Table of contents for 1419 in The Week

A constitutional clash

What happened The UK Government blocked a Scottish law that would make Scotland the first part of the UK to allow a self-identification process for changing gender, triggering a constitutional row. On the basis of legal advice, Scottish Secretary Alister Jack used a Section 35 order to prevent the gender recognition bill passed by Holyrood last month from gaining royal assent. It’s the first time that Section 35 has been used since the Scottish parliament was created in 1999. The law would reduce the waiting time for legally changing gender, lower the age at which people can apply to 16, and remove the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Jack said the bill would affect the operation of equalities law, which remains a reserved competence of the UK…

4 min

The Week|1419

The NHS – diagnosis?

The National Health Service is sometimes said to be Britain’s national religion. But as its 75th birthday approaches, the country is “rapidly losing faith”, said The Times. According to a YouGov poll last week, more than two-thirds of us think NHS services are “bad”; 80% think they’ve got worse, and nearly 40% aren’t confident that the NHS would help them in an emergency. Even before the current winter crisis – “the most serious in its history” – there were seven million people on waiting lists for surgery and planned care in England. Cancer survival rates lag behind those in comparable nations. A debate over the NHS’s “structure, remit and funding cannot be avoided”. Money, or at least public money, can’t be the only answer: the service already eats up 45%…

2 min

The Week|1419

Bad week for:

Outdoor adventures, after the High Court ruled that members of the public had no right to camp overnight on Dartmoor. The national park has long been the only place in England where people can camp without permission. But Alexander Darwall, a fund manager, and his wife Diana successfully argued that a 1985 law regulating access to the moor had been misinterpreted. They have owned the 3,450-acre Blachford Estate since 2013. Jeremy Clarkson, whose comments about the Duchess of Sussex looked set to cost him his deal with Amazon Prime Video. This week, the presenter, who has two shows on Amazon, revealed that he had apologised to Meghan for saying that she should be paraded naked down the street while excrement is thrown at her – and that Amazon was “incandescent”…

1 min

The Week|1419

Poll watch

Support for leaving the EU has fallen across the bloc since the Brexit referendum. The largest drop was in Finland. Between 2020 and 2022, only 15.4% of respondents said they’d vote “leave” in a Brexit-style referendum, down from 28.6% in 2016-2017. Similar falls were recorded in the Netherlands (from 23% to 13.5%), Portugal (from 15.7% to 6.6%) and France (from 24.3% to 16%) and Austria (26% to 16.1%). European Social Survey 61% of UK adults think that being a surgeon is harder than being prime minister, 52% think the job of a nurse is harder than that of a PM, followed by firefighter and soldier (51%). 81% of Britons, though, believe that a footballing career is easier than running the country. YouGov/The Times…

1 min

The Week|1419

People

The key to a good life Robert Waldinger, a Harvard psychiatrist, is the director of a study that has tracked hundreds of people over 80 years, to see what makes for a happy and meaningful life, says Alison Flood in New Scientist. Along the way, he’s come to a few conclusions. “The big, surprising takeaway is how much having warm connections with other people predicts how long you stay healthy,” he says. “You’re even less likely to get arthritis.” The study’s happiest participant, Waldinger reckons, was Leo, who’d wanted to become a writer, but who had had to shelve his dreams to care for a sick parent. “He got a job as a history teacher at a local school and he loved teaching. He had three daughters and he loved…

The World Economic Forum’s latest annual winter shindig at Davos, in the Swiss Alps, “marks a return for glitzy parties and high-minded debates following a three-year hiatus”, said Lauren Silva Laughlin on Reuters. Yet there was something of a hangover even before the party started. “The global pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have added more friction to the already creaking globalised world that Davos epitomised.” Some 600 global CEOs were expected to attend but, with the exception of the German chancellor Olaf Scholz, “the political leaders responsible for shaping the new world order have mostly stayed at home”. The WEF and its founder, Klaus Schwab, acknowledged some of the strain by renaming the conference “Cooperation in a Fragmented World”. Cooperation has certainly been “in short supply in global trade”,…

2 min

The Week|1419

Commentators

Trussonomics could be back on the agenda Christopher Hope The Daily Telegraph A flow of recent news suggests that the UK’s economy outlook might not be as bad as we thought, says Christopher Hope. Economists reckon that the Treasury will bank “an £11bn windfall” from a “stronger-than-expected” 0.1% growth lift in November. And it’s set to scoop a further £3.8bn from the profitable sale of the £19.3bn of gilts purchased last autumn by the Bank of England. Add in expected savings on the cost of support for household energy bills, and the thinking goes that the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, could have “rather a lot more cash to spare than he might have expected” ahead of his Budget in March – which would enable him to “go a bit further on…

3 min

The Week|1419

Teachers’ strike looms

What happened Members of Britain’s biggest teaching union have voted to take industrial action, paving the way for strikes at 23,400 schools across England and Wales in February and March. The National Education Union (NEU) said that 90% of its members had backed the walkout in demand of higher pay, on a turnout of 53%. The NEU announced seven strike days, but promised that no individual school would be affected for more than four of them. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said the vote was “deeply disappointing”. The teacher strikes will begin on 1 February, when train drivers and civil servants are also taking part in a “national day of action”. This week, days before another nurses’ strike was due to begin, MPs passed a government bill that is designed to…

In Percival Everett’s acclaimed novel The Trees, an elderly woman stares into space and reminisces. “What was you thinking on, Granny C?” her daughter-in-law asks. “About something I wished I hadn’t done. About the lie I told them all those years back on that – boy,” she answers, using an unprintable word. “Oh Lawd. We on that again,” her daughter-in-law responds. “Well it’s all done and past history now, Granny C. So you just relax… You cain’t bring the boy back.” This is fiction, but the real Granny C is alive today. She is 88-year-old Carolyn Bryant (now Donham, after remarriage). It is true, though, the boy is not coming back. In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till went by train from Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi and returned in…

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