Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 44

The revolving door between City banks and Westminster is distorting our economy | Simon Jenkins

It cannot be right for the former chancellor to ‘advise’ an industry that massively overlaps with government

It’s a nice job, chancellor of the exchequer. Sets you up well, should things not go right. The recently deposed Sajid Javid was a simple banker until in 2010 he got bored and entered politics. Within a decade, the Tory party’s slaughter of the talents shot him through five cabinet posts in as many years until as chancellor he fell foul of Johnson-Cummings syndrome. He is now nursing his w...

The links between politics and banking are desperately unhealthy, for all of us | Simon Jenkins

Between Whitehall and the City there is a revolving door of co-dependency

It’s a nice job, chancellor of the exchequer. Sets you up well, should things not go right. The recently deposed Sajid Javid was a simple banker until in 2010 he got bored and entered politics. Within a decade, the Tory party’s slaughter of the talents shot him through five cabinet posts in as many years until as chancellor he fell foul of Johnson-Cummings syndrome. He is now nursing his wounds on the backbenches and return...

What to learn from A-level chaos? GCSE results should now be thrown in the bin | Simon Jenkins

The introduction of an algorithm ignored the fact that losers shout louder than winners

Poor Gavin Williamson. This year should have been his dream. More British students than ever will go on to university. More than ever will be from disadvantaged backgrounds. And their unexamined A-levels will stand to their credit, with 2% more getting A and A* grades. Pupils everywhere would be pictured “jumping for joy” in the time-honoured newspaper fashion.

But these are facts and facts make poor headlines....

The age of the office is over – the future lies in Britain's commuter towns | Simon Jenkins

The rise in home working has thrown city centres into crisis. If I were in the property game, I’d buy anywhere with a cathedral

Is the office dead? Not an office, which everyone needs, but “the office”, the institution, the corporate HQ, the great overhead in the sky. Just as once the farm gave way to the factory and the factory to the desk, so technology transforms the nature of work. At the turn of the 21st century the digital revolution shrank offices to tiny screens. From then on offices have...

Dive for cover – Boris Johnson is invoking 'morality' in his Covid policies | Simon Jenkins

Yes, the schools should reopen next month – but where was the talk of morality at the height of the first wave?

We should beware. The prime minister has recovered from Covid-19 only to be struck down by a new ailment: morality.

Not reopening schools next month, says Boris Johnson, would be “socially intolerable, economically unsustainable and morally indefensible”. The harm done to children’s prospects and mental health would be “far more damaging” than any risk from the virus. “We have a moral du...

Boris Johnson cries 'nimbyism', but his planning changes will be disastrous | Simon Jenkins

Scrapping regulations in England will unleash a wave of urban sprawl, worsen inequality – and leave locals powerless to stop it

The most extraordinary upheaval in modern British government is to be introduced this week by Boris Johnson. He is, in effect, to end planning permission. Local councils and those they represent are to be stripped of control over new buildings, to be replaced by central government “zoning” commissions. At the weekend, the housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, promised a “ch...

Boris Johnson's list of lords is a disgrace | Simon Jenkins

The way members of our second chamber are chosen casts a pall of corruption over Westminster

Boris Johnson’s latest nominations to the House of Lords are shameless. This is no reflection on the individuals concerned, merely on the decrepit state of the constitution that selects them, and on the man who is its current custodian.

It reminds us of a theory constantly denied, but often posed: that membership of the British parliament can effectively be purchased. No British minister should ever have t...

British prisons are inhumane and do not prevent crime – most of them should go | Simon Jenkins

If you want to prevent reoffending, you shouldn’t lock people up. Where is the politician brave enough to admit this?

For the past four months, two-thirds of Britain’s prisoners have been in quasi-solitary confinement, locked in cells for at least 23 hours a day. According to the Prison Reform Trust, evidence indicates this does permanent mental health damage. At this point, prison becomes a life sentence. On any basis, it is barbaric.

Britain’s prison record is currently, like its public health ...

The Spain quarantine decision shows No 10 is still in coronavirus panic mode | Simon Jenkins

The pandemic is leaving a trail of unreliable data. When it is converted to policy, there are huge consequences for us all

Coronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverage

Mention Spain just now and Downing Street panics. It was from Spain in March that the biggest early importation of Covid-19 was thought to have come, according to an Oxford-Edinburgh working paper. Carriers were greeted at Heathrow with open arms. While the rest of Europe was clamping down its borders, Boris Johnson ...

Boris Johnson is trying to woo Scotland. But only money is holding the union together | Simon Jenkins

The task for Scottish nationalists is to find a way out of dependence on London

At least Boris Johnson has gone to Scotland. Thatcher would never have dared at the height of her unpopularity. But nothing speaks louder of the state of the UK union than the coronavirus crisis. While its level of excess deaths has been slightly lower than England’s, Scotland has one of the highest death rates among comparable European countries, and made serious failings in protecting care homes. Yet Scotland’s firs...