marquis of Salisbury, struck a deal with Alastair Campbell, much to the embarrassment of William Hague, the Tory leader at the time. Then, as now, Labour’s plans fell far short of the wholesale reform of the Lords which it keeps promising in each election manifesto.

The convenience of patronage through appointing life peers and the self-interest of those now in the Lords, tend to reduce a Labour prime minister’s reforming zeal to merely kicking the hereditaries. The case can always be made that there are more important matters to fix, nonetheless when it comes to Lords reform Labour has repeatedly ducked manifesto commitments.

Change, Labour’s 2024 manifesto, promised “immediate modernisation” and “long-overdue and essential reform”. A key proposal was mandatory retirement for peers at the age of eighty. That has been dropped. No surprise there. At least 54% of Labour’s peers are already over 80 – the highest proportion of any party group.

The Labour leadership is now adamant that there should be no further debate over Lords reform once the hereditaries are out. They will give no succour to an amendment that Labour should revisit its manifesto pledges on constitutional reform this side of the next general election even though the amendment has been proposed by one hereditary who accepts his fate - the Duke of Wellington, a former Conservative MEP turned cross-bencher.

Compared to MPs, members of the House of Lords are not expensive. Lords can claim a tax free allowance of £371 for each day they are present in the chamber. Those based outside Greater London are also entitled to £100 overnight allowance plus travel expenses. In a typical year the House of Lords sits around one hundred days.

The current confrontation is costing the taxpayer more because members have to attend more often. Whips are advising “bring your car in” because there is little public transport after midnight. Officially Labour has long considered the House of Lords “not fit for purpose”. The procedural purposes it is being put to are not sensible either.

Given the patchy attention span of the modern House of Commons for the work of legislation, the existence of second chamber for scrutiny and revision seems a sensible precaution.

In my opinion, it does not need greater powers than at present so members should not have the mandate of being directly elected. They could be appointed or indirectly elected from party lists, based on percentage shares in votes at other elections.

Probably much the same sort of people as now would end up in the reformed Lords – though younger.

Much has been made of the exercise of patronage by David Cameron and Boris Johnson to ennoble younger members of their staff, especially women. In practice the likes of Baronesses Liz Sugg, Gabby Bertin and Charlotte Owen are proving successes. They are bringing a freshness to the elderly House and an awareness of contemporary issues which were in danger of being overlooked. In spite of the relatively low “pay”, these ladies seem to want to make a career out of it.

As has been the case so often with this new government in other areas of policy, the ordering up of the tumbrils for the hereditaries may scratch a partisan itch while falling far short of delivering the worthwhile Change that was so comprehensively promised.

Meanwhile life has been made more difficult and less productive for those most directly concerned – all members of the House of Lords.

The Tories have accused Keir Starmer of “shameless gerrymandering” after the UK government confirmed today that the voting age will be lowered to 16 across Britain in time for the next general election.

The government insists the change - which amounts to the biggest electoral shake-up since 1969 when the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18 - is a boost to democracy. If 16 and 17-year olds can already contribute to society by working and paying taxes, “it's only right they can have a say on the issues that affect them”, insisted Starmer. 

While Austria is the only country in Europe so far to have lowered the voting age for national elections to 16, it’s worth remembering that the change will bring England and Northern Ireland in line with Scotland and Wales, where those aged 16 and 17 are already able to vote in Holyrood, Senedd and local council elections.

The Liberal Democrats have backed the government’s electoral reform, describing it as a "no-brainer", while the Tories and Reform are against lowering the voting age.

Conservative shadow minister for Housing, Paul Holmes, reacted to the announcement in the Commons today, asking: "Why does this government think a 16-year-old can vote but not be allowed to buy a lottery ticket, an alcoholic drink, marry, or go to war, or even stand in the elections they're voting in?".

Perhaps the biggest Tory gripe though is the timing of the announcement. “The cynicism is breathtaking”, fumed former home secretary James Cleverly, noting that, Labour, having originally pledged to lower the voting age last year in Starmer’s election manifesto, “dropped it from the King’s speech after getting a big majority without it. Now they’re tanking in the polls, they announce it again.”

It’s worth pointing out that, while Starmer stands accused of gerrymandering - by lowering the voting age in an attempt to harvest more left-leaning voters - the Conservative party has had its own share of gerrymandering accusations too. 

In January 2024, the Tory government scrapped the 15-year overseas residency limit for allowing British expatriates the right to vote in UK elections. That move affected up to 3 million possible voters – twice as high as the projected figure of voters aged 16-18 – and largely benefitted older voters living abroad after retirement, who tend to skew conservative.

Perhaps the more pertinent question, however, is whether this latest electoral reform will actually benefit Labour, or could it backfire? 

As Prof David Runciman points out, elections tend to be decided by the preferences of pensioners, who are the most numerous subsection of the population (there are more voters aged over sixty than under forty). And, certainly in past elections, any attempt to redress this imbalance would almost certainly have benefitted Labour, with a 16 to 17-year-old voting cohort more likely to opt for Labour than the Tories. 

Yet the fracturing of Britain’s two-party political system means we can expect Labour’s youth vote to be chipped away at by the Greens, Reform, Lib Dems and potentially even a new left-wing Corbyn-led party too. 

Given its poll lead, the potential appeal of Reform UK to Britain’s youth vote will be the biggest concern here for Labour. Farage’s (far superior) follower count on TikTok will do little to reassure Starmer on this front. 

It’s worth noting too that, for the most recent European parliament elections, the voting age was lowered to 16 in Germany and the AfD performed well amongst the country’s youngest voters, with 16% of 16–24-year-olds voting for the hard-right party. CNN carried an article at the time, headlined: “This Country’s 16-year-olds Voted for the First Time. The Results are Scary.”

All of which is to say, Britain’s biggest electoral shake-up since 1969 will certainly inject some fresh life into our democracy. But we shouldn’t be too quick to assume how this younger cohort will vote. That a lowering of the voting age will largely benefit Labour is far from guaranteed. 

Caitlin Allen

Deputy Editor

ON REACTION TODAY

Gerald Warner

Afghangate: this is a watershed in political history

READ HERE

Anthony Peters

Fed Chair Powell has handed Trump a smoking gun

READ HERE

ALSO KNOW

Biggest UK-German treaty since 1945 - During a visit to London today, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has signed a wide-ranging “friendship treaty” with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which includes a mutual defence pledge, under which Germany and Britain will be obliged to come to each other’s aid in the event of an attack. Merz has also agreed to change domestic law by the end of the year to make smuggling migrants from Germany to Britain a crime.

Deadly Israeli strike injures confidant of Pope Francis - According to the Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem, Israeli tank shelling of Gaza’s only Catholic Church, the Holy Family Church, has killed two people and injured several others. The parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli, who used to receive daily telephone calls from the late Pope, is among the wounded.

A win for the Chinese Yuan - Beijing’s ongoing attempt to break the dominance of the dollar appears to be gaining traction across Asia, according to data in Nikkei which shows that the share of dollar-denominated loans in emerging Asian economies declined 16% between the first quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2024, largely due to Chinese banks pivoting to yuan-based lending.

UK unemployment rate highest since June 2021 - According to new ONS figures, unemployment nudged up to 4.7% in the three months to May, hitting the highest level in four years, while wage growth slowed for a third consecutive month and employers cut back on hiring.

FIVE THINGS

1. Dennis Ross, in Bloomberg, on why Israel has its best chance for peace in 25 years.

2. Brussels should not be shocked by Trump being Trump, writes Alan Beattie, in The Financial Times.

3. High water bills, filthy rivers – and now drought. This is England’s great artificial water crisis of 2025, writes George Monbiot, in The Guardian.

4. We may not be in recession, but vibes are dire, writes Sebastian Payne, in The Times.

5. Could Japan soon be governed by chatbots? Asks Phillip Patrick, in The Spectator.

“Am I going bonkers?” That response by Mr Justice Chamberlain to the barely credible facts being laid before him at a secret hearing last November, by representatives of the Labour …

Read more

Like all great epics, the Jeffrey Epstein saga needs to be divided into three.

First, what’s happening.

Second, what’s actually happening.

Third, what the hell is really happening?

Let’s begin by unpacking the week when Donald Trump faced the first proper crisis of his presidency. You can forget about Ukraine and Iran which he treated more like useful distractions in his ongoing media strategy of bait and switch: stop the media obsessing over one outrage by providing them with another. This week, something happened that spoke directly to the place where Trump lives as a retail politician.

Some parts of his base started to burn their red MAGA hats. There hasn’t been a release of so much Chinese-sourced chemical into the atmosphere since one of their fireworks factories exploded in Hunan province, last month…

Read more

In the excited anticipation of US President Donald Trump’s second state visit to the United Kingdom in mid-September, little attention is being paid to the visit Trump is making to the UK before that, later this month.

Trump is not coming for the preliminary chat the King was hoping to have before pushing the actual state visit into some time in the future. On this first visit, Charles III has no plans to meet his fellow head of state. Donald Trump will be in Scotland, but there will be no overnight stay this time at Balmoral. Sir Keir Starmer has already said he will make the journey north to pay homage to the president. Trump will also meet Scottish First Minister John Swinney.

Talks with politicians however are not top of Trump’s agenda. He is coming to the UK for golf – which is his personal and business obsession. He will be celebrating the opening of the second 18-hole links golf course constructed at the “majestic Trump Estate” at Balmedie, a few miles north of Aberdeen.

His battle to build the golf course dates back almost twenty years – long before his successful run for the White House. In microcosm, the story of the course displays many of the traits Trump has displayed in politics: bombast, nam-calling, double dealing and, above all, tenacity and determination to win at all costs.

Typically, “Nunquam Concedere” – “Never Give In” – is the motto Trump attached to the coat of arms which he persuaded the Scotland’s Lyon King of Arms to grant to "The Trump International Golf Club Scotland Ltd". Waste not want not, Trump also uses the badge for "The Trump International Golf Links and Hotel Ireland".

Golf imperialism is one front in Trump’s campaign to bend the world to his will.

The prime minister should brace for Trump to up his demand for the Open, the British one of the four golf "Major" tournaments, to be played at one of his courses. Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, has hosted the Open before, but not since Trump purchased it in 2014 for £39.5 million. "Trump Turnberry" now boasts the most expensive green fees in Scotland of £1,000 a round compared to just £42.50 for Scottish golfers at St Andrew’s.

Now Trump has a highly priced, world class 36-hole golf course on the East coast of Scotland as well.

Golf matters to Donald Trump and it is big business for him. The Trump organisation has been amassing and constructing courses since 1999 and now owns some eighteen of them. Twelve are in the US. As well in Scotland and Ireland, he also has developments in Indonesia, Puerto Rico and the UAE. In 2024, Trump reported $267 million in “golf related” income plus $161 million “golf and hotel” proceeds from his Doral club in Miami. Trump’s son Eric is in temporary charge of the business.

There have been many claims that the family is profiting from the presidency by hosting officials and guests at its resorts at high rates, with the bill sometimes picked up by the American taxpayer.

Golf is also Trump’s main physical recreation. During his first four-year term, President Trump played golf 427 times, mainly at courses his companies own. That works out at once every 5.6 days. He has kept up the average in his second term, playing more than once a week. Claims by his spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt that his uses his time outdoors to network with Members of Congress and other VIPs are not born out by the guest list of his playmates, largely made up of cronies and employees.

A whole book, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, has already been published about the president’s unique approach to the game. Rick Reilly, a Sports Illustrated writer, cites numerous incidents of Trump fiddling the score card and behaving in an unsportsmanlike way. One favourite tactic is to claim that the ball closest to the hole is his, whether he hit it there or not.

Trump purchased the 1,400 Menie Estate in 2006. He warned that the Aberdeen area would be hard hit by the end of the oil boom and pledged to invest a billion dollars in a new golf resort, ultimately generating 5,000 jobs.

Nineteen years later, the business needs a boost from the opening of the second course. At the end of 2023, it was given an asset value of £37,201,613 with outstanding loans to Trump of over £40 million. The operating loss was over £1 million. Around 80 people are employed full time at the resort.

Trump has not yet been able to build the promised large luxury hotel and resort village. Exclusive accommodation is currently limited to “the five-star Trump Macleod House and Lodge”. There are ten bedrooms in the “baronial mansion” and a further nine in the converted stables and blacksmith’s house.

Trump’s mother Mary Macleod was born on the Isle of Lewis and is commemorated at the resort. Her name however has been dropped for the new course. The two eighteen holes are referred to as “the Old” and “the New” courses, perhaps a distant echo of venerable “Royal and Ancient” Club which has the Open in its gift.

There are fewer than twenty decent links courses in the world. Played over sand dunes, if the ball misses the fairway or green it will be lost in very long grass. The construction of a total of 36 new holes of links golf is a considerable but controversial achievement which has faced opposition over two decades.

The Scottish government under Alex Salmond and, today’s First Minster John Swinney who was then the minister responsible, overruled local opposition in Aberdeenshire after Trump testified in person at a planning inquiry, enabling the development to go ahead.

First Minister Salmond became a friend and dining companion at Trump Tower but the two men soon fell out over a proposed off-shore windfarm. In 2012, Trump wrote to Salmond: "With the reckless installation of these monsters, you will single-handedly have done more damage to Scotland than virtually any event in Scottish history." In spite of frequent legal challenges, the scheme went ahead, perhaps explaining in part Trump’s enduring hatred of “windmills”.

The so-called “moving sand dunes” on which the courses have been built were SSSI, sites of special scientific interest. Local opposition was fierce and colourful, including the involvement of Queen guitarist Brian May and the making of an award-winning documentary You’ve Been Trumped. Trump described Michael Forbes, a local farmer blocking his plans, as “a pig” who lived in “a slum”. He was taken to court after the water supply was cut off to Forbes's mother, Molly. In 2012, Forbes was voted “Top Scot” in a poll. Another local, David Milne, had a large dune built surrounding his home.

Even without inevitable controversy over his policies as president, Police Scotland are preparing for protests locally when Trump visits in a few days’ time. It is an open question whether the Prime Minister is wise to hasten to what will be in essence a Trump business promotion.

Sir Keir is no golf fan. He is the first prime minister in 107 years to turn down the offer of honorary membership of the club near his country residence of Chequers. Previous Labour Prime Ministers Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson played frequently on the Ellesborough Golf course and took important visitors out for a round. Bill Clinton gave Tony Blair his first lesson how to play over four holes there. “Either he is an unbelievable athlete or I have a career as a golf instructor”, Clinton commented after a successful round. Gordon Brown called on the Royal and Ancient to admit women to the club.

Presumably, Starmer snubbed Ellesborough’s gesture because he was worried about taking freebies or, as a football fan, detests the more middle-class sport of golf. Either way, the chances of golfing fun with Trump on his new course in Scotland seem remote. The prime minister will still have to make sure he does not come away the loser from this Trump encounter.

A row between the Labour government and Britain’s biggest trade union dramatically escalated today after Unite announced that it has suspended Angela Rayner’s union membership over her handling of Birmingham’s long-running bin strike. 

In an emergency motion at its conference in Brighton, Unite also threatened to review its relationship with the Labour party more generally if Birmingham’s Labour-run council makes any of its members redundant.

Birmingham’s refuse workers have been on all-out indefinite strike since March over pay. Unite has urged the council to guarantee long-term pay for Grade 4 bin lorry drivers, warning that their pay could fall from £40,000 to £32,000 under new council plans. Negotiations have stalled, with council leader John Cotton saying this week that the authority has "reached the absolute limit of what we can offer".

As rats plague the city’s streets and rubbish continues to pile up, the government has become increasingly short-tempered with Unite. Both Sir Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting have attacked Unite’s “unacceptable” tactics after it prevented lorries from leaving the depot. And, this week, Rayner demanded the union accept the latest deal tabled by the city council, insisting the authority had "moved significantly to meet the demands of the workers".

Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, responded to Rayner by branding the government's backing for the council as "disgraceful".

"People up and down the country are asking ‘whose side is the Labour government on?’ and coming up with the answer 'not workers'", she added.

While Unite’s very public announcement about suspending Rayner demonstrates the level of ill-feeling, this action alone is unlikely to cause the Deputy Prime Minister or her colleagues any sleepless nights. In fact, Rayner’s office has responded by saying that she already resigned her membership months ago and therefore can’t be suspended anyway. 

More worrying for Labour is Unite’s accompanying announcement that it will review its wider relationship with the party - a thinly veiled threat to pull funding if tensions escalate. 

Unite - which has donated £19m to Labour since 2019 - is the party’s biggest trade union backer. 

Labour is less dependent on union financial backing that it was under Corbyn since it takes more from private donors than it did a few years ago. Even so, if the union chose to disaffiliate itself from Labour, this would still deliver Starmer a heavy financial blow. 

Starmer’s government got off to a good start with the unions thanks to the string of public sector pay rises made in the aftermath of the election. 

The PM also sought praise from GMB more recently over his decision to seize control of British Steel’s plant in Scunthrope to prevent its closure, with Andy Prendergast, the union’s national secretary, declaring: “We’re thankful that we actually have [a government] willing to take the bull by the horns.”

British Steel aside, relations between union bosses and ministers have come under increasing strain over the past year.

Christina McAnea, general secretary of Unison, lambasted the government for its (now reversed) winter fuel cuts and “heartless” welfare reforms, that had left her “baffled and speechless”.

The government's net zero drive has also put a strain on its relationship with GMB and Unite, with Graham labelling Ed Miliband’s plan to block new oil and gas licences in the North Sea “irresponsible”, adding: “There is clearly no viable plan for the replacement of North Sea jobs or energy security.” 

Even the government’s flagship Employment Rights Bill - which sets out to give unions significantly more powers, for instance by lowering thresholds to industrial action - has failed to satisfy Graham, who has twice complained that the Bill has “more holes than Swiss cheese”. 

That tensions would arise between Britain’s trade-union movement and a centrist Labour government is hardly surprising. After all, Blair’s government was accused of treating unions like “embarrassing relatives”. 

But Blair didn’t have Nigel Farage lurking in the background, never one to miss an opportunity to paint himself as the only political leader truly on the side of “working people”. Perhaps one of the biggest concerns for this Labour government will be the potential for strained relations with the unions to play into Reform UK’s hands.

Caitlin Allen

Deputy Editor

ON REACTION TODAY

Tim Marshall

Don’t be afraid of the big bad BRICs

READ HERE

Jenny Hjul

Are we reading too much into The Salt Path scandal?

READ HERE

Gerald Malone

Weill-Ullmann double bill is an evocative opera pairing

READ HERE

ALSO KNOW

Disaster in Gaza hospital imminent - Medics in Gaza’s largest functioning hospital have warned that it is facing disaster due to fuel shortage and Israel’s widening offensive in the southern city of Khan Younis. Nasser Medical Complex was forced to stop admitting patients on Thursday after Israeli tanks moved near towards the hospital firing shells and bullets, with the military claiming to be dismantling “terrorist infrastructure sites.” Tanks were 200m away from the facility according to witnesses.

Trump promises “major statement” on Russia - President Trump has said that he will make a statement on Monday on Russia, amid his growing frustration with Vladimir Putin and as Trump’s envoy Keith Kellogg prepares to travel to Ukraine at the start of next week. He also confirmed that a deal has been agreed between the US, NATO allies and Ukraine over US weapons shipments.

UK economy contracts in May - New figures from the ONS reveal that the UK economy contracted by 0.1 per cent in May, amid a sharp drop in retail sales. Chancellor Rachel Reeves described the figures as “disappointing” but maintained that the government is committed to kickstarting growth.

FIVE THINGS

1. Why Cold War hoverboats are making a comeback. Jeremy Hsuan in New Scientist.

2. Sebastian Payne, on the Norman Tebbit test that Kemi Badenoch cannot fail, in The Times.

3. Britain and Europe need to get serious about air conditioning, writes John Burn-Murdoch, in The Financial Times.

4. Nicholas Morton explores Boccaccio’s boundless energies, in Engelsberg Ideas.

5. Americans deserve an unflinching investigation into Biden’s health, writes the Editorial Board of The Washington Post.

Britain’s National Crime Agency is hailing a breakthrough after four people were arrested today by police investigating a spate of cyber-attacks that wreaked havoc on British retailers, targeting M&S, the Co-op and Harrods. 

A 20-year-old woman was arrested in Staffordshire while three males - aged between 17 and 19 - were detained in London and the West Midlands. One of the suspects is from Latvia and the rest are British.

All four were arrested at their homes on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences, blackmail, money laundering and participating in the activities of an organised crime group.

M&S, the Co-op and Harrods were all hit with cyber attacks back in April. They were targeted with ransomware - malicious software which locks an owner out of their computer or network and scrambles their data. The criminals then demand a substantial payment, typically in cryptocurrency, to restore access to affected computers. These retail hacks have been linked to a group named Scattered Spider, whose constituents appear to be native English speakers. It’s thought they carried out the attacks by deploying a piece of malicious software from another group, called DragonForce. Using another gang’s ransomware is a common practice, known as a ransomware-as-a-service model, where the two entities involved share any proceeds.

While the hack meant both the Co-op and Harrods were forced to shut down their systems, the damage inflicted on M&S appears to have been the most substantial. The attack has cost it an estimated £300 million this year - the equivalent of a 30 per cent hit to profits. More than a month after the incident, M&S was still unable to deliver orders to Northern Ireland while the online store was down for seven weeks. This week, the department store's chair Archie Norman told MPs that the business was still in “rebuild mode”. 

Personal customer data was also stolen in the attack, including mobile numbers, home addresses and dates of birth. When hackers steal customer data, research suggests that this information is often reused by criminals for identity theft and phishing. And there are even studies emerging to indicate that victims of data breaches can find themselves more likely to have mortgage applications denied.

M&S has repeatedly refused to reveal whether or not it paid a ransom, which would likely have been in the millions. This week, Norman told MPs on the Business Select Committee that the firm would not "discuss the nature of the interaction with the threat actor".

While the National Cyber Security Centre generally urges organisations not to pay ransoms if they are targeted, some ignore this advice and cough up. Which is understandable given the level of chaos wreaked upon those who refuse to be blackmailed. 

In October 2023, the British Library was crippled by a major cyber-attack that shut down many of its services for months on end after it refused to pay a £600,000 ransom to Rhysida, a notorious Russian-affiliated hacker gang. The FT estimates that the attack cost the British Library up to £7m. 

What can we learn from these attacks?

Notably, while the M&S describes itself as the victim of “sophisticated impersonation”, the initial hacking process sounds like a fairly simple technique. 

The Scattered Spider group’s primary tactic is voice-based phishing. From what we know so far, it seems that the hackers called up an overseas, outsourced IT help desk and impersonated an M&S employee to get the desk’s support with resetting a single sign-on password. And, just like that, they were in. 

While Norman has pushed back on suggestions that M&S left the back door open, he has conceded that, with the benefit of hindsight, the company would have brought forward its planned technology investment to strengthen its cyber-security systems.

While in the case of M&S the main vulnerability was in fact human, “the lesson to be learnt here is that sometimes just one vulnerability can can shake the whole system to its core,” says Aybars Tuncdogan, Reader in Digital Innovation and Information at Security, King's College London. That’s why, he adds, companies “need to think of cybersecurity not just as a tedious and inconvenient IT issue, but as a core function of the business”.

Though the scale and sophistication of attacks vary, 74% of large businesses say they were targeted with cyber attacks last year, according to a cyber security breaches survey conducted by the UK government. 

Reflecting on the M&S saga and the degree to which online shopping has transformed retail, it is thus unsurprising that Sir Charlie Mayfield, former chairman of John Lewis, says other retailers understand only too well how vulnerable they are.

Caitlin Allen

Deputy Editor

ON REACTION TODAY

Gerald Warner

Jupiter’s tawdry state visit: the elites are dancing on a volcano

READ HERE

Anthony Peters

For investors, rational decision-taking has become all but impossible

READ HERE

ALSO KNOW

UK-France boat deal - Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron have unveiled a "one in, one out" migrant deal to curb Channel crossings. According to Starmer, migrants arriving on small boats will be returned to France in exchange for asylum seekers who have not tried to enter the UK illegally. Speaking during his visit to London, the French President said that he was "totally committed" to the pilot scheme which will begin within weeks.

IDF kills Palestinians queueing for nutritional supplements - An Israeli strike near a medical point in central Gaza has killed at least 15 Palestinians, including eight children and two women, as they queued for nutritional supplements in the town of Deir al-Balah, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital. The IDF said in a statement that it was targeting a member of Hamas and “regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals”.

Former Tory chair defects to Reform - Ex-Tory chairman Sir Jake Berry has defected to Reform UK, becoming the second former Conservative cabinet minister to join Nigel Farage’s party this week and the fourth former Tory MP in the last two weeks. Explaining the move, Berry wrote: “Old Westminster politics has failed. But there’s a better way”, adding that “change comes with challenging the old order.”

Ukrainian spy shot dead - Colonel Ivan Voronych of the Security Service of Ukraine was executed in broad daylight as he left his home in Kyiv, as Russia and Ukraine target respective intelligence officials for assassination. Details on the incident are limited thus far.

Ruling made over flight MH17 - A landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights Wednesday found that Russia shot down the MH17 flight in 2014 with 298 people on board, 10 of whom were from the UK. The plane was shot down by a Russian-made missile fired from eastern Ukraine controlled by separatists loyal to Moscow.

FIVE THINGS

1. How Russia could exploit a vacuum in Europe. The dangers of a rapid drawdown in American forces in Foreign Affairs.

2. Matthew Hefler in Engelsberg Ideas: an attack on US intelligence.

3. Plans to relocate Gazans to a ‘humanitarian city’ look like a crime against humanity, writes international law expert, James Sweeney, in The Conversation.

4. Israel and Syria should prioritise security cooperation, argues Ahmad Sharawi in Foreign Policy.

5. Over 4.6 billion years on, the sun is having a moment. Bill McKibben in The New Yorker: Solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system.

In Chapter XV of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities there is a passage in which the tricoteuse Madame Defarge and her…

Read more