Towering Columns
For The Spectator, Madeline Grant argues that the right can no longer avoid the question of what it means to be English.
All this is why the debate over Englishness cannot be dismissed as a mere racist fixation; and why it’s a particular problem for right-leaning parties. If it is not to threaten the electability of British conservative movements, three things need to happen. Firstly, there needs to be much greater honesty from politicians. People can see the illusion of coherence crumbling around them. There must be an acknowledgement that demographic change is not some great, unbridled good, nor is it an inevitable price of globalisation. There needs to be a greater recognition that what happened under nominally conservative administrations has made a non-racialised concept of Englishness more, not less, difficult. Some humility wouldn’t go amiss. Historically, it is incredibly difficult to assimilate millions of people from different cultures. Very few countries have managed it.
Secondly, in manifesto commitments, primary legislation and in the language they use, people on the right need to make a much stronger case for those other ancient demarcations of English identity. Vague mush about ‘British values’ and football isn’t enough. It has to be rooted in our history.
Finally, politicians and commentators must desist from the patronising lie that ‘Englishness’ is unique in never having had any relationship to ethnic identity, that we alone have always been a ‘melting pot’. It’s not borne out by history, it does not help our present reality, and if anything will drive dissatisfied voters into the arms of the genuinely extreme and racist, it is this lie.
In The Critic, Stephen J. Goss warns that the Government’s handling of Drumcree has undermined the Parades Commission and rewarded the threat of disorder.
This is insufficient. Replacing the Parades Commission has long been advocated, but proved problematic. Joint DUP–Sinn Féin proposals following the 2010 Hillsborough agreement failed after the Orange Order rejected them. Mr Justice O’Hara will no doubt tidy the Commission’s procedures. However, his terms of reference exclude the harder question: what is a lawful determination worth if it cannot be enforced? Until ministers, police, and the Commission settle who ultimately decides – and who answers for the consequences – each will keep pointing fingers at the others.
The Commission was established to spare the police from adjudicating competing communal claims. Yet, its decisions depend upon PSNI assessments, while preserving police powers to prevent breaches of the peace, and allowing HM Government to intervene. There are sound reasons for those safeguards, but Drumcree 2.0 has exposed how the allocation of responsibility can become a circle of blame. Each institution can defend its particular decision while confidence in the whole arrangement deteriorates.
The Parades Commission was created so that parading disputes would no longer be decided by the threat of disorder. Now, by allowing that threat to defeat its rulings, this Government has brought back the very problem the Commission was established to solve.
For The Telegraph, Tom Sharpe, former captain of HMS Endurance, condemns the loss of the Royal Navy’s only icebreaker just as Argentina rattles its sabre over the Falklands.
HMS Protector, in service only since 2011 after a stop-gap lease and later purchase, has shown throughout her short life in the RN the operational and maintenance shortcomings that I saw in HMS Endurance. Those lessons have not been learnt. If the leaner-crewed ships of the future hybrid fleet are to work, we must fix how we support and operate this type of ship.
The second issue with this is broader: withdrawing our ice-patrol capability from the South Atlantic at a moment of renewed Argentine pressure over the Falklands and their resources, while the High North grows ever more contested, is poor timing. Meanwhile the Batch 1 River-class naval patrol vessels leave service in 2028; the Batch 2 that currently provides permanent presence in the Falklands is likely to be pulled back to cover the gap at home.
All these ships cost a tiny fraction of the defence budget yet deliver outsized effect in presence and soft power. We must stop leasing vessels like HMS Protector. We must stop half doing defence, even the easy stuff like this. We should buy a proper successor icebreaker outright – from Finland, the world leader in icebreaker design and construction, or from the experienced Norwegian yards that built Protector herself – and demonstrate lasting commitment to the Falklands, Antarctica, and the Arctic.
In The Times, Juliet Samuel accuses grid bosses of gaslighting the public over a string of near-misses in Britain’s electricity control room.
Yet things keep happening. On September 28, Neso’s forecasts showed it was going to run out of power and it had to put out a call for extra, same-day (and expensive) generation. After about 15 hours, it cancelled the notice — its forecasts were wrong. On October 6, it issued another call. Luckily, even though the wind was low, demand was lower. Again, the forecasts were wrong.
On October 9, for no obvious reason, the grid suddenly ran so short of power that its frequency, or “heartbeat”, went out of the normal operating range for ten minutes, which is what happened in June. An internal “frequency event report” on the latest incident, which I’ve seen thanks to a concerned insider, shows that Neso had to push more power from north to south than the wires are meant to take.
It also had to offer a fortune to incentivise power production from generators in the south. When even that wasn’t enough, it issued a call for “emergency assistance” from France. A Neso engineer says we were one circuit trip away from a very serious situation. “All that was left was [to] scramble for emergency assistance from the EU, violate transmission constraints or disconnect demand.”
Incredibly, three days later, Neso was begging France again, issuing its biggest-ever call for power.
For The Critic, Henry Hill explains why Labour’s tax-and-transfer doom loop means it cannot save the economy.
Here is how this doom-loop works: as the condition of the British economy worsens, the more people face economic hardship, and the more people face economic hardship, the superficially stronger the argument appears for giving them more money. But the only way to find this money, now that simply borrowing it all is off the table, is by raising taxes — which places further strain on the shrinking and overburdened productive part of the economy.
Britain already has a very lop-sided tax-system which exempts huge numbers of people from making any meaningful contribution whilst extracting wildly disproportionate sums from higher earners. Again, this might sound fair enough in the abstract.
The problem is that Britain is a stagnant, high-cost, low-wage economy and high-earners are generally the people most able to adapt their behaviour to such a regime, either by restructuring their income, working less, or moving overseas. (This gets even more pronounced for taxes even more narrowly targeted, such as inheritance tax or corporation tax.) It also crushes the disposable income of the people who tend otherwise to spend the most in the consumer economy, which has knock-on effects of its own.
In The Telegraph, Haim Ben Yakov traces the Green Party’s new anti-Zionist position back to its Soviet origins.
Soviet anti-Zionism operated in two directions. First, the Party created an ideological language at home. Soviet diplomacy then carried that language abroad. When the same propositions won support in international organisations, they could be brought back into the Soviet Union no longer merely as the claims of the Kremlin, but as the supposed opinion of the “international community”. Resolution 3379 was the culmination of that process.
For Soviet Jews, this was not an academic argument about the Middle East. Studying Hebrew could attract suspicion of Zionist activity. A desire to emigrate to Israel could become evidence of political unreliability. An attachment to Israel, or simply the desire to preserve a distinct Jewish identity, could be interpreted as a question of loyalty to the Soviet state.
Anti-Zionism proved to be an extraordinarily useful political language. It made it possible to talk about Jews without formally talking about Jews.
Wonky Thinking
The Prosperity Institute has published The Case for Freezing the National Living Wage by Matthew Bowles and Dr Emmanuel Igwe, with a foreword from Christopher Snowdon. It argues that a five-year freeze at £12.71 would bring the minimum wage back to 56 per cent of median earnings and could put around 270,000 more young people into work. An extract is provided below:
The cost of employing a full-time worker in Britain, as of April 2026, was £28,308.52 per annum. This number includes the full-time salary of an employee earning the National Living Wage (NLW), the new higher rate of employer National Insurance contributions, and the auto-enrolment pension contributions an employer makes to an employee’s pension. The minimum wage ‘bite ratio’—that is, the ratio of the minimum wage to the median wage in a country, also called the Kaitz Index—has risen from 46 per cent in 1999 to approximately 66 per cent today. This sits comfortably above the 60 per cent threshold which was the NLW’s original target and is often treated as the suggested point where disemployment effects begin to emerge.
In Britain today, we are already seeing these effects. This has been borne out especially when looking at employment opportunities for young people. The NLW has risen by 48 per cent since 2019 in cash terms (15.8 per cent in real terms), whilst output per hour has only risen by 2.4 per cent over the same period. The Low Pay Commission estimates that wage spillovers from multiple increases to the minimum wage have now reached the 35th percentile of earners.
This has resulted in the slow erosion of the differential between junior and mid-level roles. As a result, the financial incentive to seek promotion or assume more responsibility in the workplace has been weakened, with damaging effects on workplace productivity. Most unfortunate is the continuous increase in 16–24-year-olds who are not in employment, education, or training (NEETs). The number of NEETs has increased from 715,000 in 2021 to 946,000 in 2025. This is a major cause for concern, signalling that the door to entry-level jobs has been steadily closed to young people seeking employment.
Podcast of the Week
In a live interview for The Spectator’s Quite Right! Michael Gove quizzed Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy on issues surrounding prisons, Islamist extremism, and policing.
Quick Links
Public burka ban issued in Portugal.
Vikrum Digwa’s mother could be released from prison early.
Iran-backed assassin in UK jailed.
Ships increasingly attacked in Strait of Hormuz.
Houthi missile attack leaves five dead.