Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 45

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...

Britain deserves better than an Old Etonian Donald Trump | Simon Jenkins

His illness aside, Boris Johnson’s leadership style has served the country badly during its worst crisis in decades

Britain’s prime minister is looking ever more like an Old Etonian Donald Trump. A premiership that began with sacked ministers, party purges and vacuous slogans has continued in the same vein. Revelations in the Sunday Times of No 10 during Johnson’s illness are alarming. With a prime minister locked in his bedroom, his absentee aide Dominic Cummings manoeuvred the ousting of the he...

The Iraq war is finally getting some proper scrutiny – from a TV programme | Simon Jenkins

More than 15 years after Bush and Blair’s invasion, the errors of the greatest war crime of our age are being exposed

Once Upon a Time in Iraq is the most searing anti-war documentary I have seen. In five parts on Mondays on BBC2, it is not bangs, screams and tears. The searing is not visceral. It is intellectual. In among the footage of the 2003 war, we hear simply the calm narrative of people whose lives were traumatised by the conflict, who witnessed the gut-wrenching obscenity of two great d...

The Tories’ latest Brexit plans expose frictionless trade as a fiction

Firms trying to rebuild after lockdown are being plunged into more uncertainty by this incompetent government

When Boris Johnson sold Brexit to the British electorate in 2016, his pledge was that it would be “frictionless”. Just how monumental this deceit was is now becoming apparent.

You cannot leave a single market across a frictionless border – and you never could. Today the minister for the cabinet office, Michael Gove, and home secretary, Priti Patel, were forced to spell out this reality. Go...

Rishinomics means centralisation like we've scarcely seen before | Simon Jenkins

Forget government by local communities in their own interests: in Sunak’s Britain, Whitehall will be the master of all it surveys

So this is Rishinomics. The Tory party might well wonder, what is this cuckoo in our nest? It means colossal public spending, stupefying debt, subsidies doled out on all sides, and a private sector strangled by whimsical regulation. Perhaps a truth is emerging. Old-fashioned Toryism was always the free market’s fair-weather friend. At the first sign of trouble, it runs...

Thank God for Britain's arts rescue money. But could we be more creative about it? | Simon Jenkins

The £1.57bn relief package is welcome. It should be followed up with ticket vouchers to make sure there are bums on seats

You can fill a plane with people, but not a concert hall. You can go to a cinema, but not a church service. You can crawl the pubs of Soho, but not darken its theatre doors. Deep in their Whitehall bunker, Boris Johnson’s joyless apparatchiks daily reveal their prejudices – and the lobbies to which they are susceptible.

Related: 'At last a glimpse of hope': UK arts figures on ...