Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 36

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...

Only by forgiving – and forgetting – can Ireland move on from its past | Simon Jenkins

Boris Johnson’s lie that there was no need for a border in the Irish Sea may be a chance, at last, for reconciliation

If I had lost a family member on Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland in 1972, I am sure I would want someone brought to justice. Nor would I care when. Indeed, though ardent about forgiveness and rehabilitation, in such a case I am sure I would want punishment. I am human, and revenge is a human emotion – though I would call it “justice”. But such justice must be subject to two limi...

Boris Johnson's Euros bandwagon-jumping won't get him far | Simon Jenkins

The quiet dignity of England’s football team was in marked contrast to the prime minister’s cynical opportunism

By any normal standards, England’s performance in the European Championship was outstanding. The team reached heights it hadn’t for over half a century – and its off-field behaviour was dignified and sportsmanlike, a credit to England’s remarkable leader, Gareth Southgate. At the final whistle, the contest was a draw. The aftermath was a tragedy, requiring a “result” from a penalty shoo...

We need a revolution in university teaching – and online-only lectures could start it | Simon Jenkins

The idea has met with uproar from Manchester students, but if it results in more teaching hours, all the better

Lectures are rubbish education. They should have gone out when printing was invented and students learned to read. The vanity of monks and preachers kept them going and set them up for university education ever since. Lectures have nothing to do with teaching, which is an interactive process. They are academic showbusiness.

Yet 3,000 Manchester University students have signed a petition ...

The UK government is shirking its duty in the cladding scandal | Simon Jenkins

The Grenfell inquiry made it clear that private companies, not residents, should pay to make high-rise towers safe

For the 72 people who died in the Grenfell Tower fire four years ago, the cladding scandal was fatal. For thousands more, it is becoming a nightmare. The government is removing the deadly cladding from some 500 of the most at-risk towers, but beyond that, the residents of an estimated 1,500 high-rise buildings in England considered unsafe – and therefore unsellable, unmortgageable an...

Liverpool deserves better than the humiliation of losing its Unesco status | Simon Jenkins

The city’s historic waterfront is at risk of being overshadowed by banal flats and offices. National government must step in

Britain could next month become only the second country in the world to have a monument stripped of world heritage status by Unesco. That monument is Liverpool’s magnificent waterfront. And, as if to brush off this shame, Boris Johnson and his government intend to put another site in danger too, at Stonehenge. Does anyone care?

Stonehenge is merely the symbol of a minor but ...