Fintan O’Toole is always worth reading, and his latest for The TLS is no exception. I particularly enjoyed this paragraph, which does a great job of summarising the failure of the current Government while setting out the challenge for the next:

Comparatives make Starmer look good, but they also make his task, if he wins, look overwhelming. Income inequality is higher in the UK than in any other large European country, with the exception of Italy. Typical households are 9 per cent poorer than their French counterparts and the poorest households are a staggering 60 per cent poorer than their equivalents in Ireland. Almost a third of young people in the UK are not engaged in any formal education by the age of 18 – compared to just one in five in France and Germany. UK hospitals now have fewer beds than all but one OECD advanced economy. Since 2005 UK companies have invested 20 per cent less than those in the US, France and Germany, placing the UK in the bottom 10 per cent of OECD countries in this category. Since 2008 the UK’s productivity gap with France, Germany and the US respectively has doubled to almost 20 per cent. It is quite possible for an incoming Labour government to do much better than all of this without doing nearly well enough to get the UK back on a par with the countries it used to be able to regard as its peers.

I’ve written many times before about how I could never be a politician, so this is never likely to be a problem for me: but where on earth do you start on sorting out this mess?

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I was surprised earlier this week to read of the drought in Barcelona, which has been ongoing for the last three years. I don’t think I’ve heard about it previously. Sandrine Morel’s article in Le Monde sets out several drastic actions which have been taken, including painting patches of grass green, restricting the use of showers in gyms and sports clubs, and planning to fill swimming pools with seawater. There’s a concerted effort to hide the problem from tourists, given the degree to which the local economy is reliant on them.

On February 12, Barcelona mayor Jaume Collboni visited the Pedralbes monastery and asked the nuns to pray for rain.

Two new desalination plants will come online in 2028, but I’m sure that feels a long time away for residents who can’t shower after playing friendly football games on the municipal pitches. As the summer looms, there are interim contingency plans to import (relatively small) quantities of water by ship, as became necessary during a less severe drought in 2008. The drought also affects trees: as more of them die off, less carbon dioxide is absorbed, fuelling climate change further.

It continues to be confounding how little impact these sorts of events have on UK politics. We still drown in endless debates about what’s ‘affordable’ in mitigating climate catastrophe, seemingly disregarding the costs associated with the inevitable consequences of inaction. It’s unconscionable that climate change is nowhere to be found on Rishi Sunak’s list of five priorities—though given his singular inability to make progress on his priority areas, perhaps it makes little difference.

Diamond Geezer had a masterclass of a blog post yesterday. He crescendoed from an observation about the layout of departure boards at Euston station to a single state-of-the-nation sentence of 282 words.

Glorious.

At 2am last Sunday, as the temperature dropped below zero, a four-week-old baby was pulled out of the English Channel, clinging to life. Alongside, a pregnant woman with advanced hypothermia was rescued and admitted to hospital. Four people were found dead in the water; another body washed up hours later. All had been trying to cross the Channel to reach the UK.

Today, just three days later, we have the spectacle of the Conservative party voting to prevent people from claiming asylum in the UK. Instead, applicants will be flown to Rwanda to try their luck there, a country that the Government’s Bill declares safe—contrary to the view of the Supreme Court.

Rishi Sunak calls this ‘an effective deterrent’ to crossing the Channel. For this to be true, the possibility of living safely in Rwanda must be a fate more grave than the possibility of watching your newborn baby drown in freezing seawater in the dead of night. As Sophy Ridge might say: “I’m sorry, Prime Minister, but you can’t possibly believe that, can you?”

The Home Office has suggested that most of those who come to the UK in small boats are likely to have valid asylum claims. They are genuinely fleeing for their lives, and the rules allow them to resettle in the UK. In 2021, the then Home Secretary elected to lie about this, falsely claiming that ‘70% of individuals on small boats are single men who are effectively economic migrants’. No apology has been forthcoming.

The man who was, until last night, deputy chair of the Conservative Party, says that asylum seekers ought to ‘fuck off back to France’. He pretends not to understand that the UK’s asylum laws are more generous than those in France. In the UK, more than 80% of asylum claims are successful; in France, more than 80% are rejected.

The Rwanda plan maintains the UK rules, cements the underlying calculation and boosts the business model of people traffickers: risking life by crossing the Channel still offers the best hope by far for asylum seekers to be allowed to resettle in a country where they are safe from persecution.

There is a simple way to ‘stop the boats’—or, more accurately, to stop frightened, persecuted people risking their lives. Dangerous crossings of the Channel in small boats are unnecessary, a product solely of Government cruelty: we have ferries and a tunnel. The Government could allow people to apply for asylum before they arrive. If successful, the Government could provide safe passage. Instead, the Government prefers to continue with a system under which the only way that people can claim asylum is by coming to the UK, a fact which literally requires small boat crossings and on which the entire business model of human traffickers across the Channel depends.

Moving to offshore applications wouldn’t be easy: it’s hard for someone who is fleeing persecution to fill in forms and engage with bureaucracy. It would need to be a caring, supportive, accessible, approachable, thoughtfully designed service. It would probably be expensive. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives support this approach.

It takes only a passing acquaintance with history to understand that regret most often stems from treating people unkindly and inhumanely, not the converse. This isn’t a difficult long-term call, but the state of our politics means it’s not necessarily an electorally expedient one.

The politically astute thing for the Conservative party would have been to couple offshore applications with the Rwanda scheme: let people apply before reaching the UK and be given passage straight to Rwanda if successful, or passage to the UK if extenuating circumstances apply. It would still be an appallingly inhumane derogation of international law, but it would have been far more likely actually to stop dangerous crossings.

Instead, we’re invited to believe that the Prime Minister believes that living in Rwanda is a fate worse than death.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

On Sunday, the country was subject to the ignominy of our Prime Minister standing next to a flood and talking about how his Government had spent £5.2bn on flood defences—as he put it, ‘overall investment that’s going into flood defences is at a very, very high level’.

I don’t know what reaction this was intended to provoke, but it’s hard to believe that anyone who witnessed the spectacle didn’t think, ‘Well, it’s not bloody working, is it?’

This would be a slightly unfair conclusion—Government investment in flood defences protected thousands of homes—but the choice of imagery is baffling to the point of incompetence.

King Cnut is often maligned as believing he could use his power to stop the tide from coming in, whereas the legend is actually that he commanded the sea to retreat as a demonstration of his own lack of power. There is a hint of the, shall we say, ‘silly’ version of the Cnut story in standing in a flooded area and talking about the billions the Government has spent on avoiding that very fate.

Of course, the heavy periods of rain which cause this sort of flooding will only increase as we further corrupt Earth’s climate. A warmer atmosphere means more evaporation which means more rain: I don’t need to rehearse the water cycle for you, though basic scientific principles are sometimes a challenge for senior politicians.

Sunak’s decision to pour cold water on the UK’s net zero strategy also guarantees pouring floodwater into people’s kitchens, bathrooms, and living rooms.

For example, over 80% of new cars sold in Norway are now electric; sales of petrol and diesel cars will be banned next year. Rishi Sunak refuses to aim for the same here even within a decade.

When Sunak expels hot air in claiming that the UK is ‘leading the world’ on climate change, it neither makes it true nor dries anyone’s flooded home. It only serves to underline his disconnect from the reality the rest of us face.

After the Prime Minister decided that the level of immigration into the UK was ‘far too high’, it felt like he’d decided to come up with a new plan in about thirty seconds. Wendy and I watched in total bafflement as the seemingly nonsensical details appeared on our screens.

Perhaps the best commentary I’ve seen on the topic is from Jonn Elledge, who properly captures the sense of utter befuddlement we felt:

There are so many issues with this policy that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’ll reduce Britain’s competitive advantage in sectors, like science and higher education, where non-British people choose to work here for reasons other than money. It’ll wreck the NHS and social care system, which depend on immigrant labour to function and will struggle to recruit if workers can no longer bring their children. (Sure, you can argue that those systems should wean themselves off cheap migrant labour by hiring more staff domestically; but doing so would likely require substantial budget increases which ministers have made abundantly clear they have no intention of providing.) It means smugly telling the public that we are reserving not the best, but worst, paying jobs for the domestic workforce – and doing so just as we approach an election year.

And it means telling British voters that they no longer have the right to bring someone they love to their own country, simply because they don’t earn enough money. The estimate doing the rounds for the proportion of the public affected is 73%; given that people are more likely to fall in love when they are young and not earning very much, that may well be an under-estimate. And on Tuesday night, the government declined to promise that this would not affect visa renewals for those who are already here. They’re literally telling the voters that, to get the numbers down, they’re going to deport their partners.

They say that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

This morning, I’ve been reading two articles where it strikes me that there is a particular resonance in the themes.

The first is Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite’s remarkable account in The London Review of Books of the NHS infected blood scandal: ’We’ve messed up, boys’. This is the first thing I’ve read about these events that allowed me to grasp the totality of the tragedy. It’s a remarkable piece of writing, even by the exceptional standards of the LRB.

The second is Devi Sridhar’s editorial in The Guardian Weekly about the way politicians used scientists in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This isn’t quite such a must-read, and I don’t entirely agree with Sridhar’s views but fully support her conclusion that we ought to reexamine the power and independence of Government advisors. This discussion has been bubbling away in public health circles since the creation of Public Health England, which many saw as reducing the independence of scientific advisors.

Doctors and politicians both have essential parts to play in the management of public health crises. Crises require both technical expertise and democratic oversight. Doctors sometimes tend to dismiss the role of politicians by thinking that only technical decisions have weight. Politicians sometimes ignore expertise, preferring their own views or feelings about the right path. The balance isn’t easy to get right, and both doctors and politicians are eminently capable of getting things wrong.

There’s much to ponder in Sutcliffe-Braithwaite’s piece, of which this is only a very minor part. Yet, when reading the two essays in sequence, the spectre of the problematic relationship haunts both crises.

In December 2019, the Conservative Party won the UK General Election with a minority of the vote: 43.6% of voters supported them or—if you prefer—29.3% of the electorate.

In the former Home Secretary’s second letter of resignation from that position, published yesterday, she claimed:

I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019.

The majority—56.4% of voters—supported candidates other than Conservatives.

Perhaps political maths isn’t Braverman’s strong suit.

Forty-one days ago, Rishi Sunak declared in his party conference speech:

Politics doesn’t work the way it should. We’ve had thirty years of a political system which incentivises the easy decision, not the right one. Thirty years of vested interests standing in the way of change. Thirty years of rhetorical ambition which achieves little more than a short-term headline.

You either think this country needs to change or you don’t.

Yesterday, the man who led the Conservative Party for more than a third of those thirty failing years was appointed by Sunak as our Foreign Secretary.

It seems that Sunak is placing himself in the ‘don’t’ category.

Just occasionally, a line in a newspaper editorial captures something so succinctly that I can’t help but smile. This line about Suella Braverman, from Clare Morrison in The Independent this weekend, is a great example:

She somehow managed to get the entirety of Northern Ireland, regardless of background, to come together and say in one voice: “What is she going on about?”

Surely we’ll have a new Home Secretary by this time next week.