Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 64

Yes we must take back control, not from Brussels – from Whitehall | Simon Jenkins

While local council budgets plummet, centralised government gains ever more power

Take back control. After two bloodstained years in British politics, it remains the one Brexit slogan with a modicum of potency. It drips with self-righteous empowerment. It depicts remainers as shiftily in thrall to Brussels, while shielding Brexiters from the charge of mere xenophobia. It is also utterly cynical.

In a recent series of interviews for this paper, John Harris travelled the country, going “anywhere...

Sajid Javid’s immigration proposal exposes the insanity of Brexit | Simon Jenkins

The home secretary knows he has to keep Britain’s borders open, despite migration being the key driver of the Brexit vote

Reality is at last dawning. The home secretary, Sajid Javid, is reportedly to propose that EU passport holders will be waved through immigration “for 30 months”, in the event of a no-deal Brexit next March. They will only need to apply for visas later, if they wish to stay permanently.

This is reportedly a concession to business, employers and the chancellor, Philip Hammond....

Walking in Benjamin Britten's footsteps, Suffolk

Simon Jenkins walks from the Snape Maltings concert hall to Aldeburgh beach, under the vast skies and through the marshland that so inspired the composer

Just a few yards separate the doors of Snape Maltings from the Alde marshes. They pass from modern concert hall to utter serenity. Music and place do not always make happy partners, but the music of Benjamin Britten is infused with this Suffolk coast. I once heard the high-pitched chords of his Sea Interludes drift out of a rehearsal and sett...

Fragmented railways will never work, public or private | Simon Jenkins

As long as Britain’s trains and infrastructure are run as separate entities, the chaos will continue

Imagine going into a restaurant, sitting down and giving your order to the waiter. The order is then passed into a back kitchen, where someone employed by a different owner is contracted to cook it, arguing all the time with his lawyers and accountants over the recipe and the price. That is Britain’s rail system, born of idiocy and ideology in Whitehall 25 years ago. It is demoralised and it i...

Michael Gove is right: it’s vital to get the Chequers deal through | Simon Jenkins

Hard-Brexit fantasists and deluded remainers who threaten to oppose the plan in parliament risk unleashing chaos

Sanity time is at hand. Michael Gove is right. The reckless, crash-bang-wallop of the hard-Brexit fantasists has had its day. They have not produced a plausible future for British trade with Europe. The default option is now “crashing out”, and that is infantile. Of course the Chequers proposal has problems. But it takes the UK out of the EU and keeps frictionless trade with EU memb...

God aside, for whom does Justin Welby speak? | Simon Jenkins

Even if you agree with the archbishop of Canterbury’s criticism of the gig economy, he has inappropriate power in a secular country

So it’s the Justin and Jezza show. The Church of England is no longer the Tory party at prayer, it is the Labour party. According to the archbishop of Canterbury, God is for higher taxes, trade union protection, a ban on the gig economy and a living wage of £8.75. He also wants universal credit to be abandoned. Or rather, if this is not God’s view, then why else i...

From Sweden to Brexit, immigration is the issue dividing Europe | Simon Jenkins

Xenophobia is sweeping the continent. European agreement to address migration is vital

The message is glaring from Sweden’s election result. There is one dominant issue in Europe’s politics at present, and it is immigration. It rules in Italy and Germany. It rules in Hungary and Austria. It rules from Serbia to Scandinavia. It dominates every meeting of the leaders of the EU. It obsesses the United Kingdom, except there it cloaks itself in the euphemism of “reaching trade agreements with the r...

Britain’s reaction to the Salisbury poisonings plays into Putin’s hands | Simon Jenkins

Secret agencies have their methods, unknown to their superiors, and no one’s hands are clean. The response to this attempted murder has been infantile

There is “no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”. The poet Thomas Babington Macaulay might have had in mind the saga of the attempted killing last March of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and the subsequent death of a bystander. The reaction to the sad affair has been cynical, dis...

Boris Johnson’s latest Brexit outburst combines madness and mendacity | Simon Jenkins

This is the worst way to stage a Tory leadership challenge. The Chequers deal is not ‘humiliating’ or a scandal

Never trust a man who can’t master his metaphors. Boris Johnson’s latest outburst has Theresa May’s Brexit tank flying a white flag while losing a wrestling match after being locked in a car boot as it cherrypicks a magnetic field. Is this the scrambled mind that reportedly called the Chequers deal a triumph a month ago – before deciding that writing Telegraph columns was easier than...

Hooligan Brexiters now offer a mad, dystopian future nobody voted for | Simon Jenkins

A hard Brexit would entail years of chaos. But no deal would be far worse, whatever Dominic Raab says

I was awakened by the bedside radio coming to life, leaving me briefly lost between a bad dream and reality. Two BBC World Service reporters were calmly discussing a nation gone raving mad. Its food needed stockpiling. Medicines were running low. Ports were jammed and motorways were turning into vast lorry parks. Foreigners were fleeing, care homes emptying of staff, fruit lying unpicked. Wher...