Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 25

Facile, empty and cliched – Liz Truss’s first week has been a disaster | Simon Jenkins

The new prime minister made promises on the campaign trail she hoped would be forgotten. She is already paying the price

Liz Truss may not make an exciting or popular Tory leader, but she may have one thing going for her. She may be lucky. A mere 12% of voters expect her to be a good prime minister. But, just as Tony Blair was eased into Downing Street by his handling of the death of Diana (his “people’s princess”), so the death of the Queen could help Truss steady and establish herself.

As the na...

King Charles III has views and passions, but his first job is to reform the monarchy’s image | Simon Jenkins

He will be a very different monarch to his mother. He should use that to his and the nation’s advantage

King Charles intends to reign – he would say serve – precisely as did his mother. His entire life has been spent in the shadow of her performance, and he has been tutored at every turn in the role of the occupant of the throne. He knows that the nation has regarded the Queen as the apotheosis of constitutional monarchy. His is unlikely to be a long reign, and he will not want to betray his moth...

The first thing Prime Minister Liz Truss needs to do? U-turn on everything she believes in | Simon Jenkins

She’s a small-state ideologue, but all that matters is that she carries the UK through this economic crisis

Liz Truss enters Downing Street tomorrow to face an economic emergency that is unprecedented in peacetime. She will meet it, we are told, with £100bn of public money, significantly more than what her predecessor, Boris Johnson, spent on furlough during the Covid crisis. This will require a blatant U-turn for a prime minister who spent the summer campaigning for office on a pledge of no more...

Britain’s traumatised education system needs a break – and a decent minister | Simon Jenkins

After two-plus years of Covid and seven secretaries of state in the past six years, teachers and students deserve more support

To be Her Majesty’s secretary of state for education has become a bad joke. There have been seven in the past six years, three in the past two months. Like Keeper of the Wardrobe or Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, the job means nothing besides acting as a visible reminder of the decay of serious government under Boris Johnson.

After two years of trauma, Britain’s educatio...

The first task for a Prime Minister Truss: get Sunak back into cabinet | Simon Jenkins

Her rival to the Tory throne would at least bring some coherence to an otherwise extraordinarily lightweight front bench

British politics has this past month been an exercise in torture. Rishi Sunak’s bid for Downing Street is like that of a boxer told at the start of a contest that the judges have already decided he has lost. He has had to fight on while his opponent, Liz Truss, goes on a victory tour. The resulting campaign has so damaged both candidates that Tory members – and the public in ge...

Truss’s warmongering rhetoric is empty, antagonistic – and wildly dangerous | Simon Jenkins

The potential PM’s plan to cut benefits and boost defence spending merely serves her craving for the theatre of conflict

Was anything learned? On the first anniversary of Britain’s defeat in Afghanistan there is only silence. The previous defeat in Iraq saw a searing public inquiry in 2016. It concluded that Iraq had posed “no imminent threat”. The war was “unnecessary”, and based on dodgy intelligence, dubious legality and feeble attempts at avoidance. But Iraq was the “bad” war. Afghanistan was...

England’s water industry now represents the unacceptable face of capitalism | Simon Jenkins

Million-pound salaries for bosses, billions for shareholders – all while sewage is dumped in our rivers and sea

Where there’s muck there’s brass. But rarely was muck filthier or money more brass-necked than in the case of the brown effluent pouring into the Channel off Seaford, or the green algae spreading over Windermere. The English water industry can make all the excuses it likes, but those who find themselves swimming in sewage tend to notice – and wonder why those responsible deserve million...

Do you want free speech to thrive? Then it has to be regulated, now more than ever | Simon Jenkins

The online safety bill in the UK is shaping up to be a censor’s nightmare, but we need to take this debate seriously

Responses to the assault on Salman Rushdie have combined personal sympathy with a general defence of free speech. Sympathy should come first. The second remains controversial. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but what of “words can never hurt you”? Witness the Iranian government’s blaming of Rushdie himself and his supporters. It is he, not Iran, that lies hurt.

Freedom of sp...

When will the Commonwealth and Anglicanism move on from colonial-era prejudices? | Simon Jenkins

It should not have been down to the athlete Tom Daley to call out blinkered attitudes to LGBTQ people

The British empire may be dead but its ghost refuses to lie down. In the past fortnight, two relics, the Commonwealth and the Church of England, have come to prominence, incanting their slogans of virtue. The Commonwealth claims to be a “major force for change in the world”, the C of E to be a bond of “living in love and faith”. They are strong on abstract rhetoric, but leave little firm ground ...

Who knows if Truss or Sunak is right on the cost of living crisis – where are all the economists? | Simon Jenkins

The profession seems to have gone AWOL, just when we could do with a bit of modelling on tax cuts v handouts

Cut taxes? No, give handouts. Go for growth? No, fight inflation. Increase debt, curb debt. Raise interest rates, lower them.

Two members until recently of the same cabinet seem at opposite extremes of the economic spectrum. Both studied economics at Oxford. They must have attended similar lectures and read the same books. What’s their problem?

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Continue ...