Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 74

From Spain to Iraq, states have to see that suppressing secession won’t work | Simon Jenkins

Madrid’s heavy-handed approach to Catalonian independence is a mistake. It’s better to compromise and allow a degree of ‘autonomy-lite’

Forget Brexit. The referendum that really matter is this Sunday in the wealthy Spanish province of Catalonia and its great city of Barcelona. A Catalan vote for independence from Spain would trigger a similar vote in Euskal Herria, the Basque country, and start Spain down the road to disintegration. The outcome of the referendum is considered too close to call...

Corbyn’s man of the future act is hooked on dogmas of the past | Simon Jenkins

Look behind the slogans and Labour’s new project reeks of pre-Blair revivalism, not the radicalism of the left

Jeremy Corbyn’s passage from antihero to premier-in-waiting is the phenomenon of modern politics. Three months ago the idea was absurd that a gauche, accident-prone backbench grump might plausibly stand before cheering supporters and declare himself “in the political mainstream … on the threshold of power and ready for government”. Yet so it is. Were Theresa May’s Tories to implode, w...

May has to take back control of Brexit from the hard-liners and the plotters | Simon Jenkins

Florence is the prime minister’s chance to build bridges with EU negotiators and quell the revolt from within her party

At last Theresa May will make the speech she should have made a year ago. Her Florence proposals are clearly intended to decontaminate the polluted air round the Brexit talks. She hopes for concord with EU negotiators on a compromise first step towards British departure, on a reasonable timetable. There has to be a deal on this. There has to be a move back from the “cliff-edg...

Ignore Trump’s lies. North Korea is no threat to Britain | Simon Jenkins

Kim Jong-un does not present an existential threat, and in the end it will be up to China to cut him down to size

Donald Trump’s United Nations performance on Tuesday was dangerous. It was dangerous not for the testosterone tub-thumping and infantile imagery. It was dangerous for being based on a lie. Trump said: “If forced to defend ourselves and our allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

Related: Is Trump about to repeat George W Bush's worst mistake? | Michael F...

If the west is to bombard North Korea with anything, let it be capitalism | Simon Jenkins

Kim Jong-un’s latest provocations merely underline how ineffective sanctions and bluster are. Far better to undermine his regime with trade

Thank you, North Korea. Today’s latest firing of a missile over Japan into the Pacific surely demonstrates the most exquisite failure of western diplomacy in modern times. Another missile plops into the Pacific. Nobody is dead, no territory is conceded, no demand threatened. It was the dull rattle of an antique sabre, intended to do one thing: to humiliate...

Crushing morale, killing productivity – why do offices put up with meetings? | Simon Jenkins

There’s no proof that organisations benefit from the endless cycle of these charades, but they can’t stop it. We’re addicted

Just off to a meeting? Stop right now. Turn back. You will be stuck in an overheated room, chained to a table for an absurd length of time and stopped from proper work. Worse, we are now told that just sitting there is a killer. It shortens life. You will die.

Related: One hour of activity needed to offset harmful effects of sitting at a desk

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Why are 40 hardline MPs setting the tone of the Brexit debate? | Simon Jenkins

The number of die-hard Brexiters is tiny. The vast majority of MPs urgently need to build a cross-party coalition to come up with a coherent plan

In every battle there are die-hards, last-ditchers, merchants of death or glory. Forty Tory MPs are lining up like lemmings to race to the Brexit cliff edge. They are writing an open letter that demands no fancy transitions or economic areas, no single markets, no pseudo-Brexits. For them, Brexit is the second coming. On the appointed day in March 20...

Britain can control immigration. What drives this debate is nasty politics | Simon Jenkins

Appearances, not reality, have dominated policy in this country. Social neglect caused the Brexit vote – when will Theresa May address that?

In politics, optics trump metrics. Tuesday’s leak of a Home Office draft on post-EU migration policy indicates the hardest face of Brexit. Its language is Home Office repressive. It reads like a prison governor’s report, less concerned with the inmates than with the height of the perimeter fence. What with the border computer fiasco, the detention violenc...

The EU is blackmailing Britain – and it may well work | Simon Jenkins

Brexit negotiations between David Davis and Michel Barnier have stalled over money, and this time it’s not clear how Britain will muddle through

The stalled Brexit negotiations are now serious. We used to assume that these matters would resolve into predictable compromises. There is a box of fudge under the table, a quid pro quo at the end of the road. Even in North Korea we sense that sanity will one day out.

Related: Liam Fox accuses EU of trying to 'blackmail' UK over Brexit deal

The EU and...

Ignore the panic. There’s little point learning languages at school | Simon Jenkins

Reactionary educators fetishise languages because they are easy to test. But the obsession with measuring comes at the expense of true education

Education policy is like defence policy. It is always fighting the last war but one. Predictable woe has greeted the plummeting number of pupils studying modern languages, which have fallen by roughly 10% in a year and German by one-third since 2010. Only Chinese and Arabic look reasonably healthy – I wonder if this might be because rising numbers of...