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Labour MP’s migrants claim contradicted by own government data
Uh oh. Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones has found himself in a tight spot after his Question Time appearance on Thursday night. The Labour MP for Bristol North West told the BBC audience on the issue of Britain’s borders that ‘the majority of the people in these boats are children, babies and women’. But it appears that data published by, er, his own government contradicts that claim…
The government’s official statistics for irregular migration to the UK state in black and white that ‘since January 2018, 70 per cent of people detected arriving irregularly have been adult males ages 18 and over’. The document notes that in the same time period, ‘just under one-fifth of(19 per cent)’ of detected arrivals were children. Yet despite this, Jones decided last night to double down on his contradictory claim. Arguing with Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf and sceptical audience members, the Treasury man added:
You’re told not to challenge the audience on Question Time, but I’m going to. So let me tell you this story. When there are babies and children put into that position by human trafficking gangs who are coming across in the channel with skin burns, from the oil from those boats mixing with the salt sea water, I would ask any of you to look at those babies and children and say ‘go back where you came from’.
But that doesn’t quite back up Jones’s rather dubious claim about the demographics of small boat occupants. As of yet, Downing Street has not corrected the Chief Secretary’s comments. Will No. 10 admit he got it wrong? Watch this space…
Watch the clip here:
Jolyon Maugham wades into abortion debate
No one was especially interested in Jolyon Maugham’s take on next week’s abortion amendments, but the Babe Ruth of the bar has waded into it all the same. The fight is on as rival amendments to decriminalise abortion battle for support ahead of next week’s free vote on a change in the law. Now the baseball bat-wielding barrister has taken to Twitter to tweet about his role in the whole thing – and has concluded that the warring female politicians should stop their arguing about which amendment is better, mash them together and, er, just shut up. Charming!
Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi has tabled an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill which aims to decriminalise abortion at any stage by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy. Meanwhile Stella Creasy’s has taken a different position, tabling a rival amendment which would make accessing an abortion a human right – which has sparked concern among some of the UK’s biggest abortion care providers who claim it would effectively tear apart the 1967 Abortion Act. Good heavens…
For his part, Maugham has blasted Antoniazzi’s stance as ‘narrow’ before launching into a tirade centring himself in the whole thing. Defending Creasy’s view, the kimono-cladded KC first revealed that ‘disagreements’ between Antoniazzi, Creasy and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) have been going on for quite some time. Slamming the briefing document provided by BPAS on Creasy’s rather broad amendment – which would also decriminalise abortions by partners and healthcare professionals – Maugham claimed it made ‘seriously bad legal points’, adding:
What really horrified me was BPAS’s threat to take the fight public. I drafted some responses to that briefing document and suggested [Creasey] send them to BPAS inviting them to desist from a public attack, saying that if they did she would need to respond. I also reached out to the barrister who I guessed (correctly) had given the advice to BPAS.
The barrister and I agreed that a discussion privately would make sense rather than a public fight. No one except Farage would gain from BPAS launching a public attack. And I came away from our discussion and email exchange cheered.
My cheer was misplaced. To my surprise, and I imagine that of its barrister, BPAS took its attack public, going after Stella Creasy’s amendment in a progressively more and more aggressive fashion with its criticism increasingly bad faith and unmoored from legal reality.
Don’t hold back! The legal mastermind added: ‘The right way forward was for the amendments to be folded together picking out the best elements of both… The right thing to do – even now – would be for Tonia/BPAS and Stella to talk.’ He went on to lament: ‘I hate that I’ve felt obliged to talk about this publicly.’ Er, pull the other one. If he had his way, his pronouns would be ‘Me/Me/Me’!
Israel’s war with Iran is only getting started
With the launch of Operation ‘Rising Lion’, Israel appears to have sought to take advantage of a narrow window of opportunity. Through its own actions over the last 18 months, the Iranian regime brought itself to a moment of extreme vulnerability. Tehran found itself in an uncomfortable position in which it continued to seek to prosecute its long war against Israel – intended to result in the Jewish state’s demise – while at the same time finding itself shorn of many of the capacities for aggression and defence on which it had relied. Israel has struck in this narrow window. Iranian has retaliated. The two sides are continuing to exchange strikes.
The weakening of Iran in recent months has occurred on two directly related fronts. Firstly, Tehran has long relied on a system of proxies to conduct aggression against enemies and to deter said enemies from responding. The attack by the Tehran-aligned Hamas organisation against Israel on 7 October 2023 led to a partial and piecemeal mobilisation by Iranian proxies to assist Hamas as it faced Israel’s determined counter-attack in Gaza.
Iranian strategy for decades has been to subject Israel to a death by a thousand cuts
The result of this partial counter-mobilisation – by Lebanese Hezbollah, the Yemeni Ansar Allah (Houthis) and the Iraqi Shia militias – was not, however, the one that Tehran had hoped for. Far from, as intended, forcing Israel to abandon its effort to destroy Hamas in Gaza, Iran’s mobilisation of proxies has resulted in the severe weakening of the proxies themselves.
In retrospect, it is clear that Iran had made one of the cardinal errors of irregular warfare – namely, never allow yourself to be drawn into open battle against a conventionally superior adversary. By attempting to strike at Israel at a time when Jerusalem was already engaged in war, Iran’s proxies brought down the full weight of Israel’s advanced capacities for air and intelligence warfare on their own heads.
The result? Lebanese Hezbollah, Tehran’s main tool for power projection and deterrence, is today a shadow of its former self. Its historic leadership has been destroyed, its mid-level cadres decimated, its military array along the border obliterated, and its advanced weapons systems severely depleted.
The Iraqi Shia militias, too, unilaterally pulled out of the fight in late 2024. The Yemeni Houthis, proving an unexpectedly tougher nut to crack, are still on their feet. But their capacity to penetrate Israeli airspace has been severely limited throughout, while their own infrastructure now stands helpless and exposed against the attention of Israeli air and naval assets.
This was demonstrated in recent days with Israel’s bombardment from the sea of the Hodeidah port and its earlier air action against the airport at Sana’a. The bottom line is that the proxy array, it is now clear, was useful only in so far as it pursued a long, attritional war intended to bleed Israeli resilience. (It didn’t manage that, either, but at least avoided severe damage while its masters year in and year out proclaimed the imminent success of this effort). Once drawn into the open, its weakness was laid bare.
The second related weakening of Iran concerns its own capacities. In April last year, when it became clear to Iran that Israel was not going to avoid directly targeting Iranian personnel deployed alongside Tehran’s proxies, Iran took the fateful decision to directly target Israel for the first time. Met with a limited response, it tried again in October. Israel’s response the second time was extensive and very damaging. Iran has in subsequent months been almost bereft of air defences.
So the net result of the decision by Iran’s client organisation Hamas to initiate war against Israel in October 2023 was the severe weakening of both Tehran’s direct and proxy capacities to make war and to deter and to defend against adversaries.
At the same time, as has become apparent in recent days, this weakening in no way served to temper Iran’s resolve or its ambitions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this week for the first time declared Tehran formally in breach of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran possesses sufficient enriched uranium to construct 8-10 nuclear devices within weeks. Its propaganda organs continue to call for Israel’s destruction. Iran is engaged in rebuilding and seeking to resupply Hezbollah in Lebanon. A brand new IRGC proxy group, the ’Islamic Resistance in Syria’, fired rockets at Israel for the first time last week.
So the combination of severely reduced capacities with continuing politicidal intentions and efforts evidently brought Israel to the decision to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities. It is a historic moment for the Middle East. What is likely to follow?
Iranian strategy for decades, openly declared, has been to subject Israel to a death by a thousand cuts. That is, to strike at and demoralise and slowly deplete the Jewish state, Israel, all the while deterring an effective response through the perceived Israeli fear of casualties. Israel in the last 18 months has identified this strategy and has chosen not to play its allotted role. The result is the open confrontation which has now begun.
The precise dimensions of the damage Israel has inflicted on Iran’s nuclear capacities and its senior military command have not yet become apparent. They are likely to be considerable but far short of a knockout blow. Iranian has retaliated. That hasn’t been a conclusive move either. This means, in short, that the long overture in the conflict between Israel and Iran is completed. The main part is now beginning.
The Welfare Bill is too little, too late
How much of the government’s Welfare Reform Bill will survive the mauling of backbench Labour MPs? If this bill even achieves £5 billion worth of savings by the time it becomes law, it will be something of a miracle. Once again, Rachel Reeves’ claim to be an ‘Iron Chancellor’ is about to be tested. No-one should be surprised if she folds.
This week, the wobbling began. In her post-spending review interview with the Today programme, Reeves initially said that she would not be reviewing the proposed changes to the criteria for claiming Personal Independence Payments (Pips), which are supposed to mean that hundreds of thousands of people are no longer eligible. Then she hinted that she would be listening to objections from within her party. Finally, she was almost boastful when she said: ‘Even with these changes we will substantially be increasing the amount of money we are paying in sickness and disability benefits during the course of this parliament.’ So these are ‘cuts’ which are not really cuts at all; rather an attempt to moderate the rate of growth in welfare spending.
If Reeves thinks she is going to save the public finances that way she can think again. Moreover, Liz Kendall is trying to reassure backbenchers – over a hundred of whom are reported to be prepared to rebel, enough to wipe out Labour’s enormous majority – that she will write into the bill more protections for disabled people most in need of help.
That is unlikely to placate a large number of Labour MPs, however. The backdrop to this bill is that it is being introduced by a party which, in opposition, lost no opportunity to accuse the Conservatives of trampling on the poor and unfortunate. Labour MPs have been brought up on the mythical narrative of evil ‘Tory austerity’ (austerity is a strange word for a government which continued to spend considerably more than it raised in revenue every year it was in power). They will find it emotionally difficult to accept a single bean being cut from any welfare benefit. Still they will troupe through the ‘ayes’ lobby and support the Welfare Bill.
Labour backbenchers and investors in government bonds live in very different worlds
Regardless of the form in which the government gets its Welfare Bill through the Commons, Britain will continue down the road to bankruptcy. Against a deficit of £150 billion, what good are £5 billion worth of cuts? The amount the government proposes to save from restricting Pips would hardly pay the interest bill on government debt for a fortnight. That illustrates the gulf which lies between the Labour party and fiscal reality.
We are going to learn over the next few years – if it doesn’t become obvious sooner – that Labour backbenchers and investors in government bonds live in very different worlds, and that unfortunately it is the latter whose views are more important. If the backbenchers do succeed in forcing Reeves to fold on welfare plans they will eye it as a famous victory. That is not how it will seem to bond investors who will eventually lose all patience in the ability of the UK government to cover its debts.
Reeves needs to tell the public that they’re wrong
Writing about Britain’s spending plans has started to feel a bit like swimming through treacle. It’s not that there aren’t lots of interesting observations to make about Wednesday’s £300 billion spending announcement. Such as the fact that the NHS sucks up the bulk of the resource spending with a 3 per cent rise in real terms, while every other department combined only grows by 0.2 per cent. Or that the health service will soon take up nearly half of all day-to-day government spending on services. Or that only 13 per cent of Rachel Reeves’s capital spending increase is classed as ‘growth-focused’.
It’s hard to pay attention to this because of the sense that the looming fiscal crisis is being largely ignored. Nearly 45 per cent of the UK’s GDP is spent by the state, while the maximum level of tax our economy has tolerated so far is 38 per cent. As the economist Andrew Lilico has pointed out, there’s no escaping the fact this means a deficit of around 6 per cent every year.
For years, fiscal events have revolved around marginal tweaks that are aimed at preserving the Chancellor’s rapidly vanishing headroom. Targets roll forward, ambitions for a balanced budget are quietly shelved, and meaningful debt reduction is delayed in perpetuity.
The forecasts put out by various government departments, meanwhile, point to staggering long-term liabilities that future generations will be expected to shoulder. These aren’t abstract numbers – they are very real, and are rooted in political promises that the public is largely unwilling to see as unsustainable.
It’s worth occasionally reminding ourselves of these unaffordable commitments that the government hasn’t yet worked out how to contend with:
- Sickness benefits. Forecast to rise to nearly £100 billion a year, with almost 1,000 Brits being signed off to collect this welfare payment every single day. An increasing number of young people never even enter the workforce, meaning tax potential is lost too.
- State pension. A 25 per cent increase in pensioners by 2050 will mean, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, increased costs of around 1.2 per cent of national income annually. Or in today’s money: around £32 billion extra to be found every single year by the middle of the century. That’s more than three times the Chancellor’s current fiscal headroom.
- The triple lock. It might be politically untouchable, but it could cost an extra £40 billion a year by 2050.
- Debt interest. The cost of servicing the national debt is forecast to hit £131 billion a year by the end of the decade, with borrowing costs continuing to go in the wrong direction.
- Health spending. The OBR also reckons the amount spent on health will grow at double the growth rate of the economy between now and the mid 2070s, when it will hit nearly 15 per cent of GDP. Future demands on social care will require at least an extra £9 billion a year by the 2030s, too.
- Defence. Meeting the government’s target to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030 would require an extra £17 billion a year (probably why we heard no talk of this particular ambition in the review).
- Housing asylum seekers. Despite Reeves’s commitment to stop accommodating them in hotels, she’s still expecting to spend £2.5 billion a year housing them elsewhere.
- Student loans. The government will soon be handing out £25 billion a year in student loans, almost a third of which will never be repaid – while graduates see less salary benefit when they enter the world of work. Government forecasts show outstanding liabilities hitting half a trillion by the late 2040s.
- Public sector pensions. Many of these pots – for the NHS, the police and civil servants – are empty, and including them within public debt metrics properly would already drastically change how the nation’s finances are viewed.
And yet, here’s the real political bind: much of this is exactly what the public demands. A generous state pension. Ever-growing NHS budgets. More funding for social care. A stronger military. These are not fringe views – they are the mainstream political consensus.
Brits have become accustomed to a large state. Covid, Ukraine and the energy crisis have brought back an expectation that taxpayers will always bail each other out.
But reconciling these expectations with a tax base that isn’t growing fast enough, and a debt mountain that is already staggering, is a problem that no party seems prepared to confront. Until someone does, every fiscal event will remain a short-term fix for a long-term crisis – and Britain’s books will only drift further into the red.
Israel’s Iran attack has done the West a favour
Israel’s overnight strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran represent the initial salvo of what Jerusalem is calling Operation Rising Lion. In Genesis 49, Jacob tells his sons: ‘Judah is a lion’s cub/ from the prey, my son, you rise up/ He lies down and crouches like a lion/ like a lioness — who dares disturb him?’
Jerusalem is bracing itself for painful reprisals and has put its citizens on alert
Israel rose up after years of warning the world of Iran’s plot to acquire nuclear weapons. In a series of daring precision strikes, it has targeted key regime figures, ballistic missile supplies and the Natanz nuclear facility. Israeli intelligence reportedly learned that Tehran had produced enough enriched uranium to build 15 nuclear bombs and was approaching ‘the point of no return’. Israel is describing its actions as a ‘preemptive strike’, hinting that the possibility of an Iranian attack on Israel was growing.
Hossein Salami, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is dead. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, is also believed to have been killed. Among the other fatalities are key officials and scientists involved in the regime’s nuclear programme.
There are reports that Mossad agents embedded deep in Iran sabotaged the Islamic state’s military air defences. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) characterised its air strikes as ‘the opening blow’ and stated that ‘at the end of the operation, there will be no nuclear threat’. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: ‘We can’t leave these threats for the next generation, because if we don’t act now, there will not be another generation. If we don’t act now, we simply won’t be here.’
In a direct message to ordinary Iranians, he added that Israel harboured no enmity towards them but rather towards the fundamentalist dictatorship.
In retaliation, Iran has dispatched more than 100 drones to bomb Israel. Jerusalem is bracing itself for painful reprisals and has put its citizens on alert. Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, the IDF’s chief of staff, has cautioned Israelis: ‘The expected cost will be different from what we are used to.’
This suggests the top brass and the security cabinet have factored in the potential for significant loss of Israeli lives or severe damage to hardware, infrastructure or networks, but calculated that a greater cost would have been incurred by inaction. There are no good options for Israel. Iran is sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state and nuclear weapons would allow the Ayatollah Khamenei to inflict devastating, existential destruction on Israel and her people. Whatever loss of life follows Rising Lion would be dwarfed by the mass extermination Iran could carry out with nuclear arms.
In addition to the military blowback, there will be diplomatic ramifications. This will include fallout from traditionally anti-Israel institutions such as the United Nations and censure from European nations increasingly concerned with managing internal cohesion and extremism problems and eager to be seen by some segments of their populations as distancing themselves from Israel.
Jerusalem will be interested primarily in the impact on relations with the United States. The Americans took no part in Rising Lion and president Donald Trump had been urging calm to allow a fresh nuclear deal with Iran to be struck. Mindful of how the Obama nuclear deal, cancelled during the first Trump administration, gave Tehran breathing space under the guise of hemming in its nuclear programme, Israel might well have assessed that Trump was on the brink of making the same mistake and acted before Tehran could lock in favourable terms for its uranium enrichment and warhead capabilities. Although the operation had been foreshadowed by the evacuation of senior American personnel from the region, Israel had previously been on the brink of taking out Tehran’s offensive nuclear capabilities only to be reined in by Washington DC.
Trump is instinctively pro-Israel, as is his Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But his second administration has witnessed an influx into the national security and foreign policy bureaucracies of isolationist ideologues hostile to Israel. These figures think of Israel as a malign ally that talks in pro-American terms but could drag the United States into further Middle Eastern conflict. This is, in part, because of American policymakers’ and voters’ affinity for the embattled nation, and also because of the implications of allowing another large-scale elimination of Jews less than a century on from the Shoah.
These sentiments are misplaced. Far from a drag on America First, an Israel that takes proactive measures against common enemies like Iran enhances American security while allowing Washington DC to maintain clean hands. A nuclear-armed Iran would overnight become caller of the shots in West Asia; Tehran would be able to inflict sizeable casualties on American and other Western citizens and assets in the region, as well as disrupting military, intelligence and trading operations. It would be able to hold the West to ransom for political, diplomatic and financial gain.
There are echoes in Rising Lion of Operation Opera, the 1981 mission that destroyed Osirak, Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor, and Operation Outside the Box, the 2007 bombing of Syria’s offensive nuclear programme at Al Kibar. The Osirak bombing was met by widespread international condemnation, denunciatory resolutions and diplomatic hysteria, but over time it became clear that Israel had done the world a favour in denying nuclear capabilities to a madman. Ironically, had Israel deferred to the world opinion and left Osirak alone, by the eve of the second Iraq War in 2003 Saddam almost certainly would have been able to hit British (and American) assets within 45 minutes.
Israel can expect the same indignant response from the international community now as it did then. But it can be safe in the knowledge that it has acted not only in its own interests but in the strategic, security and commercial interests of the Western nations lining up to condemn it. That is the way of it when you are one of the few remaining democracies that believes in destroying your enemies before they can destroy you. Other nations might think it proper to wait until the UN, the EU and the legal professoriate give them the green light to wanly defend themselves, by which point their cities are already smouldering and endless body bags being filled from the rubble. But Israel is not one of them.
‘Judah,’ Jacob tells his fourth son, ‘your brothers shall praise you/ Your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies’. Judah’s hand has struck his foes and those of his brothers but there will be little in the way of fraternal commendation. The lion’s cub has risen up, not for praise but for survival.
Trump has been outmaneuvered by Netanyahu
The surprising thing isn’t that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Iran. It’s that the current bombing campaign didn’t occur sooner. Netanyahu has been inveighing against the Iran threat for decades. The prospect that Trump might be prepared to cut a nuclear deal with the Iranian mullahs finally forced his hand.
Trump, who based much of his MAGA movement around opposition to endless wars in the Middle East, has been outmaneuvered by Bibi. Intent on a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump proclaimed that he would secure an end to the Ukraine war within 24 hours. Then he focused his attentions on Iran. But his impulse to avoid war, any war, in the Middle East has been foiled.
A gallimaufry of MAGA adherents is aghast at the ease with which Netanyahu sidelined Trump and his chum Steve Witkoff. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is scurrying to disclaim any responsibility for the Israeli strike. Currently Trump’s mission is to avoid responsibility for the attack.
But if it proves successful Trump will want to claim credit. He’ll say that he was with Israel all along. Perhaps Trump will even say that he conceived of the plan.
Did Israel kick in a rotting door? Perhaps. It appears to have decapitated the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The audacious Israeli action may lead to the collapse of the sclerotic regime which has faced substantial internal protests over the past decade.
Another scenario, the one envisaged by Trump’s camp followers is also more than a little plausible. It is that the war against Iran leads to broader turmoil in the region, not to mention far higher oil prices as the Iranian regime shuts down the Persian Gulf.
The notion that Iran will place much credence in the Trump administration’s pious assertions of remaining aloof from the conflict seems farfetched.
Iran may well seek to trigger a wider war that enmeshes America. At a minimum the Israeli action will stir up more hostility to America in the Middle East. The question for Trump will be whether he chooses to seek to help protect Israel from Iran. If he chooses not to assist it, he will be pounded by Israel’s supporters – and if he does, he will be pounded by his MAGA base for deserting his cherished foreign policy principles.
Either way, Trump is in a sticky wicket indeed.
Four bets for Royal Ascot next week
Royal Ascot gets me more excited than the weekend racing fare so I am going to put up four horses who could well go off shorter when they line up for their respective targets next week. First up in RASHABAR in the Group 1 St James’s Palace Stakes on Tuesday (4.20 p.m.). Brian Meehan’s three-year-old colt caused an upset at this meeting a year ago when landing the Coventry Stakes at odds of no less than 80-1.
Admittedly, next week he has to take on arguably the best horse in training in the form of Field of Gold but this race might just cut up to less than eight runners by the off, in which case the current three places would be attractive. For starters, the likes of Shadow of Light and Jonquil are more likely to run instead in the Commonwealth Cup and I suspect there may be one or two other defections amongst the 11 runners who accepted earlier this week.
Rashabar had one or two fitness niggles earlier in the season but his handler is convinced he has him back to his best now. Field of Gold, Ruling Court and Henri Matisse could, of course, fill the first three places in the race but 25-1 is too big for the Meehan runner, especially as we know he loves this track and fast ground.
Back Rashabar 1 point each way at that price – available with all leading bookmakers, but makes sure you place it with those paying three places (a couple of firms are only offering two places ante-post). It’s not impossible that he could spring a big surprise at this meeting for the second year running but a place would yield a nice profit.
Also on day one, DOCKLANDS is a big price in the Queen Anne Stakes (2.30 p.m.) for a horse that just loves Ascot. Trainer Harry Eustace’s five-year-old has form figures from his six runs at the course of 113222. He was also second in this very race last year.
Admittedly, this year’s renewal looks a tougher contest and the first three home in the BoyleSports Lockinge Stakes at Newbury – Lead Artist, Dancing Gemini and Rosallion – could fill the three places again on Tuesday.
However, racing is rarely that straightforward and so back Docklands one point each way each way at 25-1 with bet365, SkyBet, Paddy Power or Betfair. I am pretty sure he is better than he has shown in his first two runs this season and he will have been trained to peak for the Queen Anne by his astute handler.
Two-year-old races aren’t usually my bag but I think trainer Michael Bell’s filly SPICY MARG is overpriced to win the Queen Mary Stakes on Wednesday (2.30 p.m.). Trainer Karl Burke’s runner Zelaina has been all the rage over the past week or so on the back of her hugely impressive debut at Nottingham on 4 June when she routed a decent field.
However, Spicy Marg was equally impressive when winning a far less competitive four-runner race at Newmarket in early May. Bell has resisted the temptation to run her again, preferring to keep his charge fresh for Royal Ascot.
Bell is an excellent target trainer. As well as training a Derby winner (Motivator in 2005), he has enjoyed nine winners at Royal Ascot, and three of those wins came in juvenile contests. Bell said earlier this month of Spicy Marg: ‘We think she’s very smart. With the ground, I wouldn’t mind if it was fast but if it was very soft that would be an unknown. We really like her.’ The chances of soft ground are virtually non-existent given the weather forecast and so the five furlongs trip and the going should be perfect if she takes to the track.
There will almost certainly be more places available on the day but back Spicy Marg one point each way at 16-1 with William Hill or 888sport. I would be surprised if she goes off at 16-1 on the day and she is already as short as 10-1 with several firms.
Last but not least for Royal Ascot, I am looking forward to the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stakes a week tomorrow on June 21 (3 p.m.). Quite a few of those entered for this six furlong contest will not run because they will take their chances earlier in the week in Tuesday’s King Charles III Stakes over five furlongs.
One horse will just the single entry next week, as he is very much a six-furlong specialist, is Karl Burke’s ELITE STATUS and I can see him going off shorter than his current ante-post odds. It’s asking a lot of him to reverse the form of his Group 2 York race last month when he finished a well-beaten fourth to Inisherin and he may fail to do so.
However, Elite Status did not get a clear run at York and I am certain he will come on for his seasonal debut. His form has always been at its best in the late spring and early summer, sometimes tailing off by the autumn. Back Elite Status one point each way at 25-1, a price available with most bookies, all paying three places.
Anyway, that’s four more horses, three at 25-1, for an interest next week. That’s also the ante-post book for Royal Ascot done and dusted.
I have already put up two more ante-post bets: Native Warrior each way at 50-1 for the Royal Hunt Cup and Trawlerman each way at 8-1 for the Ascot Gold Cup. Sadly, the former is unlikely now to make the cut for the Royal Hunt Cup but we live in hope as this horse is made for that race and 50-1 would be a steal if he does line up.
Away from Royal Ascot, I am going to go in double handed for the Jenningsbet Northumberland Plate at Newcastle on June 28, having already put up Duke of Oxford each way at 33-1.
A lot of the horses at the top of the market for this race are going to run in one of the two staying handicaps at Royal Ascot on Tuesday and most that do are therefore unlikely to run in the Plate less than two weeks later. One horse that needs soft ground or an all-weather terrain is WHO’S GLEN so he has no entries next week at the royal meeting due to the anticipated quick ground.
Andrew Balding’s stayer made a promising seasonal debut when fifth in the Chester Cup early last month. There is no way he will go off at 16-1 for the Plate if, as I hope, he lines up for the race. Back him 1 point each way at those odds with bet365, SkyBet, Paddy Power or Betfair.
My thanks to all those who posted grateful comments on my winning tip, Lambourn, for the Epsom Derby last weekend. I will be back on Tuesday morning with the first of five daily columns for each day of the royal meeting. I will certainly be putting on my betting boots for a couple of really strong fancies in two of the handicaps for which there are no ante-post odds as yet so… watch this space.
Last weekend: + 8.8 points.
1 point each way Elwateen at 12-1 for the Oaks, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
1 point each way Lambourn at 10-1 for the Derby, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places. + 10.8 points (Rule 4: 10p in the £).
Pending:
1 point each way Docklands at 25-1 for the Queen Anne, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Rashabar at 25-1 for the St James’s Palace, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Spicy Marg at 16-1 for the Queen Mary, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Native Warrior at 50-1 for the Royal Hunt Cup, paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Trawlerman at 8-1 for the Ascot Gold Cup, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Elite Status at 25-1 for the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Duke of Oxford at 33-1 for the Northumberland Plate, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Who’s Glen at 16-1 for the Northumberland Plate, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places.
2025 flat season running total: – 5 points.
2024-5 jump season: – 47.61 points.
2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.
2023-4 jump season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jump season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
Israel’s attack on Iran marks the beginning of a new era for the Middle East
On 5 June 1967, Israel destroyed three Arab air forces with a devastating pre-emptive strike at the start of what became the Six-Day War. Overnight, Israel has undertaken what appears to be a similarly devastating pre-emptive attack, this time on Iranian nuclear, military and terror facilities.
Israel has undertaken what appears to be a devastating pre-emptive attack
But there is a key difference between the two strikes. In 1967, Israel was fighting to defend only itself. It had no allies in the region and little concern with what happened outside its own borders. Today, Israel is not only acting as a proxy for the West itself; it is acting against a tyrannical, terrorist regime. Iran has held its own people – as well as Lebanon and Syria – captive; it has spread poison across the rest of the region, funded and directed Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis to bring war and destruction across the region – not least in Gaza, where Iran’s sponsorship of Hamas has led to the current devastation – and led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the region over the decades since the regime took power in Iran. The UK has also been a target of its terror – spying on prominent British Jews and Iranian dissidents for assassination.
Until last night it stood on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon, which would have made the past decades of Iranian terror seem paltry. There has been near-unanimous agreement that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon; the only issue was how to stop it. Plainly, the original Barack Obama deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) did not work, and Iran has been stepping up its preparations.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declared yesterday for the first time that Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. Tehran was refusing to answer questions on uranium particles found in undeclared sites in the country and the stockpiling of uranium enriched to nearly weapons grade. Iran responded by revealing it has already built, and is operating, a previously secret new uranium enrichment centre.
Israel’s overnight strikes, in which over 200 planes attacked over 100 sites, were necessary and targeted. Iranian air defences have been crippled since October when Israel destroyed the air defence batteries protecting Iran’s long-range ballistic missiles – crucially leaving its nuclear facilities vulnerable to future attacks.
Reports suggest that last night Israel took out targets in Qeytarieh, Niavaran, Chitgar, Mehrabad, Narmaq, Saadat Abad, Andarzgoo, Sattarkhan, Shahrak-e Mahallati, Shahrak-e Chamran, Kamraniyeh, Farahzadi, Ozgol, Marzdaran and the Armed Forces HQ as well as individuals such as Hossein Salami, commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Ali Shamkhani, a key adviser to President Khamenei. There were multiple strikes on the Arak heavy water reactor, the Parchin military complex, the Khondab reactor and the underground Natanz nuclear site, the so-called ‘heart’ of its weapons programme.
Obviously what happens next is key. Iran will retaliate, but its capacity for a devastating response has almost certainly been destroyed. It is likely, too, that the US would intervene should the Iranian response necessitate it. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sought to make clear that Israel was acting on its own – which to the extent that only Israeli forces were involved is true. But the US knew what was coming – and if it was not prepared to see Iran attacked it would have stopped it.
The people of Iran have been enslaved by the regime for decades, and the rest of the region has been destabilised by it. Iran has been responsible for terror and chaos for decades, and now for the first time the potential exists to bring stability to the region. Those who campaign for a Palestinian state should be relieved: it is a basic fact of the Middle East that there can never be a safe, stable Palestinian state while the Islamic Republic of Iran is able to export its terror. History may well record that 13 June 2025 was the beginning of a new era for the Middle East.
Israel’s shadow war on Iran has burst into the open
Woken by sirens outside my window in Israel at 3 a.m. I made my way to the bomb shelter in the basement, reaching for my phone on the way. An unusual and urgent message appeared on the screen which had been sent to the entire nation: Home Front Command had updated its guidelines with immediate effect. Israelis are instructed to know where their nearest protected space is, to avoid unnecessary movement, and to prepare for possible extended periods in shelters. Public institutions are not to open. The meaning was clear: the long-anticipated Israeli operation against Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes had begun.
Saudi Arabia publicly condemned the Israeli strikes – but behind the scenes, Riyadh may well be quietly pleased
Within minutes, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed it. Operation Rising Lion had been launched: a preemptive strike ordered by the cabinet to “roll back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival.” The opening wave saw Israeli Air Force jets strike dozens of nuclear and military command targets deep inside Iran. According to the IDF spokesperson, 200 planes dropped 330 munitions across a wide array of targets.
The IDF stated bluntly: Iran possessed enough enriched uranium to build several bombs within days. Israeli intelligence had concluded that Tehran was about to cross the threshold towards weaponisation. Israeli sources later revealed that the Revolutionary Guard had capabilities to assemble fifteen nuclear bombs, with Iranian scientists already at work. Israel estimates that more than ten nuclear scientists were killed in the strikes.
“This was an imminent threat,” the IDF declared. “We acted to remove it.”
Targets included nuclear enrichment facilities, ballistic missile production sites, and the homes and offices of senior Iranian military and political leaders. Israeli defence officials told local media there was a “significantly increased likelihood” that much of Iran’s senior military leadership, figures directly involved in its nuclear weapons programme, had been eliminated in the first wave.
Iranian state media soon confirmed the most consequential of these deaths: Hossein Salami, Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was killed in the strikes. Salami, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War and one of the regime’s most visible military figures, had overseen the IRGC’s operations across the region.
Also reported killed was Major General Gholam Ali Rashid, Commander of the Khatam-al-Anbiya Central Headquarters and Deputy Chief of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff. Rashid had long been a key architect of Iran’s military doctrine.
Among the scientists reported killed were Dr Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, former head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran and a leading nuclear physicist, and Dr Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, a prominent academic and advocate of Iran’s advanced scientific and AI capabilities. Abbasi-Davani, who survived an assassination attempt in 2010, had remained a crucial figure in Iran’s nuclear establishment.
In all, Israel eliminated the Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC, the Deputy Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff, and several other senior military and nuclear figures in the opening wave.
Striking Iran’s military headquarters, its nuclear facilities, and its ballistic missile infrastructure in a single coordinated campaign will have required an extraordinary level of intelligence preparation and operational precision. Al Arabiya reported that Israel carried out at least 300 attacks inside Iran last night, designed to cripple command-and-control systems as well as strike hardened nuclear targets. Iraqi media confirmed that Iraq had closed its airspace to all traffic. Israeli airspace too was sealed until further notice.
In the days before the strike, Israel engaged in an elaborate information operation to achieve tactical surprise
Iranian residential areas in northeast and west Tehran were also hit, in what Israeli sources suggested were carefully targeted elimination attempts against senior IRGC commanders embedded within the military structure.
The operation followed months of escalating tensions. Earlier, the International Atomic Energy Agency had issued a report confirming that Iran was violating its nuclear commitments. Diplomatic efforts by the US and Europe were faltering. US President Donald Trump had issued a public 60-day warning, demanding that Iran cease uranium enrichment on its soil and dismantle its programme or face consequences. Many had dismissed or forgotten that deadline. The Israeli strikes came on day sixty-one.
In the days before the strike, Israel had engaged in an elaborate information operation to achieve tactical surprise. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was publicly reported as going on vacation to northern Israel for the weekend, just two days before his son Avner’s highly publicised and widely criticised wedding at Ronit Farm. At the same time, Israel’s domestic political discourse was dominated by a coalition crisis over the draft law, while international attention focused on the US-Iran nuclear negotiations, which were reaching a boiling point. The timing of Netanyahu’s holiday, against this backdrop, helped reinforce the impression that Israel was not on the verge of military action.
There were high-profile meetings scheduled, and public US warnings urging Israel not to attack had been prominently leaked. The appearance of tension between the US and Israel seems, in retrospect, to have been part of the deception designed to lower Iran’s guard.
In fact, as American journalist Bret Baier revealed after speaking directly with Trump, the President was fully aware of Israel’s actions: “There were no surprises there,” Baier reported. “Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb,” Trump told him. “We’ll hopefully get back to the negotiating table – we’ll see. There are several people in leadership in Iran who will not be coming back.”
Trump added that he was watching for Iran’s response: “Looking to see what the retaliation will be.” While the US was not involved in the strike, Trump affirmed the US would help defend Israel if needed. It is almost poetic: Trump is treating Iran as Iran has long treated the world: disavowing direct involvement, distancing himself from his proxies, and signalling: this is not my fight.
Publicly, the US maintained distance. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said: “We are not involved in strikes against Iran. Our top priority is protecting American forces in the region.”
In his address to the nation, Prime Minister Netanyahu was bullish, and left no room for doubt: “Tonight Israel backs its words with action. We struck at the heart of Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme. We struck at the heart of Iran’s nuclear weaponisation programme. We targeted Iran’s main enrichment facility in Natanz. We targeted Iran’s leading nuclear scientists working on the Iranian bomb. We also struck at the heart of Iran’s ballistic missile programme.”
He also spoke directly to the Iranian people: “Our fight is not with you. Our fight is with the brutal dictatorship that has oppressed you for 46 years. I believe the day of your liberation is near. And when that happens, the great friendship between our two ancient peoples will flourish once again.”
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar launched a full diplomatic campaign. The Foreign Ministry opened an emergency situation room and began a marathon of calls to counterparts worldwide to secure legitimacy for Israel’s actions.
Meanwhile, Israelis were warned to prepare for a difficult and potentially extended campaign. Commander of the Home Front Command MG Rafi Milo cautioned that “challenging and complicated days” lay ahead and that widespread alerts were expected.
Netanyahu added: “There are no free wars. You may very well be required to stay in protected areas for a long time, much longer than we have been accustomed to.”
Saudi Arabia publicly condemned the Israeli strikes – but behind the scenes, Riyadh may well be quietly pleased that Israel is doing what many Sunni Arab governments view as a necessary action to contain Iran’s ambitions. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt regard Iran as the principal regional threat, particularly in light of its support for Shia militias, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and its nuclear programme. Even those without formal ties to Israel tacitly align on this issue, a shared concern that has underpinned years of covert regional cooperation. One Israeli official even told Israel Hayom the preemptive strike was “more successful than anticipated.”
Overnight, Israel has crossed a threshold. What began in the early hours with sirens and a nation moving to its shelters is now an unprecedented military and geopolitical rupture. The confrontation that long seemed a shadow war is now fully in the open. What began in October 2023 with Palestinian terrorists bursting across Israel’s border in Toyota pickup trucks, armed with RPGs, gasoline, and guns, has transformed into a systematic campaign: the near-elimination of several of Iran’s proxy forces that have threatened Israel for decades; the downfall of the Assad regime in Syria; the crumbling of Hamas in Gaza; the destruction of key military assets including the airport in Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen; the degradation of Hezbollah’s operational capabilities; the elimination of many terrorist leaders across the region – and now, this.
The IDF has confirmed that Iran has launched approximately 100 UAVs toward Israeli territory, now en route and under active interception. As the coming days bring further Israeli strikes, Iranian retaliation, and the possibility of a broader regional war, one fact is now beyond dispute: the strategic confrontation that has loomed for decades is no longer theoretical. It is happening, now.
Tackling child poverty may prove a vote winner for Farage
In news bound to make Keir Starmer nervous, voters in 121 Labour-held constituencies with high rates of child poverty are reportedly prepared to support Nigel Farage at the next election and hand their seats to Reform. This shock projection, via the Financial Times and More in Common polling, came less than a fortnight after the Reform party leader declared that he would scrap the two-child benefit cap. Could it be that limiting benefits to families with two children, a policy once so popular with the public, has lost its appeal?
Farage is winning over swathes of Labour’s heartland in part because he has smelled a vote-winner: removing the two-child benefit cap may play to Reform’s natalist agenda, but being seen to battle child poverty will make a fatherly Farage popular across the country’s disadvantaged areas. While the government stalls on publishing its child poverty strategy, alarming stats have brought home to parents in the poorest areas just how badly their children are faring.
A poor early start risks affecting children long-term, too
No matter their race, ethnicity, number of siblings or parents’ party allegiance, children born in areas such as Blackpool or Knowsley (both with some of the highest proportions of disadvantaged neighbourhoods among local authorities) are less likely to achieve good developmental goals by the age of five. They are more likely to be obese and suffer from untreated tooth decay and have 55 per cent more visits to A&E than their peers in affluent areas. Aida Cable, CEO of the Thrive at Five charity, points out that:
For years, only half of children eligible for free school meals have reached a good level of development by the end of Reception, while their better-off peers have seen year-on-year improvements in outcomes.
A poor early start risks affecting children long-term, too: less than 20 per cent of all white British teenagers from low-income homes will achieve a Grade 4 in their English and Maths GCSEs, while Black Caribbean children aged 16 fare even worse. The number of NEETs (young people aged 16-24 not in education, employment or training) has soared to nearly a million – representing one in seven in this age group. These lost youths are more likely to risk depression, future unemployment or low-paid employment, as well as substance misuse.
While some charities argue that there is a strong correlation between areas with high levels of child poverty and high numbers of families impacted by the two-child limit, others feel the focus should be on reducing attainment gaps: ‘We need a laser-like focus on improving early outcomes for children in deprived areas,’ argues Aida Cable.
Some educationalists point out that the latest dire results affect all children in low-income areas, and that their family composition – whether raising two children or six – has little bearing on outcomes: ‘How sad it is that we are crying out for more funding for families with young children,’ says Natasha Whiles, Executive Principal at Grace Academy in Coventry:
We already know what the problem is: poverty and shocking standards of living for families in economically-deprived areas. The question is, what is being done to tackle it? The solution is investing in these communities.
The Conservative government tried to do just that last year with its £301 million funding for 75 family hubs in the most deprived areas. The ‘Family Hubs and Start in Life’ programme focused on addressing the attainment gap at age 5, delivering a mixture of services, including health visitors, SEND experts, therapists and more in the community hubs. In their election manifesto, the Tories promised to extend the hubs nationwide.
A network of support for families in struggling communities: this seems like a reliable way to improve a low-income child’s early years and reduce inequality. Will Labour’s postponed strategy to fight child poverty admit as much when it’s eventually published? Farage may beat them to it.
Trial by victimhood has taken over Britain’s courts
We live in a country in which petty grievances and perceived slights abound, and one in which resentments and gripes are taken seriously by the state. We saw evidence of this state of affairs in two unrelated reports this week.
The first came from Leeds, where an employment tribunal found that the use of the word ‘lads’ in relation to a worker earning £95,000 a year at a farming and food production company amounted to ‘casual use of gender-specific language’, and could be legally regarded as ‘unwanted… given her account of how it made her feel’. Her level of compensation is to be decided at a later date.
Taking recourse to legal action is very much the order of the day now
It would be tempting to dismiss this as an isolated and meaningless episode, except that it’s neither. On the first count, it belongs to a growing list of court cases that begin with ostensibly insignificant, dubious or comical slights made towards workers by their bosses, a trend that culminated last month in an NHS worker taking her employers to court for comparing her to Darth Vader. She won £30,000 in compensation.
Neither is this case meaningless. It signifies a culture beholden to the notion that their subjective feelings are a matter that warrants intervention by the authorities. Taking recourse to legal action, making appeals to the arms of the state for perceived slights, is very much the order of the day now, as another widely-disseminated report reminded us on Wednesday.
A study conducted by the social cohesion campaign group Don’t Divide Us has found that equality laws are causing unsuccessful racial discrimination lawsuits to ‘sky-rocket’. Between 2017 and last year, the number of employment tribunals that included a claim of discrimination based on the characteristic of ‘race’, as defined in the Equality Act 2010, almost tripled, from 285 to 829. Tellingly, while such claims have shot up, the number of successful cases has remained stable and more or less unchanged. According to Alka Seghal Cuthbert, the campaign group’s director, the Equality Act has:
Handed inordinate power to those making malicious or bogus claims or to thin-skinned people willingly misinterpreting perfectly innocent comments or interactions.
A society characterised by petty grievances and aspirations to victim status has two clear sources. One was the emergence and veneration, first noted in the 1990s, of the culture of victimhood and ‘getting in touch with your feelings’, which manifested itself in people blaming society for all their ills and wallowing in self-pity when things went wrong. The idea that the woes of individuals can be ascribed to vague forces and impersonal external agents continues today, with customary accusations that shortcomings of institutions can be ascribed to nebulous ‘institutional’ or ‘systemic’ failings.
The second source can also be found in the 1990s, in what was then baptised ‘political correctness’. With a subsequent large injection of postmodern theory from academia, that ideology evolved into what came to be known as ‘woke’, or hyper-liberalism. It’s essentially the same way of thinking, one that abounds in resentment and resorts to finger-pointing, but now with turbo-charged levels of paranoia and megalomania.
Even before wokery arrived in Britain roughly ten years ago, the groundwork had been laid down for an irrational culture of imagined grievance. The 1999 Macpherson Report made it policy that discrimination needn’t have to be observed or proved – but only perceived. That report first brought to the public’s attention the conceit of ‘institutional racism’, one which, in its wording, could be detected:
In processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority-ethnic people.
This extension of an unverifiable subjective view of discrimination was enshrined in law in the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Today a hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice’. With the introduction of non-crime hate incidents in 2014, potentially harmful words no longer even had to cross the threshold of criminality to warrant a visit by the police.
In order to banish racism, progressive legislation has stretched the scope by which it can be defined to unreasonable and intrusive degrees. A state that encouraged the idea that racism and prejudice are diabolical and invisible forces, ones that inhabit the minds of those who carry it ‘unwittingly’, ones that can be ‘perceived’ but not seen or heard, is a state that has reduced a country to one riddled with paranoia and petty narcissism.
Law and justice should be based on objective facts, not subjective impressions. It’s fitting that just the other week we witnessed the de facto reintroduction of blasphemy laws into this country. We are heading back to the dark ages of suspicion and denunciation.
How will Iran respond to the Israeli airstrikes?
President Donald Trump was off the mark when he was asked about the likelihood of an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities on Thursday afternoon. “I don’t want to say imminent, but it looks like it’s something that could very well happen,” he said. Hours later, the Israelis conducted a major bombing campaign against dozens of Iranian targets purportedly linked to its nuclear, missile and military programs. Dubbed “Operation Rising Lion,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the operation was geared to hit the heart of Tehran’s nuclear capability in order to protect Israel’s survival.
Iran has a number of ways to retaliate
“This operation will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat,” the Israeli premier said, adding that Natanz, Tehran’s largest uranium enrichment complex, was targeted as well. Several senior Iranian officials, including General Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, were reportedly eliminated, although given the fast-moving developments and multiple claims, it’s hard to determine anything with full accuracy.
The Trump administration obviously knew something was up. A day before Israel’s military action, the State Department and Pentagon ordered the evacuation of non-essential diplomatic staff from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as well as other U.S. military facilities in the Gulf. But being prepared doesn’t necessarily mean the administration will be happy about what Netanyahu has chosen to do. You will hear the usual statements about U.S. support for Israel; and as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a press release, “Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense.” Yet it was Rubio’s assertion that Washington wasn’t involved in this operation that was most interesting. It demonstrates something that has been clear for quite some time – Trump wants nothing to do with another war in the Middle East, if he can help it.
Let’s not sugar-coat it: in launching preventative military strikes against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, Netanyahu has essentially killed off Trump’s diplomacy with Iran (or at least set it back significantly). It was becoming increasingly obvious as the weeks went by that Trump and Netanyahu had the same objective – prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon – but diverged on the strategy to achieve it.
Trump wanted to try his hand at negotiations with the Iranians. In April, he dispatched his friend and envoy Steve Witkoff to Oman to get the process moving. Netanyahu, however, has been clear that talking to the Iranians was a waste of time and indeed a hindrance to the military option he has been dreaming about for well over a decade. For Trump, Netanyahu choosing to initiate a conflict three days before Witkoff was scheduled to meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in the sixth round is beyond unhelpful – it’s nothing short of sabotage.
Whether or not this escalates into a wider war will be determined in large part by the Iranian response. Tehran has taken a big hit, and the Iranians aren’t going to sit there and nurse their wounds for very long. The Israelis are expecting a strong Iranian counterattack of some kind, as are U.S. defense officials.
Iran has a number of ways to retaliate. One of the most likely is an even larger barrage of cruise and ballistic missiles against Israeli cities, above and beyond the limited salvos Tehran conducted during their previous flare-ups with Israel last year. Depending on the strength of Israel’s air defense systems, we could be looking at significant Israeli civilian casualties, which, in turn, could pressure Netanyahu to authorise even heavier bombing sorties. It doesn’t take a genius to see how this escalates into a big confrontation.
How will the Trump administration react? We simply don’t know. The U.S. military wasn’t involved in the Israeli airstrikes; Rubio and other unnamed U.S. officials made this point clear. The question is whether the U.S. will eventually become involved in the event of a drawn-out conflict between Israel and Iran that lasts days or perhaps even weeks. The Israelis are banking on U.S. defensive support to shoot down Iranian missiles, and it’s likely Netanyahu will receive it. U.S. logistical and intelligence support for offensive Israeli attacks on Iran, however, shouldn’t be offered. Doing so would, in effect, reward Netanyahu for torpedoing Trump’s diplomatic efforts, thrust the United States into a war it shouldn’t be fighting and increase the odds of Iran retaliating against the tens of thousands of U.S. troops that are stationed in the Middle East.
All of us will be on tenterhooks over the coming hours and days.
How exactly will Reeves’s funding boost fix the NHS?
The NHS was a big winner at the Spending Review, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves announcing a ‘record cash injection’. Two hundred miles from the Commons in Manchester, NHS England Chief Executive Sir Jim Mackey, told healthcare leaders gathered at the NHS confederation’s annual ‘expo’ that the government had ‘done us a good turn’.
There will be a £29 billion real-terms increase in day-to-day spending for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), with its annual budget reaching £232 billion by 2028-29. The budget for the NHS in England alone will rise to £226 billion. Government spending on health and care will have doubled in a decade. The DHSC budget will eclipse the national income of Portugal and more than 40p in every government pound will be spent on the NHS.
The government has raised the political stakes for reform
There was a strong sense of déjà vu listening to the Chancellor, as she reflected a growing fiscal orthodoxy. Greater NHS spending has been awarded owing to popular acceptance, whilst other areas of public spending are squeezed – including those which directly impact the ‘wider determinants of health’.
There will be an increase of £4 billion for adult social care (by 2028/9, compared to 2025/6), but care clearly remains the poor relation. Little was mentioned of the life sciences or MedTech – genuine engines of economic growth – with reform announcements saved for a life sciences sector plan, due later this month.
The government states that the purpose of the uplift is to enable the NHS to ‘cut waiting lists, improve patient care and modernise services’. Much of the policy ambition – from seeking to improve the NHS App to hiring more GPs – is welcome and these measures have previously been recommended by Policy Exchange. But it is in no way certain these objectives will be realised.
Internal modelling from the DHSC, reported over the weekend, suggests the government’s ‘milestone’ for waiting times – that 92 per cent of patients will start consultant-led treatment for elective care within 18 weeks of referral – is ‘over-optimistic’. Policy Exchange estimate it would take another 155 months (or, to April 2038) to reach or exceed this target if the government were to continue on the performance trajectory we have seen since last year’s general election.
Despite significant ‘inputs’ to the NHS budget and in staffing numbers, a significant gap in productivity compared to pre-pandemic years remains (-9 per cent comparing 2019/20 to 2022/23).
It is welcome that central departmental costs will be reduced, but the service has struggled to deliver the 2 per cent productivity improvement demanded in recent years. There is a risk that this investment simply disappears into thin air once more. The £22.6 billion uplift announced in last year’s Autumn Statement has already been consumed by inflation and pensions.
The DHSC will begin the Spending Review period £1 billion ‘in the red’ and it has been suggested that the latest investment could be ‘absorbed’ by rising medicine prices and pay rises alone. A ’50 per cent increase’ in investment for ‘NHS technology and digital transformation’ is proposed, but a clear strategy and the mechanisms required to make good on this investment are still lacking. The recent recruitment of Axel Heitmüller as the PM’s ‘expert adviser’ on health is a sign that there will be a welcome focus on how to spread innovation more effectively, given his prior experience.
Whilst the capital budget will increase, it will remain flat in real terms, squeezing the resources required to ‘modernise services’ or to address a maintenance backlog now over £14 billion. The NHS will look to make greater use of private finance, but the announcement they will do so – rather curiously – was not made by the Chancellor. Instead it appeared on the NHS England website later in the day, as part of Mackey’s own ‘100 day plan’, which moots the introduction of an ‘off–balance sheet capital investment mechanism’. The form this will take has not yet been clarified.
In boosting NHS spending once more, the government has raised the political stakes for reform. It is clear that they regard turning around a ‘broken’ service as being at the vanguard of meeting a more existential challenge: ‘We must have a strong NHS – not…an insurance-based system,’ the Chancellor reflected yesterday, looking up at the MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage.
But with the public again expected to back another massive rise in the NHS budget, with limited reckoning of the trade-offs in the near-term, their patience may be tested if improvement is not felt soon. The government’s ten-year health plan must convince the public that they have the strategy in place, or it will look like the Chancellor is making a large, rather speculative investment.
Life is too precious for assisted dying
Assisted dying has attracted for me, and no doubt many other MPs, far more mail than any other issue. The weight of this mail on either side of the argument has been pretty much the same. It has also involved more surgery discussions than any other subject, and an online meeting for my constituents, which around a hundred people participated in.
The interest and passion on both sides of the argument has been immense, but so has been the respect that all have given to this sensitive topic.
Technically the bill’s proposers and the committee have done an impressive piece of work. They included a suggestion I made that social workers also be a part of the teams that examines these cases, and for this I am grateful.
But is this enough?
As MPs, we have been given this subject to deal with on the basis of our consciences, and with much personal discussion with family, friends and professionals. I have looked into the subtleties of the arguments, and found myself drawn to personal experience to also help me find clarity.
At the end of the day just knowing that there is a bill in place, may, as has been suggested by others, be a relief. But for others, it will produce an anxiety, and a questioning over what to do as the end-of-life approaches.
Thoughts, for example, of ‘becoming a burden’ on one’s family may arise, when they donot need to.
The current state of end-of-life care cannot be described as optimal. The provision of hospices across our country is patchy at best.
Just recently I took part in a sponsored walk along with friends and colleagues, on the ‘Men’s Walk to Support’ for Dorothy House Hospice, that lies on the western edge of my constituency. Four hundred of us took part and collectively we raised around £71,000, but this amount does not even touch the sides of the need, especially after the increase in national insurance for employers is taken into account. The £100 million announced by the government for capital projects at hospices, while welcome, does not help with the everyday costs.
It has been pointed out to me that if hospices are properly supported, then much of the problem that this bill seeks to deal with goes away, and where it does not, doctors must be supported and protected when they are dealing with extreme pain, especially when its amelioration hastens the death of the patient.
I will tell the story of my own sister, who just a few days before the end of her life regained her lucidity
But this care at the bedside should not be interfered with by judicial process. It is too intimate, too pressing, too delicate.
So, what should be done with those who want to die, perhaps before their natural end comes, but out of fear for what is to come?
I will tell the story of my own sister, who just a few days before the end of her life regained her lucidity, after years of dealing with cancer. Following days of being for the most part unconscious, she called her two young sons to her bedside and told them not to be afraid, but to be strong, and to do the right things in their lives, and that she would always be looking over them.
Such moments are priceless and would potentially be denied if this bill was passed. People are surprising. Life, and indeed death, is hard. But it does not mean we should, even if we could, escape from these situations, which are all different and subject to the individuals and families involved.
Making the decision to approve this bill would introduce a huge grey area to the end of life, which we will all one day have to face. Life is too precious. For the sake of the many and having voted for the bill to go through to its committee stage, I now, at the third reading, and after much thought, will be voting against it.
What is the point of the RSPCA?
The secretly-filmed footage is a horror show. Hens are desperately trying to escape as they suffocate in a gas chamber. The birds, which are being killed for supermarket meat because they’re past their egg-laying days, gasp for breath. They appear to cry out as they die slowly. The floor of the gas chamber is littered with dead bodies.
The RSPCA increasingly feels like a relic that has lost its way
Should we phone the RSPCA? Oh, someone already did. The animal welfare charity’s response? While it acknowledged that the footage was deeply upsetting, it said that using carbon dioxide to gas chickens was permitted under RSPCA welfare standards:
‘This can be incredibly difficult to watch but the birds are actually unconscious when this happens, and are not experiencing pain.’
Really? The RSPCA’s ‘Assured Scheme’, which certifies farms, food producers and food retailers that meet its specific animal welfare standards, does indeed allow hens to be killed in either gas chambers or electric water baths. Its website tells us:
‘The RSPCA welfare standards require birds to be killed within 10 seconds of exit from the water bath. The RSPCA is committed to phasing out inverted shackling systems, and these are currently only allowed under strict conditions of use.’
Is this meant to be reassuring for animal lovers? The anti-cruelty charity also approves slaughter by gas or maceration of day-old chicks, describing this as an ‘effective and humane kill’.
Pigs can be painfully mutilated on RSCPA-approved farms, with tail docking and teeth clipping both allowed in certain cases. The charity also allows pigs to be slaughtered in gas chambers. In RSPCA Assured slaughterhouses, ‘the concentration (of Carbon Dioxide) must be at least 90 per cent,’the charity informs us. Crumbs of comfort for those poor animals in their final moments.
An investigation published in the Independent claimed that pigs who meet their end in this way have been known to ‘scream in pain and gasp for breath’ and ‘scramble to try to escape, panicking and in distress’.
Turkeys don’t fare much better: they can have their beaks painfully trimmed on RSCPA-backed farms. But the better news for the birds is that, when they go to the slaughterhouse, the charity says they shouldn’t be picked up by only one leg. They might be too tired and distressed to care by that point, because the guidelines allow cramped journeys of up to several hours between farm and slaughterhouse before they die.
It doesn’t look like these pathetic guidelines are always observed anyway. Campaign group Animal Rising claimed to have found ‘systemic animal cruelty’ at a number of RSCPA-approved abattoirs. Its investigators discovered last year that in one slaughterhouse 85 per cent of pigs were stunned incorrectly, leaving animals conscious during slaughter; in another, 96 per cent of cows were prodded with an electric goad, a practice banned by the RSPCA. Some 46 per cent of cows showed clear signs of panic or escape behaviours, it added.
There was also ‘frequent verbal and physical abuse from workers’, said the campaigners. Animals ‘watch(ed) in terror and panic as other animals were killed or stunned in front of them’. The society suspended the abattoirs and launched an investigation, insisting that it takes allegations of poor animal welfare ‘incredibly seriously’.
But the wildlife TV presenter Chris Packham and former Green Party MP Caroline Lucas had enough; they quit as president and vice-president of the RSPCA after the findings. Queen guitarist Sir Brian May has also stepped down, after what he called ‘damning evidence’ of animal welfare failings related to its food certification label. The RSPCA said it had ‘different views from Brian on how best to approach this complex challenge’.
When animal rights campaigners released an advert to expose the awful truth about dairy farming, the RSPCA’s head of public affairs, David Bowles, accused activists of using ’emotive’ language. Bowles once took to Twitter to say that ‘seal shooting is not culling it’s about humane pest control’. This animal lover disagrees.
What is the purpose of an animal welfare charity that behaves like this? What is the RSPCA doing with the tens of millions of pounds that the public donates to it each year?
The charity does do good work for animals. In 2022 alone, it put 29,945 pets in loving new homes, for instance. They also say their helpline receives 90,000 calls each month. When they can, they do go out and help animals in need. This is what people love about them. But other animal charities do equally admirable work on that front and the RSPCA increasingly feels like a relic that has lost its way.
With the RSPCA, its mission is spelled out in its name: the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It’s meant to prevent cruelty to animals. But, when animals need it most, the RSPCA is too often looking the other way; or, in the case of those poor hens, actively sweeping animal suffering under the carpet.
The sad decline of reading
At secondary school open days, English teachers are always asked the same questions by anxious parents of year six students: How do I get my child to read more? Why has my child suddenly stopped reading? What books would you recommend to make reading less of a chore?
For too many children (and adults), reading has become like swimming upstream
This apprehension is not surprising. Reading enjoyment among children and young people has fallen to its lowest level in two decades, according to research by the National Literacy Trust. The decline is particularly pronounced in teenage boys, of whom only a quarter said they enjoyed reading in their spare time. Adults are equally afflicted: 40 per cent of Britons have not read or listened to a book in the past year, and men account for only 20 per cent of fiction sales in the US, Canada and Britain.
Reading is a habit, and habits need to be practised. Yet parents are no longer even reading to their children: according to a recent survey by Harper Collins, fewer than half of Gen-Z parents think reading out loud to their children is ‘fun’, and a third believe reading is more of a ‘subject to be learnt’ than something to be enjoyed.
Screentime is the obvious culprit. Mornings previously spent reading in bed are now spent scrolling through social media. Commutes are about composing emails rather than devouring spy thrillers. Quiet evenings are for binge-watching limitless series while books lay untouched.
Even as an English teacher, I am in a nightly battle against my post-work tiredness, my internet-enfeebled attention span, and, of course, my phone. I regularly resort to strategies to restart the routine: listening to audiobooks, joining a bookclub to hold myself accountable, borrowing from a library to give myself a deadline, bingeing during the school holidays, taking myself on a shopping trip to Blackwell’s so that it feels like a ‘treat’. In our world of shiny new toys, it’s so easy to forget what a gift reading is.
What is even more depressing is we are not just losing the will to read, but the ability. Our overstimulated, dopamine-addled brains can no longer handle the sustained concentration of reading, which may explain why thirty per cent of Americans read at the level you would expect of a 10-year-old child. A recent piece in the Atlantic found that many university professors no longer assign long or complex texts because their students cannot cope with them; another study on the links between smartphones and cognitive decline suggests that we may have passed peak brain power.
This is only going to get worse. In the early days of the World Wide Web, the internet was more like print media: reading articles, forums, blogs. It was primarily text-based. Now the internet is more like television: its YouTube-fuelled evolution towards short-form video means it has become a visual medium: snippets, snapshots, screenshots, pop-ups. Online, we are no longer readers but viewers.
As scholar Mark Cuenco writes, the reading involved when staring at a screen is ‘fundamentally dynamic, ever-fleeting, disjointed… the character of the content delivers indigestible volumes of information all at once, without much sequence or structure.’ He argues that ‘the experience of reading a tweet or the caption on a TikTok is so radically different from that of reading a book (one locks us into an endless scroll, while the other has a definitive start and end point) that they are hardly comparable.’ Online, the medium becomes the message.
Who knows what the future of our post-literate society will look like: perhaps reading paperbacks will soon be seen as an esoteric hobby, the diversion of a special ‘reading class’, much like it was before the second half of the nineteenth century. What we do know is that reading fiction fosters imagination, empathy, concentration, critical thinking, language development, better memory, knowledge and understanding. It is both relaxing and stimulating, escapist and grounding.
It is not, however, something to force your way through. If students are going to resist the overwhelming pull to look at the blackhole of their iPhone screen, then we need to offer them an alternative that is genuinely enjoyable. There are some amazing young adult novels out there – The Girl With All The Gifts, After The First Death, Scythe – yet far too much is either really poorly written, or more preoccupied with social justice over a really good story.
As Maryanne Wolf writes, when reading goes well, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. Yet for too many children (and adults), reading has become like swimming upstream, trying to stay afloat amidst the riptides of instant information and gratification. The harder reading becomes, the less likely we are to exercise that part of our brain, or encourage the younger generation to do so – and we will all be poorer and weaker for it.
Save the miniskirt!
What is it about men and miniskirts? A few months ago, I read with horror – but sadly not surprise – about a school that was considering banning girls from wearing skirts. Apparently, residents in Whitstable, Kent, were so alarmed at the ‘inappropriate skirt lengths’ spotted around town they had complained to the local school. Headteacher Alex Holmes (you guessed it – a man) immediately dashed off a letter informing parents that all pupils could be forced to wear trousers as part of a new ‘gender neutral uniform’ in response.
The miniskirt is a symbol of women’s liberation – not sexual servitude
I’m sorry, what? Are we talking about a pretty seaside town in Kent or downtown Tehran? I thought the days of men lining girls up in a row to measure their hemlines were over. Clearly not. That letter sent a grim message to teenage girls. It told them that wearing short skirts is morally corrupt, sexually deviant and dangerous. How depressing.
It got me thinking about my hemlines over the years. Back at school, me and my mates would try to outbid each other when it came to who had the miniest miniskirt. I went to a comprehensive in London in the nineties, so didn’t have to wear uniform. Instead, every weekend we would scour the clothes rails at Topshop picking out the latest thigh-slimming numbers. We all wanted to look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Friends series 1/2 (think black mini, white top and knee-high boots). If I’m honest, I still want to look like this.
Looking back at photos of those years, I made some terrible fashion mistakes. I’m not sure the Adidas 3-stripe shell suit partnered with a beret was ever a good idea. But those skirts are not one of them. The miniskirt is a symbol of women’s liberation – not sexual servitude. Invented by British designer Mary Quant in the 1960s so women could ‘run and dance’, they were short on the hemline and big on fun. And they soon went global.
In Iran, women slipped into their miniskirts, cut their hair off into bobs, and went to university to study to be scientists, academics and engineers. But if a woman in Iran wore a miniskirt in public today she would be arrested and brutally punished. Those who bravely defy the morality police and refuse to wear a hijab and show their hair in public are lashed. Or, worse still, have their eyes gouged out. It is a double punishment. A cruel act of violence that leaves women unable to see – and robs them of their looks.
It is also a salutary lesson for us all. Women fought hard for the right to wear what they want. And these rights can be lost too. Our schools should be teaching teenage girls to be proud of their looks and confident to wear what they want. No man should be getting his tape measure out to check a girl’s hemline. Even if he is a headteacher.
The deadly curse of influencers
What’s the most hazardous occupation? Deep sea fisherman? Uranium miner? Tail-end Charlie in a Lancaster bomber (not a career currently available)? I challenge anyone to find a speedier way to meet one’s end than becoming an influencer. The sad death of 28-year-old University of Salford student Maria Eftimova, who tumbled off Tryfan, a 1,000ft mountain in Snowdonia during a hike organised on Facebook, is one of those all-too-regular headlines: an influencer who meets their end in their twenties, leaving tens of thousands of followers distraught.
Policymakers fret over children falling under bad influences online – we have had an entire Online Safety Act to try to address the problem. But the hazards facing the influenced seem nothing like those suffered by the people who are doing the influencing. There was, for example, 24-year-old Chinese extreme-eater Pan Xiaoting, who liked to live-stream her eating binges – and died during one in July last year after her stomach burst while trying to consume 10kg of chocolate and other foods. Or there was 21-year-old Thanakarn Kanthee, a Thai national who died at New Year after trying to down two bottles of whisky in 20 minutes.
They, you might say, had it coming. But the influencer curse doesn’t just seem to extend to people doing stupidly dangerous things – falling off buildings and bridges while trying to climb them illicitly is another favourite. All Guava Shuishi liked to do was put on make-up (although she did have an unfortunate habit of tasting it at the same time). She died of a ‘mystery illness’ earlier this month. She, funnily enough, was also 24. While rock stars became notorious for coming to grief aged 27 (as per Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison), influencers seem to have developed an unnerving habit of writing themselves out of the script three years earlier. Hari Harris, who just liked to give interior decorating tips to his online followers, did at least make it to 29 before falling down the stairs at his family’s home in Shrewsbury in February.
Social media is one of the great misnomers of our age: for many people it is the route to a solitary life
Although it often goes unstated, reading between the lines suggests that suicide is a big killer of influencers. Social media seems to have created a world which offers instant fame for a few but also the certainty of a big crash in self-esteem when the followers and likes inevitably start to dry up. It is not, though, immediately obvious why the fame and rejection offered by social media should be so much more lethal than the same cycle of ups and downs which has afflicted generations of pop stars, writers, actors and artists. Many developed destructive habits but few set out deliberately to take their lives.
Maybe the essential difference is that most performers in the pre-social media age were at least forced to keep one foot on the ground by having to go out and perform in pubs and clubs – if not on a big stage. They were forced into contact with fellow strugglers. The life of an influencer need not involve other people at all – it can be carried out entirely in isolation. ‘Social’ media is one of the great misnomers of our age: for many people it is the route to a solitary life. Covid lockdowns served only to encourage the idea that you can achieve global fame without ever having to leave your bedroom.
Still fancy being an influencer? There are few original ideas, but if I were minded to set up a TikTok or Instagram account I can think of one theme which, as far as I am aware, no-one has tried: how to live to the age of 30.
Economist accuses Reeves of ‘making up numbers’ in spending review
While certain government departments celebrated Rachel Reeves’s spending review – Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner even threw a party the night before the Chancellor’s speech – economists are not quite as impressed. In fact, the Labour Chancellor has been accused of ‘making up numbers’ in her big speech after offering up rather incoherent guidance on how departments would make savings. Oh dear…
The director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies Paul Johnson insisted his organisation is unable to ‘find any particular area of spending the government has decided it wants to withdraw from’ except overseas aid – despite Reeves constituently claiming that the Treasury had looked ‘line by line’ at every department’s spending plans in the zero-based review. Johnson noted that almost every government unit faced ‘exactly the same cut in its administration budgets…irrespective of [any] planned spending increase’. Remarking immediately after the Chancellor’s speech that it was ‘full of numbers, few of them useful’, the IFS director added rather scathingly today:
That is not the result of a serious department by department analysis. I hesitate to accuse the Treasury of making up numbers but…
Shots fired!
In its analysis released in the immediate aftermath of the review, the IFS admitted that health and defence were the ‘big winners’ but pointed to systematic issues in the NHS and the changing international situation to caveat: ‘One has to wonder whether this will be enough.’ Meanwhile, Andrew Goodwin, chief UK economists at Oxford Economics, concluded: ‘It looks increasingly likely that substantial tax increases will be needed.’ Oo er.
It’s another bad sign for Reeves after this morning’s ‘disappointing’ news from the Office for National Statistics that revealed the UK’s GDP had fallen by 0.3 per cent in April. The Leeds West and Pudsey MP has already had to fend off suggestions that she is a ‘buy now, pay later…Klarna chancellor’ – instead insisting that amid the GDP downtick, her spending review will deliver growth. It would appear she has her work cut out winning out the economists, however…