Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 37

A Labour/Lib Dems alliance could defeat the Tories in seat after seat | Simon Jenkins

The Lib Dems are a nuisance party. They should disband, or step aside in winnable seats in return for a government role

Anyone who predicts the outcome of general elections from byelections should stick to the horses. This applies especially to periodic Liberal Democrat upsets such as last week’s at Chesham and Amersham in Buckinghamshire, where they overturned a blue majority. This was nothing to do with choosing a government, rather it was passing judgment on Johnson’s “algorithmic” deregulatio...

Public inquiries are institutionally corrupt, we should just give the money to victims | Simon Jenkins

Be it the Manchester bombing, children’s homes or Daniel Morgan, millions are squandered on probes that merely enrich lawyers

There should be an inquiry into inquiries. They are institutionally corrupt. The latest, the fifth into the 1987 Daniel Morgan murder, justified itself this week with 1,200 pages and the headline-grabbing epithet “institutional”. We are no nearer the truth of this single unsolved killing, and the home secretary has merely announced another inquiry into police oversight. Fo...

Behind the spectacle of the G7 summit, global tax reform was the big event | Simon Jenkins

Before world leaders met in Cornwall, finance ministers had made an agreement that could spell the end of tax havens

G7 summits nowadays are mostly fields of the cloth of gold. They are about showing off, with Boris Johnson in full Henry VIII rig. He staged beach parties, hired cruise ships, dug up trees, summoned royals and organised worship of David Attenborough. The planet was saved, the world cleansed and the poor vaccinated. Johnson got through £70m in policing for a three-day event.

Most im...

Drug reform is the holy grail – but don’t expect answers at the G7 | Simon Jenkins

If Boris Johnson were to raise the issue with Joe Biden, the US president might reply that at least he is trying. Britain is not

Joe Biden is a fine one to lecture Boris Johnson on trade with his neighbours. Johnson could well retort: what about the US and Mexico? What about the $88bn Biden spends trying and failing to police his shambolic drugs trade with Latin America, and its related market in anarchy, refugees, gangsterism and death, not to mention the resulting US crime wave?

Last week the F...

Pressured by Biden, Johnson may finally face reality on Northern Ireland | Simon Jenkins

The US president should tell the British prime minister to honour the protocol or take the whole UK into the EU’s trading standards regime

This week’s planned G7 chat on Northern Ireland between the US president, Joe Biden, and British prime minister, Boris Johnson, can be brief. Biden should tell Johnson to stop being an idiot and honour the protocol.

Everyone knows there can be no erecting of a border across the fields of Ireland. Johnson knew that when he campaigned for Brexit. He knew it when ...

Ministers had a chance to improve young people’s lives – and flunked it yet again | Simon Jenkins

The decision to water down the schools catch-up programme shows the obscene priorities of a cabinet of reckless spenders

It was a savage put-down. When Sir Kevan Collins, England’s schools recovery chief, left Boris Johnson’s office last week, his bid for a £15bn three-year education “catch-up” programme had been reduced to £1.4bn. The government’s watered-down package amounts to about £50 a year per pupil, against the US’s £1,600 and the Netherlands’ £2,500. Meanwhile, Johnson is spending billio...

Will ‘freedom day’ go ahead? The only thing we know is we don’t know | Simon Jenkins

As Covid data emerges, decisions over England’s easing on 21 June will go down to the wire. We must hope No 10 gets it right

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England faces the tensest two weeks of its entire lockdown. On 14 June, the government must decide if the long-promised “freedom day” of 21 June can proceed as promised. That promise has now been plunged into doubt. A three-day surge in “cases” of the variant of Covid first detected in India may, or may not, mark t...

Sanctions are imposed by the sanctimonious, and achieve nothing | Simon Jenkins

The west can disapprove all it likes of leaders like Belarus’s Lukashenko, but only engagement will change anything

What should we do about Belarus? It is becoming the North Korea of Europe, its opposition leader in exile, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, told the European parliament this week. But it must be the wrong question. The question is not what should we do, but what can we do?

European and American politicians reach for economic sanctions as they used to reach for gunboats or bombers. But gunbo...

For all its faults, the BBC’s capacity for critical journalism should be celebrated | Simon Jenkins

Ministers hate the BBC for understandable reasons, but Britain is all the better for it

Good news. The system is working. Britain’s largest media organisation by far, the BBC, has ministers howling for its blood. The ancient beast is wandering through the bush, wounded by the Martin Bashir affair and trumpeting its regrets. Tory ministers are taking potshots at it with headlines, eager for preferment in Boris Johnson’s next reshuffle.

We know what happens next. The BBC sings another verse of “less...

There’s nothing ‘great’ about this new British Railways revamp | Simon Jenkins

Ministers will not get the rail system back on track until they allow individual train companies to manage their assets

No enemy of Tory policy is as savage as a Johnson Tory. Enter Grant Shapps, transport secretary. His proposed reincarnation of British Railways (ridiculously with “Great” attached) ends one of the major failures of modern British government. He accuses the botched Conservative privatisation of British Rail in 1993 of leading to “fragmentation, confusion and overcomplication”. In...