Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 16

When it comes to Britain’s relations with France, at least King Charles gets it | Simon Jenkins

Royalty is not elected to delve into political matters, but Charles’s visit to France suggests a friendship we urgently need

Sometimes I see the point of a king. Imagine if it had been Boris Johnson standing under the Arc de Triomphe this week, telling the French president, Emmanuel Macron, “Donnez moi un break.” Imagine Liz Truss telling Versailles “the jury’s out” on her opinion of France. There are moments in relations between nations that require the presence of heads of state – however chose...

Keir Starmer wants to rewrite the Brexit deal? Good – and he shouldn’t hold back | Simon Jenkins

The Labour leader says he wants to foster a ‘closer’ trading relationship with the EU. I recommend a return to the customs union

Keir Starmer should not be frightened. This week he admitted in Montreal that Britain’s Brexit agreement was “not a good deal” and that he wanted a “closer” trading relationship with the EU. What does he mean? He mentioned security and research, ties that Rishi Sunak has already initiated. Yet he shudders with fear at any accusation that he might favour returning to Eur...

Developers and their Tory allies are killing the high street. Only a people’s revolt can stop them now | Simon Jenkins

While local shops in countries such as France are protected, the UK is crippled by lax planning laws and sky-high business rates

High streets matter. We don’t want them to follow churches, becoming relics of a mostly dying sense of community. They should be the living hubs of villages and towns and not vanish beneath an anonymous swathe of suburban housing.

The news is that 6,000 high-street shops have closed in the past five years. The big stores are already going. Wilko has followed Debenhams an...

Forget ‘Chinese spies’, trade not espionage should be Britain’s main concern with China | Simon Jenkins

China is clearly using its trading supremacy to ignore accepted norms – but the UK has some leverage

Today’s claim that a Chinese spy in his 20s cruising the Westminster drinks circuit might pose a threat to the British state is absurd. MPs always overstate their role in foreign affairs. Boris Johnson, back in 2017 when he was foreign secretary, might have felt a macho thrill from sending an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea – where it could be sunk in an hour – but Britain’s defences are n...

Britain can recover from the self-harm of Brexit. Today’s return to the EU’s Horizon project shows how | Simon Jenkins

Polls suggest a majority of Britons regret our exit. Rejoining the scientific programme could be the start of something bigger

Is this the dawn? Have we reached the glimmer of a new beginning? Rishi Sunak’s about-turn on joining the European Union’s Horizon programme is a first note of sanity in the two and a half tortured years since Britain formally left the EU. Let it not be the last.

The story itself is miserable. Horizon is an £81bn continent-wide programme to give Europe’s scientific researc...

When things get tough for government, call in Grant Shapps, the perfect schmoozer | Simon Jenkins

It was once said that no minister could coherently lead a Whitehall department in under two years. Shapps seems to believe he can do it in two days

Why is every British public service seemingly a shambles? The answer is that no one is in charge. The appointment last week of Grant Shapps to his fifth cabinet job in a year may be taken from the plot of some Ruritanian court comedy. Can it be serious that five great departments of state, including home affairs, transport, energy and now defence, hav...

Theft isn’t the only problem facing the cash-strapped British Museum – and I have some answers | Simon Jenkins

The museum’s sprawling collections should be consolidated, with items sold to fund much-needed developments

Museums are essentially phoney. Few of their objects were made for them but rather to be owned, used, enjoyed and traded. They were not meant to be wrenched from their context by fair means or foul, then put in a glass case or buried in giant state hoards, most of them never again to see the light of day.

The British Museum is such a beloved institution that no one ever asks what it is about...

Is Braverman in or out? It doesn’t matter: what’s broken is the Home Office itself | Simon Jenkins

Rishi Sunak is reportedly facing growing pressure to sack the home secretary. But the troubles go much deeper than that

If you had hired as many different builders in the past five years as Britain has hired home secretaries, you would assume your house was deeply flawed. Yet the latest, Suella Braverman, one of four in that time, has managed 10 months under Rishi Sunak and is reportedly under pressure to be sacked. It is hard to imagine how a senior minister in a controversial department can ope...

Yes, rebuild the Crooked House brick by brick – and buttress local planning, too | Simon Jenkins

Communities need more power to protect assets such as historic pubs: the centralised system too often favours developers

Whose fault is the demise of the Crooked House in Himley, Staffordshire, now a pile of bricks? The nation is up in arms. MPs, peers, mayors, editors, villagers and about 18,000 people on a Facebook group are all gnashing their teeth. Even the demolition contractor, whose digger was actually booked before the pub caught fire, is embarrassed. Many of these worthies may not have k...

The weather is terrible and the forecasts worse – why do we bother with holidays in August? | Simon Jenkins

The British summer is still based on pre-industrial events. It’s time a government had the guts to shake up the holiday year

If you had booked an August holiday in Britain 10 days ago, then heard the weather forecast, you probably would have taken the first train to Gatwick. The forecast for the following week was awful – for storms, clouds, rain and “unseasonably cold” weather. In other words, another typical August.

In the event the forecast was wildly inaccurate. Where I was on the Welsh coast,...