Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 82

Libraries are dying – but it’s not about the books | Simon Jenkins

The internet stole the monopoly on knowledge but it can’t recreate a sense of place. Revival is possible

Public libraries have had another bad year. They are like churches and local railways. People like having them around, and are angry if they close. But as for using them, well, there is so little time these days.

The latest Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy figures on library closures are dire. In the past five years 343 have gone. Librarian numbers are down by a quarter,...

Never mind Russia – it’s the internet’s culture of lies we should be tackling | Simon Jenkins

With the digital air thick with mendacity, and cyber-conflict on the rise, it’s clear that the Google/Facebook duopoly badly needs some kind of external control

Everyone can lie. That is the agony and the ecstasy of the internet. It is guilt-free, open-season, licensed mendacity. You can forget the glory days when it was the empire of the weak, the kingdom of the free. It is like capitalism in the 19th century. It is raw, unfettered, unreliable power. We are right to fear it.

Related: A challe...

Pale, stale males are the last group it’s OK to vilify | Simon Jenkins

My cohort already faced routine contempt. Now we find ourselves blamed for Brexit and Donald Trump

I am hideously white, and not a man but “male”. Being over 50, I suffer the added failing of being disgustingly old. Such are the routine humiliations of my group. The BBC was called hideously white by its former boss Greg Dyke, and the West End stage hideously white by Andrew Lloyd Webber. This week the Football Association was dismissed by critics as a bunch of “old white men”. Note that it is...

Cameron can’t be a victim of populism – the term no longer means anything | Simon Jenkins

Politicians and philosophers, proceed with extreme caution. The political words we all learned in childhood – left, right, liberal, conservative – are turning to dust

Poor David Cameron was defeated, he says, by “populism”. It was not by people who disagreed with him or by his political enemies or those he had offended. It was an evil called populism. What on earth did he mean?

The answer is near meaningless. Populism has become a euphemism for exploiting the people’s will, supposedly by facile...

The supreme court is doing MPs’ dirty work for them on article 50 | Simon Jenkins

With its badly drafted legislation, parliament created this mess – and parliament should sort it out

Cicero would have seen a funny thing on the way to the forum this week. The issue before the highest court in the land was a fine nuance of constitutional law. The judge in charge, Lord Neuberger, was telling a howling mob to stop shouting over what he insisted was a boring legal decision. His judges would decide it themselves, boringly. Everyone go home.

To the mob it was not boring a...

Boris Johnson may wish otherwise, but the old world order is finished | Simon Jenkins

The new populism and the conflicts of the current century require fresh ways of thinking. His latest speech shows the foreign secretary is stuck in the past

The thoughts of a British foreign secretary on world affairs are like those of a sommelier on wine – they don’t alter the taste. Boris Johnson, so often off message, was back on it today at that home of the bland, Chatham House. He gazed at the horizon and declared himself in favour of “a rules-based international order”, and against “reve...

Blame the identity apostles – they led us down this path to populism | Simon Jenkins

With its over-defensive advocacy of minorities, the left has jeopardised half a century of liberalism

I have no tribe. I have no comfort blanket, no default button that enables me to join the prevailing hysteria and cry in unison, “Of course, it’s all the fault of X.” Meanwhile we everywhere see the familiar landscape clouding over. There are new partings of the ways, disoriented soldiers wandering the battlefield, licking wounds. The liberal centre cannot hold. It cries with Yeats, “What roug...

Is a second referendum a bad idea? Not if we ask the right question | Simon Jenkins

Any attempt to invalidate the first Brexit vote would be wrong. But that does not mean there is no need to further consult British public opinion

Let’s be clear about second referendums. There are “good” ones and “bad” ones. A bad one is a desperate attempt by the government of the day and its allies to negate a first referendum it did not like. This was practised by Denmark (1993) and Ireland (2009). It worked, which is why the anti-Brexit lobby, now supported by Tony Blair, likes the idea. S...

Hammond knows Britain’s regional imbalance is risky. Why didn’t he fix it? | Simon Jenkins

In the 2016 autumn statement the cities of the north have lost out, and all the spoils have gone to London and the south-east – again

The chancellor, Philip Hammond, is Theresa May’s chauffeur. It must be a ghastly job. He has to drive the economy towards Brexit, with no instructions, no map and no clear road ahead. Meanwhile, he has three blind mice in the back seat: David Davis, minister for I-haven’t-a-clue, Liam Fox, minister for what-on-earth-is-happening, and Boris Johnson, minister for...

I’m glad cryonics is legal – we should all have rights over our bodies | Simon Jenkins

A judge granted a dying teenager’s wish to be frozen in the hope she might live again. This decision was about the rights of all of us

The right to make decisions about our bodies, provided we don’t harm others, is sacred. That right was today upheld by a High Court judge in approving a 14-year-old London girl’s dying wish to have her body frozen. She did so in the hope one day of coming back to life. This hope clearly gave comfort to a dying person.

Cryonics is, to many of us, absurd. But the...