Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 74

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...

Barcelona is Europe’s seventh vehicle attack in a year. What can be done? | Simon Jenkins

The white van has become the poor man’s guided missile. We must work out how to retain a balance between defacing cities and averting risk

Europe has endured seven acts of vehicle terrorism in the past year, and the Barcelona killer was apparently able just to walk away. What on earth can be done?

Events yesterday in Calatonia suggest that, as with the London Bridge attacks of last spring, police are getting better at responding to these acts of carnage. The swift erection of barriers and the s...

With every sneer, liberals just make Trump stronger | Simon Jenkins

Critics seem obsessed with attacking the president. They would better off reaching out to his supporters

Did I tell you Donald Trump is a vulgar, foul-mouthed, meat-faced, 71-year-old redneck buffoon? To be honest, he is a fossil-fuel guzzling, Big Mac-eating, pussy-grabbing, racist dick. He has hubris syndrome with paranoid narcissistic disorder. Do you read his tweets? The English is dreadful. How can a man run the country who is so uncouth, with that hair, those ties, those baggy suits? He...

Stop fretting about poorer men being single and get on with tackling poverty | Simon Jenkins

Endless leftwing research into Britain’s growing gap between rich and poor is a waste of time. We need to set aside partisan politics and act

Men from poor families are more likely to be single. So says the august Institute for Fiscal Studies. This follows studies “showing” that poor people are getting poorer and rich richer, that poor young people are getting poorer than their parents, and than old people. Poor people die younger. They get divorced more often. They do worse at school. They ea...

Vermeer was an authentic artistic genius – even if he did cheat | Simon Jenkins

Who cares if, as a sensational new book argues, the painter traced and copied to achieve his effects? What matters is that the end results were sublime

Johannes Vermeer was a cheat. He was a printmaker, a tracer, a copyist. Some might say he was not a real artist at all. So suggests Jane Jelley in a new book, Traces of Vermeer, on the Dutch master. It is borderline sensational.

Related: Vermeer: the artist who taught the world to see ordinary beauty

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