Tag: Jenkins
Simply throwing money at the NHS won’t solve all its problems
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Watch the news each day and you might regard Britain’s NHS as a black, swirling pit into which ever vaster sums of money constantly vanish. All it does is answer back with screams of hospitals near collapse, queueing ...
Most Britons want assisted dying legalised. Why are MPs too cowardly to do it?
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What are MPs for? The assisted dying bill, to be debated on Friday in the House of Lords, ranks with past laws on divorce, abortion and sexuality in the canon of social liberalism. It is unfinished business of the 196...
Dedicated and tireless, David Amess was a paragon of a good constituency MP
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British politics rightly commemorates its own. David Amess, killed in his home constituency last week, was eulogised on Monday in the Commons and St Margaret’s church, Westminster, as what the prime minister called “o...
The National Trust has needlessly provoked an ‘anti-woke’ campaign
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The National Trust has more members than all of Britain’s political parties put together. It is certain that those five and a half million members will agree on nothing. That is why the Trust’s leadership has long tak...
Train or plane? The climate crisis is forcing us to rethink all long-distance travel
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All domestic plane journeys in Britain should be banned and passengers told to take a train. So says the Campaign for Better Transport in its contribution to the climate emergency debate. Planes emit six times more CO...
Tory ideals count for nothing in the kneejerk era of Boris Johnson
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Who would be a Tory ideologue? One minute you must favour a private-sector, low-tax, deregulated economy, basking in the glories of free trade. The next you must favour state spending, corporate taxes, regulated energ...
Privatisation may be on its knees, but ministers can make a mess of the railways too
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The collapse this week of Southeastern trains and the investigation of its accounts by the Serious Fraud Office signals the death knell of rail privatisation, after a quarter century of ideological turmoil, political ...
Absence makes the plot grow wilder
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Another return to the plot after absence. To and fro. I am anxious. Autumn has rolled in fast. I am concerned at the speed of change. I am nervous as I walk up the hill. The day starts sluggish and later now. The sun’...
Ever-changing dialects keep English moving – but grammar is its north star
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I say tomahto and you say tomayto. My wife says dahrling and I say my dear. We all speak differently, and some of us speak different. Does it really matter? Things matter if people think they do. I remember being with...
Boris Johnson’s military alliance in the Pacific is reckless post-imperial nostalgia
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The Aukus defence deal between Britain, the US and Australia grows murkier by the day. Essentially it is the outcome of an industrial dispute over who will build eight submarines for the Australian military. Australia...
Jeremy Clarkson’s Cotswolds farm is an ill omen for the countryside
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In 2008 Jeremy Clarkson thought a little agriculture on the side might do him good. He bought a farm in fashionable Cotswold country, acquired a Lamborghini tractor and a handful of local workers and found the experie...
Boris Johnson is right that we have to live with Covid, but he’s not making it easy
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Eighteen months is a long time in Covid politics. Boris Johnson’s much-flagged series of announcements this week for the UK will mark his route “back to normal” and to “learning to live with the disease”. Like most pe...
Boris Johnson’s biggest lie about Europe is finally coming home to roost
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It was the big Brexit lie. No, not the £350m a week to spend on the NHS or the “bonfire” of red tape. The lie was that the shambles now enveloping British trade with Europe was an unavoidable price worth paying to lea...
Biden isn’t the first president to promise never to wage another war of intervention
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Joe Biden declares an end to “an era of major military operations to remake other countries”. A president’s job, he says, is to protect and defend the “fundamental national security interest of the United States of Am...
Britons want to blame anyone for chaos in Afghanistan – except ourselves
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Who can we blame? There must be someone. When disaster lies all around, democracy craves a culprit, someone to carry the can. This past weekend has seen an orgy of blaming: of Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, Dominic Raab (B...
Tony Blair damns the Afghan withdrawal but he would do better to show remorse
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Imbecilic, tragic, dangerous and unnecessary are the words used by Tony Blair to describe the US withdrawal from Afghanistan – and Britain’s as well. The former British prime minister believes the west should stay to ...