Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 114

If Labour wants to get elected, its thinktanks should think again | Simon Jenkins

Calling on Ed Miliband to deliver 'transformative change' and a 'holistic approach' will achieve nothing. To win, Labour must deploy specifics, not platitudes

I sympathise with party leaders. They get daily criticism, personal scrutiny, abuse and exhaustion, and they must put up with those pains in the backside, thinktanks. Labour's Ed Miliband is today savaged in a letter to the Guardian by "an alliance of thinktanks on the party's left and centre right". After a weekend of polls showing his...

Tourism overwhelms the world's historic places, but pays no dues | Simon Jenkins

As Venice overturns a ban on giant cruise liners, it is clear that the places people flock to are incapable of preserving themselves

An Italian court on Monday overturned a ban on 100,000-ton cruise liners sailing up Venice's Giudecca canal to get a close-up view of St Mark's Square. The decision defies belief. Not in modern times can money have so crushingly defeated art; never can commerce have so blatantly sought to strangle the goose that lays its golden egg.

Visitors to Venice have long be...

Budget 2014: George Osborne, it's not your job to look after the very rich | Simon Jenkins

Britain will always have a wealth gap. What's shocking is how governments conspire in its obscene unfairness

Should I be shocked that five British families "own more than 12.6 million Britons put together", as suggested by a "deeply worried" Oxfam this week? They include the Duke of Westminster, Lord Cadogan, the Reubens and the Hindujas. Likewise "85 global billionaires" have more money than half the global population. Shame on them all. Noble Oxfam seems to have become an all-purpose leftwin...

Ebbsfleet as a brave new dawn for the garden city? Don't make me laugh | Simon Jenkins

George Osborne's announcement that 15,000 new homes at Ebbsfleet can help solve the housing crisis is pie in the sky

Hail glorious Ebbsfleet, gateway to the south. Never was a kinder deed done than George Osborne's pre-budget announcement of a new "garden city" at Ebbsfleet (really Northfleet) on the Thames estuary near Gravesend. It is to be focused on old cement workings and is to comprise just 15,000 houses. To call this a garden city is satire. Has Osborne ever been there?

Ebbsfleet is noth...

To plug the north-south gap, the only way is Manchester | Simon Jenkins

Bolstering the north's biggest city would help provincial England to challenge London's privilege and dominance

The north is coming. If Scotland departs the union, it will be the north, not Wales, that is next for a crisis of regional identity. How will it deal with the blood-sucking maw that has replaced Cobbett's Great Wen as metaphor for booming London?

Next week Martin Wainwright, former northern editor of the Guardian, takes to BBC radio to debunk the various "myths of the north". He...

The west's do-somethings will do nothing for Ukraine | Simon Jenkins

The response to Crimea shows just how easily misjudgment can emerge from political machismo and belligerent posturing

At least the west is agreed on the Ukraine crisis. It agrees that something must be done to stop Russia's re-occupation of Crimea, and it agrees that nothing can be done to stop it. Paradox is the stuff of foreign policy. It produces summits, holds conferences, forms and reforms contact groups. Leaders make interminable phone calls and thinktanks rush joyfully to club-class lou...

Labour's jobs promise: the wrong sort of command economy | Simon Jenkins

The policy is too general – jobs need to be created away from the overheated south in the still-depressed Midlands and north

The old songs are the best, but it's how you sing them. Labour's proposal to "give jobs" to all unemployed young people recalls the command economies of the 1940s and 1960s. So too is the old Labour idea of paying for it by hitting the rich until the pips squeak.

This time there is a sting in the tail: if young people refuse the offer of work they will sacrifice benefit....

Helen Suzman deserves her tribute alongside Nelson Mandela | Simon Jenkins

The forgotten saint of the anti-apartheid movement, her legacy to liberalism was to abandon the armchair

We can all be brave in a crowd. The truly brave are brave alone. Next month we celebrate the 20th anniversary in 1994 of the first free election in South Africa, one of the few times in history that a minority has voluntarily handed power to a majority in conditions of relative peace.

The two "saints" of the occasion, Nelson Mandela and the outgoing president, FW de Klerk, will have their tr...

Ukraine has revealed the new world of western impotence | Simon Jenkins

Behind the self-righteous bluster on Russia, all our leaders can do to punish Putin is cancel summits, school places and shopping trips

I am starting to lose this one. How dare anyone excuse a great power hurling brute force against a small one, justifying it with some nonsense about extremists and a "responsibility to protect". There should be no place for such cynical bullying in a 21st-century world order. And for what? So a leader with a virility complex can play to his domestic gallery. T...

The Oscar Pistorius trial is no place for Hollywood drama | Simon Jenkins

There is a danger that allowing television and radio into the courtroom will cloud judgment. Justice does not demand infinite openness

And the Oscar goes to… the South African judicial system. The judge for the murder trial of athlete Oscar Pistorius has decided to admit radio and television to his Pretoria court room today. It should get an 18 certificate.

On trial is no great national issue, no terrorist gang or grand fraudster. This is the examination of an intimate personal tragedy involvin...