Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 33

The towers and the glory: Simon Jenkins’ favourite cathedrals in Europe

Surviving bombs, fires and even secularism, Europe’s great cathedrals stand defiant. Here are 11 ‘masterpieces of art and architecture’

Europe’s cathedrals are its wonders of the world. From Salisbury to Seville, Moscow to Palermo, Trondheim to Istanbul, they tower over its cities, masterpieces of art and architecture whose popularity increases by the generation. Even as religious worship continues to decline, attendance at cathedral services has risen by a third in 20 years.

What is it that still...

To rid Britain of corruption, start by reforming the House of Lords | Simon Jenkins

The row over peerages for Tory donors is yet more proof that radical overhaul is essential – and now is the perfect time

“Britain is not remotely a corrupt country,” declared the prime minister in Glasgow this week. So what did he mean by remotely? He had just been accused of selling peerages to party donors. In 2006, Boris Johnson called such abuses of the House of Lords a “putrefaction … a quintessentially British crime”. Back then it was Tony Blair he was attacking. We know Johnson’s ethics va...

Northern Ireland is the loser in Boris Johnson’s badly played Brexit game | Simon Jenkins

Relying only on machismo, the prime minister has no alternative border mechanism for trade with the EU

This year, Boris Johnson craved the titles of champion of Cop26 and star of G7. He saw something called “global Britain” and hoped it would crown his Brexit triumph, leading the world into a new age of peace and prosperity like a 21st-century Churchill. Instead, Johnson now finds himself in a morass of sleazy MPs, dodgy peers and Covid contracts. More seriously, he is about to plunge once more i...

The Paterson debacle shows that Johnson no longer has advisers - he has courtiers | Simon Jenkins

After months of purges, there is no one left in the cabinet who is willing to hold the prime minister to account

No one doubted it, not even Boris Johnson. The attempt to rescue his friend Owen Paterson from a mild penalty for a breach of the parliamentary code was an abject failure.

The Tories’ short-lived attempt to tear up the independent system for combating parliamentary sleaze has been scrapped. After the government’s U-turn, MPs were due a fresh vote over whether to suspend Paterson from th...

This fish spat with France is just another product of Johnson’s broken Brexit | Simon Jenkins

The PM’s push to quit the European single market has proved disastrous for Britain’s standing at the key moment of Cop26

As Boris Johnson stumbles from cliche to cliche in Glasgow, a boatload of French fishers are making a fool of him. Posing as a world leader, he pleads that the Earth is “at one minute to midnight”, and should raise its game in the last chance saloon. Yet he cannot stop France’s Emmanuel Macron taunting him over a few boat licences, any more than he can handle the consequences o...

Simply throwing money at the NHS won’t solve all its problems | Simon Jenkins

Billions will be wasted as long as the health service remains hyper-centralised and disconnected from local authorities

Watch the news each day and you might regard Britain’s NHS as a black, swirling pit into which ever vaster sums of money constantly vanish. All it does is answer back with screams of hospitals near collapse, queueing ambulances outside hospitals, year-long waiting lists, postponed tests and staffing crises. The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, obsessed with daily headlines, hurls billio...

Most Britons want assisted dying legalised. Why are MPs too cowardly to do it? | Simon Jenkins

A debate in the Lords this week exposes the Commons’ failure to answer calls for choice and dignity

What are MPs for? The assisted dying bill, to be debated on Friday in the House of Lords, ranks with past laws on divorce, abortion and sexuality in the canon of social liberalism. It is unfinished business of the 1960s.

The bill also lies at the heart of how a free democracy should regulate issues of life and death, with deep significance for millions of Britons at a time of their maximum pain and ...

Dedicated and tireless, David Amess was a paragon of a good constituency MP | Simon Jenkins

In a country of centralised power, he did all he could to make himself a man of Southend rather than simply Westminster

British politics rightly commemorates its own. David Amess, killed in his home constituency last week, was eulogised on Monday in the Commons and St Margaret’s church, Westminster, as what the prime minister called “one of the kindest, nicest, most gentle people in politics”. He was not a star of the parliamentary firmament, but rather that paragon: a “good constituency MP”. The...

The National Trust has needlessly provoked an ‘anti-woke’ campaign | Simon Jenkins

If the trust’s properties have slavery links, we should know. Yet to attack Churchill played into the hands of culture warriors

The National Trust has more members than all of Britain’s political parties put together. It is certain that those five and a half million members will agree on nothing. That is why the Trust’s leadership has long taken the view that, on any political issue that does not directly concern it, silence is the wisest policy.

These days, however, even the word “concern” is con...

Train or plane? The climate crisis is forcing us to rethink all long-distance travel | Simon Jenkins

Arguments about switching from one mode of transport to another miss the point – we ought to be travelling less

All domestic plane journeys in Britain should be banned and passengers told to take a train. So says the Campaign for Better Transport in its contribution to the climate emergency debate. Planes emit six times more CO2 per passenger mile than trains. The trouble is that plane tickets tend to be half the price of train ones. So tax planes, and subsidise trains.

So far, so simple. Planes a...