Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 65

If we value rural Britain, we can’t build houses all over it | Simon Jenkins

The countryside should not be up for speculative land grab – we need clear rules about which areas are open for development

Government housing policy has lost all contact with planning Britain’s countryside. This week the Campaign to Protect Rural England is up in arms over house-building in green belts, and over the lack of what it calls affordable housing. These are a distraction. It is planning as such that has collapsed.

The CPRE is concerned that 8,000 houses were built last year on green-...

The crisis in Northants reveals a Britain heading back to pre-Victorian days | Simon Jenkins

With the council close to bankruptcy, years of austerity are coming home to roost. The government should uncap local taxes

Is Northamptonshire Britain’s first banana republic? This once lovely county, much of it now a waste of wind turbines and warehouses, is close to bankruptcy. It must sack staff, freeze pay,  close two-thirds of its libraries and stop all bus subsidies. It faces default on its statutory duty to public health, children in care and the elderly. While much of this is due...

The railways are a mess. But it’s not all Chris Grayling’s fault | Simon Jenkins

Fragmented rail privatisation has resulted in a fiasco for which no one person or company can justly be held responsible

Which question is best when something goes wrong? How to put it right, or who to blame? The first makes sense, but the second is more fun. That is why Chris Grayling, the hapless transport secretary, is being cursed by rail commuters from Brighton to Bedford to Blackpool. Today, yet another emergency timetable enters operation on Northern rail, announced with an inaugural ca...

Is execution Britain’s new populist ruse? | Simon Jenkins

The government’s cooperation over the US trial of two Isis suspects undermines British justice, even if it has been forced to temporarily suspend it

I shuddered at the news that Japan has finally hanged the remaining six sarin killers of 1995, as well as their leader. It was not the ghoulishness that dismayed me, but the return to fashion of execution under the guise of counterterrorism. Capital punishment has long been a populist cause. Four years ago, a majority of Britons still supported it...

Don’t worry, a no-deal Brexit won’t be allowed to happen | Simon Jenkins

Even if Britain does leave the EU on WTO rules next March, life will still go on largely as normal

Now they are talking car crashes. From Brussels comes Project Fear Mk II, a “preparedness” guide for Europe if there is no deal on Brexit. It is Brussels-speak for a terrorism red alert. It covers such things as passports, air traffic control, financial transfers, military bases, data protection, medicines licensing and all the border clutter we have spent half a century removing. Unlike the rema...

A second referendum during Brexit negotiations would be absurd | Simon Jenkins

Justine Greening’s suggestion fails to acknowledge that the current parliamentary deadlock is party political

• Justine Greening endorses second Brexit referendum

An eerie truth is starting to dawn. Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn agree on Brexit. They are both realists. They know Britain needs a customs union with the EU. Perhaps they should go off to a Welsh mountain together, and do a Trump/Putin? Either way, it is time for parliament to offer united support to Britain’s negotiators in Brusse...

Donald Trump is right. Nato is a costly white elephant | Simon Jenkins

Its founding mission to combat a Russian invasion has faded. Europe needs a much leaner fighting force

Donald Trump is a pig, a liar, a woman-hater, a racist, a monster of bombast – and did I mention a disrupter and total bastard as well? Does that feel better? Comment on the current US president seems to require a wallow in the pit of competitive contempt. But it just plays his game.

I regard Trump as an aberration, a temporary trauma afflicting US politics. He honours the thesis of the histor...

David Davis has thrown a spanner into May’s Brexit plans | Simon Jenkins

Common sense says the UK needs workable trade arrangements with the EU – but the PM still faces a battle

No sooner does Theresa May win her cabinet critics over to her Brexit compromise than David Davis rains on her parade. Her chief Brexit negotiator has had enough. His resignation letter suggests a long-disaffected colleague, sidelined from negotiations and fed up with being the butt of feuds. Quite what he wanted from his job that was remotely achievable remains obscure. Now he is yesterday...

If the novichok was planted by Russia, where’s the evidence? | Simon Jenkins

No one has a clue about the Wiltshire poisonings – though the most obvious motive is someone out to embarrass Vladimir Putin

I seem to be the only person alive with no clue as to who has poisoned four people in Wiltshire. I am told that only Russians have access to the poison, known as novichok – though the British research station of Porton Down, located ominously nearby, clearly knows a lot about it. Otherwise, I repeat, I have no clue. I suppose I can see why the Kremlin might want to kill...

How to improve the World Cup? Scrap penalties and move the goalposts | Simon Jenkins

There’s no need to settle matches with a lottery when football’s laws could be tweaked to make them more high scoring

Penalty shootouts are an offence against the greatest of team games, association football. They are a lottery, doctored to add tension, personal agony, group ecstasy and nationalist hysteria, for the benefit of television. They are to sport what Love Island is to Romeo and Juliet.

Related: England’s win shows you can shake off the past – and not just on the pitch | Jonathan Fre...