Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 35

Boris Johnson’s military alliance in the Pacific is reckless post-imperial nostalgia | Simon Jenkins

The Aukus deal has enraged China and humiliated France, when British diplomacy should be concentrated on Europe

The Aukus defence deal between Britain, the US and Australia grows murkier by the day. Essentially it is the outcome of an industrial dispute over who will build eight submarines for the Australian military. Australia ordered £48bn-worth of diesel-powered ones from France and then changed its mind, reneging on the deal. It now wants nuclear-powered ones from the US and Britain.

Crewed su...

Jeremy Clarkson’s Cotswolds farm is an ill omen for the countryside | Simon Jenkins

Rural England may be a far cry from the Klondike. But there’s a gold rush going on out there

In 2008 Jeremy Clarkson thought a little agriculture on the side might do him good. He bought a farm in fashionable Cotswold country, acquired a Lamborghini tractor and a handful of local workers and found the experience deeply satisfying. The farm was earning so little income – just £140 last year – that he named it Diddly Squat. With a personal fortune estimated in the millions, this seemed hardly to ma...

UK and EU urged to stop blocking vaccine patent waiver – as it happened

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Scotland’s deputy first minister has said there are no plans to introduce vaccination certificates for public services or for cafes and restaurants, but that they will be required for a “limited number of sectors” including nightclubs.

John Swinney told BBC Radio 4’s Today:

There will be no question that vaccine certificates will be applicable to any public services whatsoever, under a...

Boris Johnson is right that we have to live with Covid, but he’s not making it easy | Simon Jenkins

Managing the pandemic is a balance of personal liberty and public safety, and the government needs to tread a fine line

Eighteen months is a long time in Covid politics. Boris Johnson’s much-flagged series of announcements this week for the UK will mark his route “back to normal” and to “learning to live with the disease”. Like most people, he has matured over the past year, a journey from carelessness to panic to pragmatism. The journey was never about “following the science”. It was following t...

A new planning reform could mean the death of England's high streets | Simon Jenkins

Robert Jenrick’s madcap policy will hand shops over to developers motivated by profit, not community

The summer of 2021 may be remembered for Covid and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. But another lasting and insidious change took place: the death of the high street. By approving the building of residential homes on ailing shopping streets, planning minister Robert Jenrick effectively allowed any shop, restaurant, cafe or business premise in England to become a house. Since almost everywhere hous...

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...