Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 21

Zelenskiy wants jets. The west should think very carefully before giving them to him | Simon Jenkins

To grant Ukraine’s request carries a huge risk – better to help it gain battlefield advantage as a basis for peace talks

Heroic rhetoric has its moment in every conflict. “We have freedom, give us wings to protect it,” cried Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in pleading support from the nations of Europe in Westminster Hall on Wednesday. He faces a renewed battle to drive Russian tanks off his land – all his land – in the spring. His cause is just and it is desperate. He now wants jets.

At...

Britain is desperate for workers – but Sunak won’t admit immigration is the answer | Simon Jenkins

Post-Brexit, health and care employers, farmers and builders struggle to fill vacancies while ministers demonise those who could help

A sure sign of a happy country is the eagerness of foreigners to come to live there. One such state is Great Britain. Newcomers are a net benefit to a modern economy and should be welcomed accordingly. Thus, their compliment is returned.

Last year Britain’s ageing population was supplemented by a record net immigration of half a million people. After two years of pa...

Royal commissions transformed Britain in the 1960s – we desperately need them now | Simon Jenkins

These independent inquiries would rise above the party-political deadlock over reform for the NHS and housing

Britain’s once-famed welfare state seems unable to deliver. Public services are riven with conflict and starved of funds. Nothing works. Yet there the argument ends. The government defends the status quo, the opposition claims it is all about money. The Treasury rules. Reform ossifies. Progress is zero.

Scratch the surface of this week’s strikes and it is clear that each of the services ha...

Sunak’s job was to unclog Westminster’s fatberg of sleaze. His handling of Zahawi was entirely right | Simon Jenkins

There is not a democracy in the world where Zahawi’s failings and Sunak’s response would have merited such a ballyhoo

Prime ministers do not need ethics advisers. They need theatre producers. The outgoing Conservative party chair, Nadhim Zahawi, was an able, popular politician and briefly successful minister. He did not break any law, filch PPE cash from the state, appoint a friend to public office, hug an aide or attend an illegal gathering. Like thousands of taxpayers he admits to making a “car...

Bright lights, big cities: cash and HS2 are not the only keys to renewing the north, Andy Burnham | Simon Jenkins

The Greater Manchester mayor was lured by the prospect of a better London link. But civic magnetism depends on creativity, glamour and tourist appeal

The championing of the north by the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, is a noble cause, but his past support for HS2 was a dreadful mistake. From the start, it was clear that the staggering £100bn cost – more than all other rail projects put together – would cripple all British rail investments everywhere. So it has proved.

The latest rumoured ...

Message to Olaf Scholz: send tanks to Ukraine now – and lay the path for a negotiated peace | Simon Jenkins

The German chancellor should be bold, but even then there will never be ‘total victory’: the best hope is a ceasefire and a deal

A German reluctance to fan the flames of war in Europe would, in the past, have been widely welcomed. So much for the past. The hesitation of the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to send his Leopard tanks to Ukraine for a spring battle in Donbas now looks alarmingly like a peace offering to Vladimir Putin.

A large western armoury has already been built up in Ukraine, but ...

RIP ‘levelling up’ – another Johnson catchphrase that failed to deliver | Simon Jenkins

The shocking north-south divide will never be rebalanced by ministers doling out centralised funds to favourite projects

Levelling up is cancelled. It is so yesterday, past its sell-by date, rather Boris Johnson, defunct. Tory MPs have been given orders to drop it as a mere soundbite since “nobody knows what it means”. Instead they should use “community enhancing” and something called “gauging up”.

There is no limit to the linguistic banality of modern British government. The proof is in this wee...

The police don’t need powers to further curtail our right to protest. Just teach them the law | Simon Jenkins

These measures are born of culture wars, rather than the need to balance the freedom to disrupt with maintenance of order

John Stuart Mill on liberty is a famous cop-out. Everybody has rights, he said, except the right to harm the interests of others. That exception had to be policed by authority. Welcome to philosophy’s most celebrated can of worms.

The government’s attempt this week to strengthen police powers in England and Wales over disruptive protest is a classic of Mill’s cop-out. It is the...

Voters know that Brexit was a mistake, so when will our politicians admit it? | Simon Jenkins

A glimmer of hope over the Northern Ireland protocol shows what can happen if we stop being embarrassed by the B-word

Brexit has become the banned word of British politics. Rishi Sunak never breathes it. Say it to Keir Starmer and he affects not to hear. Brexit is axed, cancelled, forbidden, dismissed as boring. Not just that, but YouGov reports that 56% of the public regrets the country ever having voted for it, with just 32% still in favour. Brexit, the great self-harm, has become the Great Mis...

Finally, some sense on the NHS: Wes Streeting recognises more money is not the only answer | Simon Jenkins

The shadow health secretary wants to scrap GPs and give patients more control. It would be a welcome, practical step

At last a glimmer of light on the NHS horizon. Labour’s shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, clearly smarting from his brush with cancer two years ago, has realised that the problem with the NHS is not just cash but structure. Above all, it lies in the costs and delays of an archaic network of occupational demarcations seizing up surgeries and hospitals alike.

The sheer lumberin...