Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 108

How can Chris Grayling deny our prisons crisis? | Simon Jenkins

Successive prisons inspectors sound the alarm about our overcrowded, violent jails, but British politicians dont want to kick the habit

The British are prison addicts. We scour the country for reasons to imprison. We jail for not having a television licence, for Googling in jury rooms, for smoking cannabis, for hacking a phone, for swapping points, for perjury or, the latest obsession, historic sex abuse. Every week someone over 60 is jailed for actions unreported 30 or 40 years ago. In the pa...

The case for Trident is absurd. Scotland may help us get rid of it | Simon Jenkins

Prestige, not defence, is the only reason to keep this £100bn albatross. We may yet give thanks for Alex Salmonds posturing

I just cannot get enough of the Scottish referendum debate. On every side the unthinkable is thought, the unsayable said. The murky covers are removed from North Sea oil, the single currency, the Barnett formula, welfare dependency, the West Lothian question, revealing swamps of intellectual confusion our rulers would rather keep hidden. None is murkier that the fate...

Robin Williams: the sadness of a clown that couldnt be fixed | Simon Jenkins

Williams, like many others, struggled with addiction and personal demons. Mental illness is a great leveller but is still too little understood

Robin Williams found dead in California home aged 63

The sadness of the clown is an old showbusiness irony. The death of the clown is even sadder. But Robin Williams was no ordinary clown, he was a clown in the round, a master of the one-liner, of verbal riff, mimicry, disguise, facial distortion, fury and hilarity. He made them laugh and he made them...

Why computer science graduates cant talk themselves into jobs | Simon Jenkins

Maths and science graduates are victims of a dirigiste British education policy that fails both labour market and individual

Graduates in computer science are so inarticulate as to be unemployable. So says a consortium of prospective employers. The Higher Education Statistics Agency agrees. This week it put computing top for unemployability, along with maths, engineering and media studies. Students should switch from geek to chic.

Not a week passes without business complaining about the educati...

1914: the Great War has become a nightly pornography of violence | Simon Jenkins

The centenary has been seized as a military propaganda opportunity. So-called lessons learned have been ignored or forgotten

Britains commemoration of the Great War has lost all sense of proportion. It has become a media theme park, an indigestible cross between Downton Abbey and a horror movie. I cannot walk down the street or turn on the television without being bombarded by Great War diaries, poems, scrapbooks and songs. The BBC has gone war mad. We have Great War plays, Great War proms, Gr...

To mock President Putins pride and test his paranoia is folly | Simon Jenkins

The downing of flight MH17 was clearly an accident. This tragedy should not be used as an excuse to punish Russia.

Why does foreign policy default to stupid? From the moment that we heard of the Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine it was clearly an accident. Whoevers finger was on the trigger, the tragedy cannot have been meant. This was not another 9/11. It was cock-up, not conspiracy.

Yet foreign policy craves conspiracy. Vladimir Putin blamed the Ukrainian government. Ukraine blamed th...

Tony Blair sees his millions as modest only in the world of the super rich | Simon Jenkins

The Blairs seem to crave money because it is there. As the gap between the wealthy few and the rest widens, their fortune is hard to justify

Blair embodies corruption and war, writes Seumas Milne

How rich is Tony Blair? What are the needs of an ex-prime minister with grown-up children, a working wife, £25m in property and bodyguards costing the state £1m a year? Blair protested yesterday that he is not worth £100m, not half of that, a third of that, a quarter of that, a fifth...

Blanket digital surveillance is a start. But how about a camera in every bathroom? | Simon Jenkins

The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act needs strengthening. Only terrorists and paedophiles can object. The House stands ready to act

Parliament this week passed a law allowing the bulk collection by the government of all internet traffic in the United Kingdom. It was the fifth addition to state surveillance powers since the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa). The following is an extract from Hansard for 1 April next year.

Secretary of state for the Home Department: Mr...

William Hagues foreign office era: subdued and subservient | Simon Jenkins

The departing foreign secretary was a former Tory star who descended into empty cliche and belligerence

The progressive collapse of the Libyan regime is the epitaph on William Hagues era as foreign secretary. It has been an age without a theme, rhetoric without content. When he took office he boasted that Britain would have a new global reach and influence. He left as the emblem of that reach, a new Libya, fell into anarchy.

Hague was a Yorkshire outsider whose star shone in the 1990s, not unli...

How should we understand the teenage jihadists' mind? | Simon Jenkins

Their threat is exaggerated, but even in liberal Britain many youngsters seem to be lured by the most authoritarian edicts of the Qur'an

A friend of mine once gazed at her wayward teenagers and told me she could handle the usual drugs and sex. The one thing she couldn't deal with was them "getting religion". How awful must the agony be of parents who find their offspring vanished "to fight jihad" in the Middle East.

What could have induced two teenage boys from Cardiff and t...