Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 13

Whisper it, but in opposing Rishi Sunak’s smoking ban, Liz Truss might be right | Simon Jenkins

Restricting flavoured vapes make sense, but halting tobacco sales altogether for all entering adulthood is bizarre

At least twice as many school pupils smoke cannabis as smoke tobacco. Cannabis is illegal, tobacco is legal. If legality meant anything, the figures should be the other way round.

Smoking, like alcohol and narcotic drugs, is both enjoyable and harmful. The state’s job is to regulate the balance. Health education, together with nudge measures like banning smoking in public places, have...

The endgame looms for Sunak and the Tories. ‘Rwanda’ will be the epitaph on their political grave | Simon Jenkins

If he has any concern for his reputation, the PM will shelve this doomed mistake and do everything to rescue public services

The ship goes down and the panic starts. As the Tory party lurches towards the electoral rocks, the bridge is losing control and the crew are taking to the boats. Or at least some of them are, joined this week by a disaffected backbencher, Simon Clarke, and a reported band of a dozen rebels. Clarke’s thesis is that “an electoral massacre” can only be avoided if the ship mut...

Brexit trade checks will cost £330m a year. Starmer must revisit this disastrous deal | Simon Jenkins

The price of the Tories’ new border regime beggars belief. In a cost of living crisis, it’s a bill we can’t afford

The government is planning to increase the cost of doing business in Britain by a total of £330m a year.

From the end of this month and again in April, it will start imposing a battery of border controls on agricultural trade with the EU. Fierce protests from farming and fishing interests have delayed these controls five times. But Rishi Sunak is frantic to show himself to be macho on...

Prince William should finish what Charles started – and sever the ridiculous ties of church and state | Simon Jenkins

Rumours that the heir isn’t religious are heartening: monarchy is dubious enough without the Anglican mumbo-jumbo

Once upon a time, news that the heir to the throne may decline his “supreme governorship” of the Church of England would have caused an earthquake. Bishops would have wept as theologians worried all night. Was the 1534 Reformation for nothing?

As it is, the gossip extracted in the Daily Mail from the latest royal pot-boiler suggests that Prince William does not worship much and that he...

England’s secondary schools are Dickensian. No wonder children are staying away | Simon Jenkins

The government has made the classroom a place to be avoided. Keegan’s war on truancy should start with a little self-reflection

This year’s most alarming statistic so far is that one parent in four thinks it is fine for children to skip school. Persistent absenteeism in England has doubled since lockdown, from 10% to 22% of pupils. A third of a million parents are now being fined as a result. With working from home now good for grownups, the habit is clearly spreading to schoolchildren.

This week ...

King Charles should follow Denmark’s example – and tell us when he’ll abdicate | Simon Jenkins

Queen Margrethe is the latest European monarch to make way for new blood. It puts our archaic system to shame

The abdication of Queen Margrethe of Denmark in favour of her son Frederik is a sign of a sensible constitutional monarchy. The 82-year-old queen felt “time was running out and the ills were increasing”. It was best to hand over now. In this, Margrethe follows the abdication over the past decade or so of monarchs in the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. It is now being pressed on the 77-yea...

British politics is rotting from the bottom up: pity our crisis-hit local councils | Simon Jenkins

Starved of powers and funds and then belittled by ministers, the collapse of town hall democracy is a scandal unfolding in real time

Every review of Britain 2023 says the same. The country is not being well run. From policing to care homes, from postal services to sewage spills, from youth clubs to potholes, everywhere is failure. Small wonder just 20% of Britons now have any faith in their national politicians, one of the lowest figures in a western democracy.

Nowhere is this decline more evident...

Of course Michelle Mone should be thrown out of the Lords, but others enabled her: turf them out too | Simon Jenkins

The cronyism and irresponsibility in government during the pandemic cannot go unpunished. Let the reckoning begin now

The Michelle Mone affair stinks. It shows that, under Boris Johnson, the British government was unfit for purpose, and is scarcely better today. While the Covid inquiry descends into a lawyers’ carnival, the PPE procurement scandal festers on.

In the spring of 2020, when the pandemic first broke, Wales’s first minister, Mark Drakeford, announced that there was “PPE in the system fo...

Housing policy in Britain is a chaotic shambles. Thank God for nimbys, I say | Simon Jenkins

Without them the green belt would have been ravaged, when what’s really needed is new ideas and vision for brownfield sites

Michael Gove is right. Essential to a true democracy is the idea that local communities should have some control over their surroundings. They must not have change rammed down their throats just so someone can make money. The great cynicism of Brexit was the cry “take back control”. The government took back control only to give it all to themselves, to deny it to national an...

Rishi Sunak’s week of chaos reflects the state of his party. There’s only one answer: an election | Simon Jenkins

Today his appearance at the Covid inquiry, tomorrow his failing Rwanda bill. The PM – and the Tories – are disintegrating

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Future students of British politics may yet write theses on Rishi Sunak’s upcoming week. It starts today with bizarre torture over his 2020 Covid performance, dives on Tuesday into a shambolic vote on his Rwanda bill and may well end with a crazed plot to topple him. All three events reflect the collapse of the central institut...