Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 26

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

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In Taiwan, as in Ukraine, the west is flirting with disaster | Simon Jenkins

It’s one thing to declare yourself ‘rather dead than red’, quite another to inflict that decision on the rest of us

Arguments in the foothills of war are always the same. Those for war shout loudest and beat their chests, eager for tanks to rumble and jets to roar. Those against are dismissed as wimps, appeasers and defeatists. When the trumpets sound and the drums beat, reason runs for cover.

The visit to Taiwan of the US congressional speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has been so blatantly provocative it s...

Liz Truss’s Oxbridge proposal is the latest vacuous idea from a slapstick Tory race | Simon Jenkins

The ill-thought-out ideas issuing daily from the candidates to be the UK’s prime minister are a cause for alarm

The Tory leadership race has descended into slapstick politics, and it seems to have no boundaries. In the past week the two candidates have behaved like cliche-spouting populists on the stump, rather than responsible members of a party still in office. The latest excursion of the frontrunner Liz Truss – supposedly the nation’s foreign secretary – into education policy defies belief.

She...

The rouble is soaring and Putin is stronger than ever - our sanctions have backfired | Simon Jenkins

Energy prices are rocketing, inflation is soaring and millions are being starved of grain. Surely Johnson knew this would happen?

Western sanctions against Russia are the most ill-conceived and counterproductive policy in recent international history. Military aid to Ukraine is justified, but the economic war is ineffective against the regime in Moscow, and devastating for its unintended targets. World energy prices are rocketing, inflation is soaring, supply chains are chaotic and millions are b...

The ruble is soaring and Putin is stronger than ever - our sanctions have backfired | Simon Jenkins

Energy prices are rocketing, inflation is soaring and millions are being starved of grain. Surely Johnson knew this would happen?

Western sanctions against Russia are the most ill-conceived and counterproductive policy in recent international history. Military aid to Ukraine is justified, but the economic war is ineffective against the regime in Moscow, and devastating for its unintended targets. World energy prices are rocketing, inflation is soaring, supply chains are chaotic and millions are b...

There is one man to blame for the lorries backed up in Dover: Boris Johnson | Simon Jenkins

Tory leadership candidates, as they spout their pseudo-Thatcherite cliches, lack the guts to admit Brexit is not working

The Brexit slogan “Take back control” was always a lie. Boris Johnson, in a long boast about his so-called achievements in the Sunday Express yesterday, wrote that he “took back control of our borders”. Perhaps he should have visited the M20 in Dover, where thousands of immobile lorries are stacked up, and repeated this claim to their drivers. Under the EU, Britain’s borders we...