Sam Ashworth-Hayes | The Spectator columnists & writers

How Boris can defeat the railway strikers

Today, the RMT will succeed where the Luddites failed. For 24 hours, they will unwind the most impressive part of the Industrial Revolution, stripping Britain of trains. They will repeat the feat on Thursday and Saturday. The government, meanwhile, will wring its hands, complain about the losses faced by workers and businesses, and do very little to address them. While this won’t do much for GDP, it does at least offer the possibility of resolving the bulk of the energy crisis by harnessing the Iron Lady’s rotations in her grave. Frankly, I don’t care whether the railway staff are to blame for being intransigent. Or if the Treasury is to blame for, well, being the Treasury and fighting a desperate rearguard against spending money that could be used on election-winning bungs to pensioners.

Boris should scrap the Ministerial Code

Last week, Boris Johnson’s ethics advisor - a role that must sit alongside Vlad the Impaler’s anger management therapist in the annals of doomed job descriptions - resigned. Downing Street so far hasn’t commented on whether Lord Geidt will be replaced, with a spokesman saying only that Johnson will ‘take time’ to consider the decision. Well, here’s a hint: you don’t respond to the failure of a chocolate teapot by buying a second one. And while you’re at it, scrap the Ministerial Code too. For all the Westminster rigmarole currently focused on them, neither of these institutions is particularly old. The Ministerial Code dates back to 1997 and Tony Blair’s election landslide, the ethics advisor to 2006. These are not core structures of the British constitution, in place since time immemorial.

The uncomfortable truth about Oxford University

Oxford is a city that makes you proud to be British: its beautiful dreaming spires attract tourists and the cleverest students from across the world. But is there something darker lurking beneath the glorious architecture? Some Oxford students think so. 'Uncomfortable Oxford' is a student-run company which, for £13, takes you on a tour of the city centre. It promised to raise difficult questions about the university and society. 'Through unique walking tours, we generate discussions about racial inequality, gender and class discrimination, and legacies of empire,' its website says. The group met outside Carfax Tower, the last remnant of a church standing at the centre of Oxford. The day’s party consisted of a scattering of tourists, some interested students, an American who insisted on wearing a face mask for an activity which took place entirely outside on a windy day, and one undercover Spectator contributor.

Asking for a pay rise won’t crash Britain’s economy

The Bank of England has just raised interest rates for the fifth time in the row, warning that inflation is expected to pass 11 per cent by the end of this year. If it had escaped your notice, everything is getting more expensive, and the government is powerless to help. The extent of the Bank’s assistance has been to tell you not to ask for a payrise. Boris Johnson, meanwhile, seems furious that taxes are so high, and will be having stern words with whoever raised them. Even Freddo bars aren't exempt from the cost of living crisis, shooting up to a frankly outrageous 30p each. Inflation is essentially a problem of too much money chasing too few goods. Markets don’t like unmet demand, or unused supply. If people are lining up to buy goods that are selling out, prices rise until supply and demand match.

The police have bowed to the mob

On Saturday immigration enforcement officers went to Peckham to pick up a man suspected of overstaying his visa. When they arrived, a crowd of protesters turned up to stop the ‘immigration raid’, blocking the van from departing. When the police turned up, they also found their way blocked. Eventually, they gave up. The arrested man was released on bail. The Home Office released a statement which said that ‘preventing immigration enforcement teams from doing their job is unacceptable.’ This was accompanied by the universally understood but officially unstated caveat: not that we’d prevent you from preventing officers doing their job. British law enforcement is based on the principle of ‘policing by consent’.

Ben & Jerry’s is wrong about Britain’s ‘racist’ Rwanda plan

Why is an ice cream brand lecturing Britain on the morality of its immigration policy? Ben and Jerry’s, otherwise known for flogging overpriced junk food, has weighed in on the government’s new policy of sending mostly single men dodging Britain’s border control to Rwanda. The plan is 'cruel and morally bankrupt', 'racist and abhorrent', according to the ice cream company, which says sending people 'to a country they’ve never been to, and have no connection with' could 'put people’s lives at risk'. Setting aside the source of these allegations, let’s evaluate these statements. Despite being depicted by some as a rainy hellhole, Britain remains an attractive country where a large segment of the world’s population desperately wants to live.

David Lammy, George Floyd and the trouble with ‘structural racism’

What planet do our politicians live on? Labour’s video memorialising George Floyd, and pledging radical change to education and justice policies to combat the sort of 'structural racism' that led to his death, suggests which country. All this time I’ve believed I live in Britain, when in fact we’re all living in America. What other explanation could there be for a party pledging to radically reshape the nation based on events in Minneapolis two years ago? Why else would British politicians like David Lammy line up to say 'he could have been me'? If we didn’t live in America, comparing a Harvard-educated London lawyer to a man living in a city on the other side of an ocean based on little more than the colour of their skin seems facile.

The moral decay at the heart of the Tory party

Pigs may fly, Hell may freeze over, and a month may pass without a Conservative MP revealing the moral decay at the core of the party. Yesterday, former MP Imran Khan was sentenced to 18 months in prison for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy. In Westminster, meanwhile, rumours circulated that a senior MP had sexually assaulted colleagues. Yet another member was bailed after being arrested in a rape investigation. These stories shouldn’t be confused with the unnamed Conservative MP who was arrested over rape allegations in 2020 before the investigation was dropped or the former government whip Charlie Elphicke who was jailed for sexual assault in 2020. Neither should they be mistaken for that of the former minister Andrew Griffiths who was found by a family court judge to have raped his wife.

BLM is dying but its legacy lives on

It can be hard to remember just how strange things were during the pandemic. Every day the front pages covered the virus spreading from city to city in minute detail, while politicians and citizens alike excoriated each other for failing to show sufficient concern about the disease. With the benefit of those two years, it’s now – probably – just about safe to say it: the summer of 2020, which was dominated by the Black Lives Matter movement, really was quite strange. In response to George Floyd’s death in Minnesota, politicians in Britain took the knee in solidarity, protesters turned out in force even though pandemic restrictions were still in place, and Keir Starmer apologised profusely for referring to a ‘Black Lives Matter moment’ – which apparently dismissed the campaign’s importance.

What reason is there for young people like me to vote Tory?

With a sense of reluctance, I went into a voting booth this week and ticked the boxes corresponding to my local Labour candidates. My rationalisation was simple: I wasn’t voting for Labour, but against the Conservatives. There is a tangible stench of decay surrounding the Tory party at present. At best, it is incapable of maintaining moral standards. Barely a month passes without some MP's embroilment in a grubby scandal involving sex, money, or both. The party has no vision for the country, no agenda beyond targeting the young to pay for the old. And if you judge them on results, well, there's even fewer reasons to vote Tory. The Conservatives have been in office for over a decade. What are their economic achievements? Prices are rising; wages are stagnant.

Revoking Roe v. Wade is not an assault on democracy

The leak of a draft Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade has sparked a furious reaction in Britain. Yet for all the backlash in British political circles, the reality is that the proposed shake-up of abortion laws in the United States doesn't really matter here. Our nominally conservative-leaning parliament just voted to make abortion easier, and the issue is nowhere near as salient for the British right as it is in the US. Those who are furiously denouncing the ruling are wading into an issue that will have little to no impact on their own lives. Yet there is something significant for Brits to take from this furious debate: we're lucky that we live under the rule of law rather than the rule of lawyers.

In praise of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover

If there’s one quality that defines Elon Musk other than his entrepreneurship, it’s his ability to drive his detractors mad. From this perspective, his attempt to buy Twitter is his greatest success yet. With Twitter poised to accept a buyout today, we can expect more entertainment on this front. We can also expect a significant improvement to the social network. Musk's motivations are twofold. Firstly, he is a passionate believer in free speech, a quality he views as sorely lacking on the platform. A commitment to enabling unfettered conversation would make it a far more interesting place to be. Secondly, and relatedly, he thinks he can run it better than the current management. Given his track record disrupting other industries, it would be a brave man who bets against him.

What are the Tories for?

It’s an odd accusation to levy at Boris Johnson’s government, but the Conservative party feels grey. Flights of fancy suggesting a bridge to Northern Ireland or – a thought to make 19th century Royal Navy strategists shudder – to France have given way to a carousel of scandals and disappointments. The former is cheap or cruel; the latter marked mostly by their predictability. This week confirmed a suspicion I’ve held for a while; the Conservative party, being neither meaningfully socially conservative nor particularly interested in using an 80 seat majority, exists for the sole purpose of keeping Labour out of office. It doesn’t conserve; despite repeated pledges, immigration never came close to the promised tens of thousands until the intervention of a pandemic and Conservative MPs are mostly to the left of Labour voters on social issues.

The shameful silence surrounding David Amess’s murder

Ali Harbi Ali has been given a whole life sentence. But perhaps this is too steep an introduction. Perhaps, like me, you’re beginning to lose track of the various perpetrators of Islamist terror in Britain as the news blurs into a constant revolving track of incidents, arriving to a sense of outrage deadened by repeated horror. Ali Harbi Ali murdered the MP Sir David Amess in a constituency surgery, in a direct assault on British democracy. He told the horrified crowd that he wanted ‘every parliament minister who signed up for the bombing of Syria, who agreed to the Iraqi war, to die.’ He said he did it ‘because of Syria’. He claimed Sir David ‘deserved to die’. And your MPs, your representatives, tasked with responding to this outrage, decided that action was needed.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia can win the war

While Russia has agreed to pull back its troops from Kyiv, the signs of a wider breakthrough in peace talks are far from promising. Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba insists that his country will not trade 'people, land, or sovereignty'; and the US state department believes Russia too is unlikely to make compromises. Yet while striking a negotiated settlement might seem to be against the odds, this outcome remains the best hope for Ukraine. Outright victory is not an obvious possibility for either party to the conflict. The Russian advance has stalled, and the army lacks the troops for a full occupation. Ukrainian forces lack the ability to force Russia to withdraw from its country. Neither side appears sufficiently exhausted by the conflict to simply give up.

Russia has never been a part of the West

In 1697 Tsar Peter the Great set out on a great journey across western Europe, seeking the support of European monarchs in his confrontation with the Ottoman Empire. Unsuccessful in securing alliances, he returned instead laden with ideas acquired in his travels through Britain and Holland, which he promptly put into action in modernising Russia. The most visible symbol of this new nation was Saint Petersburg, the intended new capital of his empire. By 1858, an English visitor to the city described it as ‘one of the handsomest cities in Europe’, with a street of residences ‘so large that 50 extend over an English mile.’ And so it was that Russia progressed from a country dominated by the palaces of a wealthy few and an underclass of slaves, to a modern European country dominated by the palaces of a wealthy few with an underclass of serfs, progressing to Communism – a system dominated by the state-owned palaces of a wealthy few with a large and state-mandated underclass – and then finally to Putinism, a system dominated by the stately houses of Oligarchs and… well, you get the picture.

In defence of mutually assured destruction

The slow return of the 1980s has reached its logical conclusion. The prospect of nuclear annihilation is haunting our nightmares once again. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been marked by a willingness to engage in blatant nuclear sabre-rattling of a sort not seen since the end of the Cold War. From his statement that anyone 'interfering from outside' would 'face consequences greater than any you have faced in history' to his placing Russia’s nuclear forces on 'a special combat duty regime', Putin’s strategy has been to threaten nuclear war to keep the West out of what he sees as his business. But these threats don't mean that Putin is about to send missiles soaring over Europe at any moment. Nuclear analyst Pavel Podvig believes that the ‘special combat duty’ is nothing more than an elevated state of vigilance rather than an instruction to make Russia’s system ‘ready to fire’.

A no-fly zone is an act of war

Fuelled by repeated appeals from President Zelensky, western support for a no-fly zone in Ukraine is growing. The number of Americans in favour of a no-fly zone outnumber those against by 45 per cent to 20. People seem to feel that something must be done, beyond the sanctions already in place and the provision of weapons. A no-fly zone is something; therefore it must be done. So far, western leaders have rejected these requests. Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg has explicitly ruled out the idea, as have No. 10 and the White House. On this, if only this, they find themselves in agreement with Vladimir Putin: imposing one would be an act of war. Despite these warnings, journalists, backbench politicians, analysts, and former Nato commanders continue to call for the implementation of a no-fly zone, damning opposition as an act of appeasement no different to our appeasement of Hitler in 1938, or asking whether our unwillingness to act means we wouldn’t defend Nato members.

Putin is no Hitler

That English history lessons consist of World War II and the Tudors has come back to bite us again. The obsessive focus on learning about the 1940s means there is one historical figure Vladimir Putin has been repeatedly compared to in recent days: Adolf Hitler. It's an unhelpful comparison, to say the least. From the Sun calling Putin 'the Hitler of our age' to Defence Secretary Ben Wallace's 'whiff of Munich' remark, the build up to the war looms large in the British imagination. But while Putin is a nasty piece of work, he is not genocidal. And Hitler, unlike Putin, wasn’t armed with nuclear weapons. The motivations, intentions, and capabilities of both men bear little resemblance to one another. Even by the usual standards of British political debate, comparing opposition to no-fly zones or other forms of Western intervention with appeasement is a particularly unhelpful rhetorical tic.

Putin’s war in Ukraine is about to turn even nastier

Is Ukraine winning its war against Russia? Watching the conflict through Twitter or broadcast media, you'd be forgiven for thinking so. Despite its overwhelming military superiority, Russia is taking casualties, momentum is stalling, and a succession of stirring stories – Ukrainian soldiers telling Russian troops to go 'fuck yourself' and ordinary Ukrainians rising up to stand in the way of Russian tanks – suggests undaunted resistance. The overwhelming volume of video and audio material posted is coming from the Ukrainian side. Combined with pessimistic statements from Russian figures, this gives the impression of an advance bogged down. Take a step back, and Russian gains on the ground have been extremely rapid; by comparison, after three weeks of warfare, the actual Battle of Baghdad still lasted six days.

Putin, Ukraine and the end of ‘the end of history’

Britain is trapped in a Boomerocracy

‘If young Americans knew what was good for them’ the historian Niall Ferguson once remarked, ‘they would all be in the Tea party’. In his first Reith Lecture, Ferguson argued that austerity would be a boon for the young; public debt merely allowed ‘the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.’ It is certainly true that successive generations in Britain have run up an almighty tab while assuming the next group along will be able to foot the bill. The problem Ferguson neglected to account for was which voters would end up delivering a pro-austerity government into power. For years now Britain’s government policy has been predicated on the belief that the elderly will vote in sufficient numbers to win elections, and the young will simply have to tolerate their decrees.

What is so enraging about a group of white men?

Pity the poor 41 Club. The last time an image of a group of men eating dinner caused this much trouble, the art world was collectively trying to work out whether any of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece was left beneath the latest restoration. For those not inducted to social media’s delights, the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen posted a photo of his dinner with his local branch of the organisation in a very standard piece of constituency engagement. By 7.30 this morning, that photo had been viewed some 5 million times, the count driven up by a torrent of vitriol. Readers might ask exactly what it was about the photo that attracted so much attention. The answer is that the group pictured was stale, male and pale, out of touch with the demographics of modern Britain, evidence that people aren’t doing enough to integrate, and exposing a lack of inclusivity.

What’s worse: kicking a cat or racism?

The best football teams are adept at turning defence into attack. After a video of centre back Kurt Zouma practising his distribution with a pet cat led to calls for his prosecution, teammate Michael Antonio responded to the press with a question of his own: 'Do you think what he’s done is worse than racism?' While we could dismiss this as a fairly blatant piece of whataboutery, it’s also quite an interesting question. The response you’d probably get by asking people is 'no, obviously not'. The response you’d get from their revealed preferences is that this is a country that donates £43 million annually to The Donkey Sanctuary. If you were to learn about Britain’s moral hierarchy by watching public behaviour, you’d end up with the general impression that cruelty towards animals ranks slightly above murder, arson, and fraudulent parliamentary expenses in the list of issues likely to ignite the fury of the public.

Operation Save Big Dog and the real scandal of Boris’s leadership

There is a theory which states the primary reason for Boris Johnson’s political longevity is that there are simply so many scandals that the latest infidelity drives the last one from public consciousness before it really has time to sink in. 'Who paid for his wallpaper? Meal delivery? He had a party while forcing the country into social isolation and atomisation? How many parties— what do you mean the police are investigating him?' At this point, it seems like the revelation most likely to do him in will be the discovery that, at some point in the last two years, Boris Johnson sat quietly in a room and diligently worked through an afternoon without once breaking from his papers to do something outrageous. But perhaps this is unfair.

There’s nothing quite like Christmas on the Isle of Man

If two years away had left me in need of a reminder that home can be a peculiar place, waking this morning to the sound of air raid sirens would have done the job. Other places left with such equipment would probably not decide that they could fulfil the dual purposes of summoning volunteer firefighters for their shifts, and signalling the imminent end of days, if only because only one of the two is worth getting out of bed for. But then again, the point of the Isle of Man is that it is not quite like anywhere else. Blocking traffic to and from the airport to make way for the annual festive tractor run is the sort of idiosyncratic decision that makes the island what it is. It goes without saying that farming implements decked out in lights are a relatively recent addition to the list of holiday traditions, added to the rota along with such jolly seasonal pleasantries as the Yuletide gouge, where merry flight booking websites happily inform you that the cost of a ticket a short way into the Irish Sea could probably get you halfway to Beijing.

The Foreign Office isn’t fit for purpose

Now that the dust from the choppers has settled, we are left with two abiding images of the West’s adventure in Afghanistan. The first is an American Chinook hovering over its embassy, rescuing staff in a botched evacuation. This debacle unfolded just weeks after president Biden promised the world there would be no parallel with the fall of Saigon, and 'no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy'. The second is a plane taking off from Kabul laden with 150 pets. The general success of the war in Afghanistan never came down to British policy. It’s for Washington’s post-mortem to confront the difficult truths about the limits of military power in the pursuit of political objectives.

Kyle Rittenhouse and the failure of the American state

Kyle Rittenhouse is innocent. We knew that anyway, but the simple fact of something being true in no way guarantees that the legal system will recognise it. In this case, we are fortunate that law and reality have decided to agree with one another. Kyle Rittenhouse is innocent, but the state remains on trial. There will be a great deal of commentary after the Rittenhouse trial about ‘what this verdict says about America’. You can see the first green shoots beginning to emerge even now; news outlets are talking about the ‘racial justice protests’ in Kenosha and how the verdict demonstrates the fundamental racial inequities of American society, or even how failing gun laws allowed this to happen. These are the wrong issues to focus on.

Lukashenko and Putin are exploiting Europe’s migration muddle

At the border of Belarus and Poland, camps of migrants wait for a chance to cross the border into the EU. Groups attempt to break down the razor wire fences standing in their way, Some 15,000 Polish soldiers stand ready to stop them. Belarusian soldiers urge them on and offer assistance. The Belarusian state shuttles more migrants towards the border by the day, hands out wire-cutters, and prevents them from turning back. Some 30,000 migrants have attempted to cross into Poland since August. That number is swelling by the day, with Belarus now running dozens of flights every week ferrying further desperate people to Europe’s eastern border. It is customary for cartoonish villains to give a lengthy and discursive speech where they lay out in detail exactly what they plan to do so that the hero can take notes and foil them.

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