Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 35

Boris Johnson’s biggest lie about Europe is finally coming home to roost | Simon Jenkins

From plummeting trade to drastic shortages of workers, needlessly leaving the single market has been disastrous

It was the big Brexit lie. No, not the £350m a week to spend on the NHS or the “bonfire” of red tape. The lie was that the shambles now enveloping British trade with Europe was an unavoidable price worth paying to leave the EU. That was rubbish.

In order to further his chances of becoming Tory leader Boris Johnson made two commitments. One was to resign from the EU, the other was to depa...

Biden isn’t the first president to promise never to wage another war of intervention | Simon Jenkins

Military adventurism has long appealed to western politicians – even those who say they will not meddle in others’ affairs

Joe Biden declares an end to “an era of major military operations to remake other countries”. A president’s job, he says, is to protect and defend the “fundamental national security interest of the United States of America”. That does not include trying to construct new nations in foreign states.

Quite so. But Biden isn’t the first president to make such claims. Each of his re...

In Britain, we want to blame anyone for chaos in Afghanistan but ourselves | Simon Jenkins

The fault lies with western democracy at its most arrogant and interventionist

Who can we blame? There must be someone. When disaster lies all around, democracy craves a culprit, someone to carry the can. This past weekend has seen an orgy of blaming: of Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, Dominic Raab (Britain’s foreign secretary), his ambassadors, Nato and the west generally, not to mention George Bush and Tony Blair. Afghanistan was supposed to be the “good” intervention, the one that worked. Yet the “n...

Tony Blair damns the Afghan withdrawal but he would do better to show remorse | Simon Jenkins

The former PM has some nerve to say the west should stay on in Afghanistan to protect the ‘gains’ of his 2001 invasion

Imbecilic, tragic, dangerous and unnecessary are the words used by Tony Blair to describe the US withdrawal from Afghanistan – and Britain’s as well. The former British prime minister believes the west should stay to protect the “gains” achieved by his original invasion in 2001, and by implication by the deaths of 457 British soldiers. As it is, Britain has been “relegated from t...

The west’s nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in Afghanistan | Simon Jenkins

British MPs have turned on Boris Johnson – but what tidy end did they expect from this imperialist experiment?

Britain’s MPs this week uttered one long howl of anguish over Afghanistan. Their immediate targets were Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, politicians who just happened to be on the watch when Kabul’s pack of cards collapsed. But their real concern was that a collective 20-year experiment in “exporting western values” to Afghanistan had fallen into chaos. MPs wanted someone other than themselv...

UK politicians decry Joe Biden’s defence of Afghanistan pullout

Keir Starmer leads criticism of US president’s approach, calling it a ‘catastrophic error of judgment’

Afghanistan crisis: live updates

Joe Biden has come under fire from senior British politicians over his defence for withdrawing forces from Afghanistan, with Keir Starmer calling it a “catastrophic error of judgment”.

A defiant US president insisted on Monday that he stood squarely behind the decision to quickly pull out troops, despite the swift offensive by the Taliban. He said: “After 20 years...

It has taken 20 years to prove the invasion of Afghanistan was totally unnecessary | Simon Jenkins

Western involvement in the country was a post-imperial fantasy that has led to the current ghastly situation

The fall of Kabul was inevitable. It marks the end of a post-imperial western fantasy. Yet the west’s reaction beggars belief. Call it a catastrophe, a humiliation, a calamitous mistake, if it sounds good. All retreats from empire are messy. This one took 20 years, but the end was at least swift.

The US had no need to invade Afghanistan. The country was never a “terrorist state” like Libya ...

Depleted and unwanted, HS2 hurtles on as Johnson’s £100bn vanity project | Simon Jenkins

It has cost the taxpayer billions without a mile of track being laid – and it won’t even go north of Crewe

Britain’s new high-speed railway will not – repeat: not – get to the north of England. It will go back and forth from London to the Midlands and its chief beneficiaries will be London commuters. All else is political spin.

This became certain last week as the government’s internal major projects authority declared phase two of the HS2 project, to Manchester and Leeds, effectively dead. While ...

Boris Johnson’s planning reforms could turn southern England into urban sprawl | Simon Jenkins

Plans that would open green spaces to Los Angeles-style development will do nothing to level up the regional divide

The British government is trapped again by the picaresque politics of Boris Johnson. When the pandemic has subsided, the legacy of 2021 could yet be something more long-lasting – the permanent scarring of the landscape, courtesy of the 2019 parliament.

Last spring, the prime minister trumpeted the “tearing down” of English town and country planning regulations, in place since the 194...

Does Boris Johnson deserve sympathy? Not really, given the risk he’s taking | Simon Jenkins

The prime minister has taken potentially one of the most costly peacetime gambles in history. Judge him on how that goes

Should we sympathise with the prime minister? This week, as he puts an end to Covid restrictions in England, he faces the biggest challenge of his two years in office, with belligerent scientists on one side and belligerent economists on the other. Politics must decide the winner, and Boris Johnson’s style of government is unsuited to decision. His innate indecisiveness was exp...