When in doubt, just recognise Palestine

A botched plan to acknowledge statehood feels like the actions of a panicked Prime Minister

Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel says European powers must work with the Arab states and Israel to end the war.

Surely, with any immediate existential threat to Israel now disarmed, even if not defeated, and no clear way to reach the remaining hostages through warfare, it is time to look beyond bombing and consider how to build a future political arrangement that will exclude Hamas and stabilise the situation.

One precondition for this looks like it might be emerging: Arab states have indicated a degree of willingness to take some responsibility for solving the problem of Palestine by convening a conference on a two-state solution under the auspices of France and Saudi Arabia. The Arab League and Egypt have also, by signing up to a declaration put together at the UN, issued their first public condemnation of the October 7 attack and made a formal demand for Hamas to release the remaining Israeli hostages and hostage remains. There is still no viable consensus on governing Gaza, but most Arab governments have dealt enough with fanatical gangster terrorists to know that any arrangement involving continued Hamas control is impossible.

European governments, however, apparently cannot resist demonstrating their lack of seriousness by going beyond anything the Arab states are willing to countenance. Fifteen mostly European countries, including France and Ireland but not the UK, issued their own “New York call”, focused on state recognition for Palestine without any clear idea of its borders or governance. Proving ourselves the world leaders in self-sabotaging legal-diplomatic posturing, the UK has issued its own, singularly incoherent statement of an intention to “recognise” Palestine as a state in September if there is no ceasefire — which means that insofar as Hamas gives two hoots about what Sir Keir Starmer says, which it doesn’t, it is directly incentivised to prolong the war and hold on to the hostages for at least another month or so. Could anything demonstrate better the futility, cynicism and incompetence of Starmer’s attempts to get pro-Palestine backbenchers off his case?

For UnHerd, Giles Fraser says the surrender of Hamas and the return of all hostages must be a precondition for peace in Gaza.

In choosing this particular moment to announce the British commitment to recognising a Palestinian state, Starmer is willingly giving encouragement to Hamas, and to the very strategy that led to this desperate war. Trump says that Starmer is rewarding Hamas — and he’s right. Hamas is getting exactly what it wants. Why, now, would it give up hostages? What reason does it have to agree to a ceasefire? It only needs Israel to keep on fighting for a few more months to achieve its ultimate goal. The paradox is, if Hamas refuses peace, then the UK will recognise Palestine. This is batshit crazy: Starmer’s announcement will only prolong the agony of the Palestinian people. Whether the West wants to hear it or not, since October 7, Hamas has used the agony of its own people as a way of manipulating the rest of the world into supporting it. Whereas Israel is doing everything it can to bring its people home, Hamas uses the grotesque suffering of the people of Gaza as a means to its own end. And it will be done with renewed confidence now that this wicked strategy is so obviously working.

What is particularly shabby about Starmer’s announcement is that he is playing with people’s lives — with Palestinian and Israeli ones — not because he believes recognising a state of Palestine is the right thing to do at this moment, but because of his own troubled domestic political situation. With Corbyn’s new party on his shoulder and a few hundred of his own MP’s lobbying him, Starmer has caved.

…And Netanyahu hates the idea of a two-state solution, having done his utmost to fill the West Bank with over half a million ideological settlers who won’t be moved. Is it really credible that a future prime minister of Israel would send in the army to tear down the settlements and forcibly remove their occupants? That would be the beginnings of civil war. For despite the fact that it was a Right-wing leader, Ariel Sharon, who pushed through the Israeli settler withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, that was a doddle compared with what a withdrawal from the West Bank would look like today. The baffling thing is that Starmer knows this. He knows he is committing himself to something that cannot be done, at least not now. This is surely a grotesque form of showboating. For the future stability of Palestine, Israel and the Middle East, there’s only one way forward. Hamas must release the hostages. Hamas must surrender. What remains of Hamas must commit itself to a genuine peace process. Once this happens, and only then, should the West lean on Israel to make plans for a future Palestinian state.

The Economist’s Archie Hall says Britain’s crippling energy prices are due to policy choices as much as the 2022 gas shock.

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, says average annual electricity bills should fall by £300 ($400) by 2030. Without a drop in gas prices, they seem more likely to rise. For now, decarbonisation is popular, and blaming Vladimir Putin for high prices still works. But that backing looks fragile. Polling by More in Common for The Economist suggests that energy bills are the single most important measure voters will use when deciding whether to re-elect Labour. Enthusiasm for climate action in surveys tapers off quickly if it costs even tens of pounds extra per month.

High bills have squeezed Britons’ finances. Are they crimping growth? Output of energy-guzzling goods like chemicals, plastics and metals has fallen by more than 20% since gas prices first spiked. The government wants to subsidise power for those sectors, but that just moves the cost elsewhere. Energy flows into everything, even the services that dominate Britain’s economy. References to energy costs in corporate reports and earnings calls have more than tripled since 2019, driven by the consumer, tech and financial sectors.

No big country is as rich as Britain while using so little energy per head. Revving up GDP growth without more power—a challenging prospect until more fresh baseload like extra nuclear or battery storage lands in the late 2030s—may be possible, but is uncharted terrain. These days, Britain’s carbon emissions are not far off a global rounding error. By phasing out coal so quickly, Britain has also already cut emissions by more than just about any rich country. The bet behind today’s clean-power push is that Britain can be a trailblazer, and show how to painlessly decarbonise the grid even without much cheap solar power. But taking that prospect seriously also means entertaining the opposite risk. A botched transition would be not a model but a warning.

In The Critic, Maurice Cousins says the promises of Net Zero orthodoxy are crumbling in the face of new realities.

In the 1970s, during an earlier green moment, Labour stalwarts haunted by mass unemployment of the 1930s dismissed such ideas as indulgent. Anthony Crosland called them “morally wrong.” Tony Benn, then Energy Secretary, sneered in his diaries that the environmental movement was “overwhelmingly middle class”. So the message evolved. By the 2010s, green politics was no longer about hair-shirts or limits to growth. It was about cleaner air, cheaper energy, and energy independence. You could keep your consumerist lifestyle — just switch to a sustainable version. The transition would be frictionless. The costs would eventually pay for themselves.

For a time, this framing held. It offered cover to politicians and reassurance to voters. It allowed the consensus to entrench. But that consensus is now rapidly crumbling. The promises of a painless transition and shared prosperity have not materialised. The UK has some of the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world. British heavy industry is in retreat and our prospects in emerging sectors like AI are under threat. After two decades of record investment in intermittent renewables, energy imports are up and, as the Office for Budget Responsibility recently outlined, the UK was left dangerously exposed when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Wider strategic realities have shifted too. Great-power competition is back, and placing the West on a pre-war footing now matters far more than climate diplomacy. The idea that Britain can “lead by example,” regardless of what China, India or the US do, looks increasingly naïve. And people have noticed. Yes, support for Net Zero in the abstract remains high. But support for its practical consequences — the cost of living and lifestyle constraints — is collapsing. A so-called “green backlash” is brewing across the West. You can see it in national polling, with Reform riding high. Mainstream political figures and trade unions, from Tony Blair and Kemi Badenoch to the GMB and Unite, are challenging the consensus head-on.

For The Telegraph, Paul Goodman questions what an “authentically conservative” vision really is, and what it means for policy.

First, it’s anti-utopian. It says that history shows attempts to build heaven on earth, based on race or class supremacy – Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia – end instead in hell: in holocausts, the slaughter of innocents, Holodomor and injustices worse than they replace.

Second, it’s local – or, rather, national. A French conservative is likely to be republican, interventionist and have a high view of the state’s role. A British one will be monarchist, tend to prefer markets to planning and be increasingly suspicious of two-tier state power. The two may well find each other strangers. That said, there is rough agreement internationally on two fundamentals: social order and economic freedom, and that the two are self-reinforcing.

Third – and most controversially, given our times – conservatism in Britain is bound up with institutions: monarchy, Parliament, rule of law, limited government, a free media. If they go wrong, revolutionaries try to smash them. Conservatives work instead to reform them, because institutions are a kind of collective, embodied memory. And without memory, you can’t learn. Indeed, you have no identity.

Also for The Critic, Emma Schubart says mass immigration will not solve Britain’s pensions time bomb.

Proponents of mass migration claim that new arrivals will prop up the tax base. It is an attractively simple idea. But there are two fundamental flaws in the argument: fertility convergence and lifetime net contributions. First, while first‑generation migrants often have higher birth rates, subsequent generations rapidly adopt native fertility norms. Research on immigrant women in Norway shows Somalis go from an average of seven children per woman in Somalia to around two children by the second generation in Norway. There is some evidence to suggest that certain immigrant groups are more resistant to native fertility norms than others, namely Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in the UK. This may be partly because of sustained migration from these countries, especially through spousal immigration, which reinforces their cultural norms favouring early marriage and larger families in the UK.

But the ONS concedes that higher migration will only artificially improve dependency ratios; it “will not prevent” an aging population. Even if we consider different migration scenarios (from zero to high net migration into the UK), the old-age dependency ratio will continue to increase. This means that mass migration could only be the solution to the pension crisis if we permanently imported working age migrants to the UK, forever.

Second, the vast majority of migrants are not net contributors over their lifetimes. A Centre for Policy Studies analysis of 2022–23 skilled‑worker visa holders found that 72 per cent earn below the UK’s average salary, and 54 per cent earn less than half  the average. Extrapolating, that means roughly 242,000 visas went to “low‑wage” migrants versus just 91,000 to high‑wage earners. And that’s before counting dependents, who often don’t contribute at all. Overall, only 12 per cent of visas issued in recent years were through the skilled worker route, with a fraction going to higher skilled migrants who could contribute positively to public finances. Far from bolstering the Treasury, most migrants draw on public services, leaving British taxpayers to pick up the tab.

Wonky Thinking

The Centre for Policy Studies published Rail’s Last Chance: A four-point plan to save the railways by Tony Ledge. The Government’s proposed structure for Great British Railways will hand a monopoly power over its own regulation, the report argues. Ledge lays out a plan for the rail network based on competition and independent regulation

Britain’s railways are at a watershed. Under privatisation, passenger rail journeys almost doubled (95.9% increase) in the 20 years before the pandemic, reaching a record 1.8 billion journeys in 2018. Yet while passenger numbers are almost back to pre-pandemic levels, revenue is only at 89.1%, due to a fall in first class, business class, full fare and London and South East season tickets.

This transformation in travel patterns has left a £1.4bn financial hole, which is currently being covered by taxpayers – part of a wider subsidy of £12.5bn (£20.5bn during the pandemic) for a sector that only delivers between 1.5% and 2% of all journeys taken by the public.

The new Government has prioritised the nationalisation of passenger services and the creation of Great British Railways (GBR). Indeed, Labour’s first major piece of legislation was to allow public sector companies to replace privately-run rail franchises in advance of the new state-run GBR.

The creation of GBR, via the forthcoming Railways Bill, will deliver the biggest changes to the structure of the railways since British Rail was abolished in the 1990s.

As well as running most passenger train services, GBR will take responsibility for setting timetables, network maintenance, setting fares and managing access to the railway – all while remaining ultimately answerable to the Secretary of State for Transport. It will even become a rail ticket retailer, in competition with other third parties such as Trainline, Virgin Train Ticketing and Uber.

There will also be a transformation in how rail is regulated. The 1993 Railways Act gave the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) the power to decide who can use the railways and determine the charges for network access. This independent economic regulatory role will now end – a fundamental change.

In future, GBR will decide who can run trains. The regulator will instead become a safety, performance, appeals and statistics body. This means the dominant market operator will be in control of its own regulation.

This has the potential to be catastrophic for ‘open access’ rail, which has delivered some of the most popular and affordable high-speed services – but to which the new Government has already signalled its hostility. These services will not fall under state control, but the Secretary of State has already been pushing the regulator not to approve new open access services – despite their popularity, reliability and rapid growth.

A new passenger quango will be formed to ‘champion passenger interests’, despite survey after survey showing value for money tickets trumping all other demands

Though there will be a statutory responsibility on GBR to promote rail freight (which will remain in private hands, as will rolling stock), there will be no targets or protection afforded to the sector.

In an attempt to avoid a repeat of the 1980s, in which British Rail’s annual budgets helped contribute to a culture of inefficiency, waste, high cost and high subsidy, GBR will look to adopt a fresh financial framework, most probably via five-year budgets from HM Treasury. However, experience suggests that such longer budgets are unlikely to endure, as the Treasury favours annual settlements, despite the impacts on medium-term planning and capital efficiency.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that GBR is a solution looking for a problem – prioritising the nationalisation of the railways over their efficient and effective operation.

In particular, ministers have failed to set out their longer-term vision for the railways in the Britain of the 2030s and beyond. What are the economic goods they can deliver? What is their role in terms of social mobility, clean travel, industrial strategy, boosting inward investment, housing and regional growth? How can innovators and private sector investors be rewarded for taking investment risk? Or is the door now being closed to them?

If GBR is to be genuinely customer-focused, then it must prioritise passenger needs. Only then will revenue recover.

This paper sets out a four-part plan to deliver that customer focus, within the framework of the new arrangements. It highlights the need to support and promote open access, for GBR and its retailing operations to encourage innovation and competition (including a ‘GBR.com’ that is delivered by genuine experts, not by Whitehall); to support rail freight; and to maximise income from the wider railway estate, including better exploiting commercial, residential, hospitality, property and energy sector opportunities.

Given the scale of subsidy still being poured into the sector, we need to get this right. Otherwise, the sector, and the Government, risk repeating all the mistakes of the past.

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