How the junior doctors’ strike could have been avoided

Easter and Passover coincided this year, so we’ve been in America visiting my in-laws. Four years ago, in the spirit of the holiday of liberation and exodus, we had all travelled to the Ukrainian village outside Lviv from which my father-in-law’s family emigrated. In just a few short generations during the 20th century, people there found themselves labouring under the Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Nazi and Soviet yokes. The disastrous human consequences are laid bare in Bernard Wasserstein’s poignant new history, A Small Town in Ukraine. Now Russian missiles intermittently rain down, partly enabled by sanctions busting and dirty money. When President Zelensky addressed the British parliament a couple of months ago, he drove past luxury flats overlooking our Ministry of Defence and reportedly owned by Putin’s former deputy prime minister. They are just the £11 million tip of a £6.7 billion iceberg of dodgy UK property. In the Lords this week, a cross-party coalition is trying to strengthen the Economic Crime bill and shut the ‘London laundromat’.