Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 104

Charlie Hebdo: Now is the time to uphold freedoms, not give in to fear | Simon Jenkins

Terrorists can kill and maim, but they cannot topple governments. We must not hand them victory by treating this massacre as an act of war

Why does it happen? Whenever a political outrage is committed, the sensible question is to ask: what does its perpetrator want? What reaction does he seek, and what does he not seek?

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The NHS can’t survive without payment for frontline treatments | Simon Jenkins

Rationing supply of care by payment may offend tradition, but rationing by chaos is cruel

• NHS A&E crisis worst ever, new figures show: Politics Live blog

Politicians have gone mad. The NHS is to be rescued with £2bn from the banks (Tories), with £2.5bn from cigarettes (Labour), with £1.5bn from London mansions (Labour), with the same £1.5bn for Scottish nurses (Scottish Labour) or with £8bn “from the proceeds of growth” (the Lib Dems). Or it can always be res...

Easy to sneer at arts graduates. But we’ll need their skills | Simon Jenkins

Creative types have the confidence to take risks. And they understand that money isn’t everything

Anthony Ward Thomas, of Ward Thomas Removals, has a problem that he shares with the public. After a life spent turning a man with a van into a multimillion-pound firm, he finds his children are not interested in taking over. “They have different interests,” he says. He is sad, but agrees “there should be no divine right that they get the business”. They should make their own way in the world....

Let’s mark Debbie Purdy’s death by legalising assisted dying | Simon Jenkins

The best way to honour the right-to-die campaigner would be for MPs to push through Lord Falconer’s dignity in dying bill

• Poll: Should assisted dying for the terminally ill be legalised

The life and death by starvation of the right-to-die campaigner, Debbie Purdy, should be celebrated by the Commons passing the House of Lords’ “dignity in dying” bill forthwith. An overwhelming majority of the public – 60-70% – wants it. The weight of legal and ethical opinion wants it. Eighty of the great an...

Heroes of 2014: Dylan Thomas, a poet brought back to life | Simon Jenkins

He may have died in 1953, but the BBC dramatisation of Under Milk Wood brought Thomas’s work afresh to a 21st-century audience

Dylan Thomas’s 2014 centenary saw a predictable gush of adjective-drenched, misanthropic verse. Much did not go fast enough “into the dying of the light” for my taste. But one tribute stood out amid the gloom: BBC Wales’s dramatisation of Under Milk Wood, with a gathering up of 37 Welsh celebrities. The casting was absurdly glamorous: Tom Jones as Captain Cat and Kathe...

Glasgow’s disaster shows we find it easier to grieve for places than people | Simon Jenkins

Collective grief is a strange emotion. Why is it we reach out to suffering communities yet individual pain is not our concern?

The people of Glasgow are today grieving for six people who died as a result of a traffic accident in their city centre. A year ago they grieved the 10 deaths in the Clutha Vaults helicopter accident. Last week we grieved for Sydney and for Peshawar, as we once grieved the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, or those of Dunblane, Penlee and Aberfan.

Any comfort of...

We must heed calls for self-rule, or the union is doomed | Simon Jenkins

The UK is stumbling chaotically down the path to disintegration, guided by an inept Westminster

It’s not fair, cries every child. “Life’s not fair,” retorts every parent. Both sides then wrestle with the crooked timber of mankind to decide who gets the first piece of cake. The purpose of politics is to help them, to minimise unfairness and to fashion a path to compromise.

September’s Scottish independence referendum is coming to seem anything but definitive. It was not the final answer to a que...

Germany’s ‘pinstripe Nazis’ show the immigration debate is overheated | Simon Jenkins

Hyping every crime involving a Muslim as a security threat is unhelpful – government and the media must behave responsibly

Rightwing parties are on the rise across Europe. Should we worry? Such movements have come and mostly gone for decades. They draw strength from immigrant surges and economic woes. The Pegida rallies – Germany’s “pinstripe Nazis” – now drawing thousands of marchers to German cities, are specifically anti-Muslim. But are they different from similar movements in France, Swede...

Britain will learn nothing by trying to emulate China’s schools | Simon Jenkins

It was a myth that Beijing perfected the art of teaching. The nation’s success has little to do with maths

One third of England’s secondary schools are “failing”. In some places half of them are “bad”. A total of 170,000 pupils are in “inadequate” institutions – 70,000 more than two years ago. Fifty more schools are in “special measures” than last year.

This is the verdict of the nation’s schools inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw. Half a century of incessant centralised reform and upheaval, of res...

In publishing the CIA torture report, the US is taking a brave step | Simon Jenkins

It took more than a decade but US citizens will now have an idea of what was done in their name post 9/11. Britain still awaits the Chilcot report on Iraq

• CIA braces for impact of torture report inquiry as release date nears

America deserves credit for its decision to publish a report into the CIA’s use of torture following the 9/11 disaster. Despite redaction, the Senate’s intelligence committee confirms what has long been known, that 20 “enhanced” interrogation methods were authorised by th...