Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 7

Bankrupt and ravaged by student mental illness, Britain’s universities are badly in need of reform | Simon Jenkins

Tough questions need to be asked of these institutions, starting with: are they really the right place for so many young people?

Forget the NHS for a minute – and look to Britain’s universities, another institution in urgent need of fixing. A number are on the brink of bankruptcy or closure. Revenues are plummeting. Rich foreign students are vanishing. Jobs for graduates are falling and mental illness among students has reportedly multiplied by seven times in the past decade. The result is that i...

This winter fuel fiasco will save Labour £1.3bn this year. But it will cost Starmer more | Simon Jenkins

The PM’s poor approval rating suggests a tricky road ahead, and the Treasury’s macho posturing won’t help anyone

Should the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance be cut? For most people it’s a simple question, though most people’s opinion is of no account. For 404 Labour MPs, however, it is indeed of account. They get to vote on it.

Yet up to 50 are said to be struggling, with dozens being persuaded by their whips merely to abstain rather than vote against. What is the point? With a majority of 158, a...

Want justice for the victims of Grenfell? It’s now clearer than ever that public inquiries are not the answer | Simon Jenkins

Too much time and money is wasted on these buck-passing exercises, which only allow politicians and regulators off the hook

What is justice for Grenfell? After seven years of public inquiry we have a 1,700-page report and a cost of more than £200m. We have had investigations, books, plays and more than £100m spent on an ongoing police investigation.

Yet so far we have no closure, no prosecutions and no convictions. The word ‘“justice” does not appear in the recommendations of this week’s Moore-Bic...

What Blair can teach Starmer: pick your battles early, and surround yourself with experts | Simon Jenkins

The prime minister may not want a picture of Thatcher at No 10, but he could learn from his predecessors – and their mistakes

What can Keir Starmer learn from Tony Blair? He hit the ground running in handling last month’s rightwing riots over immigration. He rolled the pitch for Rachel Reeves’s first budget. He initiated a post-Brexit era with Germany. It looked good. Starmer’s watchword was “change”. Yet he could not face seeing Margaret Thatcher’s portrait in Downing Street, the one predecessor...

Kemi Badenoch wants to drag the Tories further right. That is a huge mistake | Simon Jenkins

What voters want is a display of reliability and competence – but the current favourite for next leader has other ideas

Politics never ends. Today the selection begins of the leader of the opposition and thus possibly the next British prime minister. The pollsters’ current favourite is Kemi Badenoch. She is intelligent and clearly popular with her party’s grassroots. But the supposedly rightwing stall set out in her manifesto, published in the Times, raises more doubts than it offers answers.

If t...

Keir Starmer, please – scrap the distasteful weekly brawl that is PMQs | Simon Jenkins

Parliament’s fusty old procedures badly need updating. The PM should start with a spectacle that serves no benefit

Boring. That was the universal response to Wednesday’s first prime minister’s questions of the new parliament. Where was the screaming, yelling, insulting and air punching? This is supposed to be Strictly Come Politicking. Get off stage, the two of you. Zero points.

The Telegraph condemned the new PMQs as a “love-in”. The prime minister was like a teenager “breaking the news he had lo...

Kamala Harris is no dominating leader – and that may be her biggest strength | Simon Jenkins

A shortage of accomplishments as vice-president does not matter: her real job is to weld together a shattered Democratic party

Kamala Harris is now the frontrunner to be the Democratic party’s candidate for the most powerful job in the world. She appears sorely underqualified, though she is hardly more so than the two men she wishes to succeed. Criticising the failings of leaders thrown up by US democracy has long been a European sport. It may be more useful instead to suggest their possible stre...

David Cameron failed to foist new houses on rural areas. Why does Keir Starmer think he’ll succeed? | Simon Jenkins

Labour’s bonfire of planning regulations will stir up the shires and let down those most in need – but the construction lobby will be happy

Outside Glastonbury last month, festivalgoers might have caught sight of David Cameron’s policy of planning de-regulation in action, sprawling across Somerset. Acres of identikit houses, mini-Tudor and mini-Georgian, seemingly flown in and dumped from somewhere off London’s North Circular Road. Hundreds of other similar estates appeared across Gloucestershire...

It’s worrying to see the prime minister cheerleading for war. Will Ukraine turn into Starmer’s Iraq? | Simon Jenkins

The Nato summit offered a chance to work towards resolution. But instead, Starmer talked about long-range missiles

When Keir Starmer entered Downing Street, a few foreign events were arranged to glamorise his arrival. He visited a Nato summit and promised to spend more on defence. He pledged £3bn a year for Ukraine, apparently from his back pocket. He was a little reckless and said his talks with Joe Biden had happened “at pace” and were attentive to detail. But he said something else. He wanted ...

He’s beaten and humiliated, but Rishi Sunak has one final job to do – for party and country | Simon Jenkins

He must do everything he can to make sure it is MPs, and not party members, who choose his successor

You can grieve over the bodies, the coffins, the funeral rites, but the worst aftermath of death is the autopsy. Who, or what, was to blame?

Focus groups at the start of the campaign were clear. The electorate wanted to blame the sufferings of the country on one thing: 14 years of Tory rule. In Scotland it passed a similar judgment on nationalist rule. Polls showed that Labour’s leader, Keir Starme...