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27 September, 2023

Britain’s largest undeveloped oil field has been green-lit for drilling by the government regulator. Rosebank, about 80 miles northwest of the Shetland Islands, contains an estimated 300 million barrels of oil; production is scheduled to begin by 2027. Labour will immediately introduce VAT on private school fees if it wins power, senior party figures tell the I newspaper. The 20% tax, which would be imposed by abolishing the schools’ charitable status, would raise about £1.7bn a year. Dental boffins in Japan are developing a drug that could let people grow new teeth, by stimulating dormant “tooth buds”. Kyoto’s Toregem Biopharma says it has had encouraging results in ferrets and dogs, and plans to begin testing on humans next summer.

Workers connect the French and English sides of the Channel Tunnel, in 1990

HS2: no time to “go wobbly”?

HS2 has always been a “dud”, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. It was “bizarrely” designed to link Birmingham’s Curzon Street station to “dead-end” London Euston, rather than St Pancras and the Eurotunnel. Costs are approaching £100bn, roughly triple the initial estimate, and the completion date is now “into the 2030s”. So reports that Rishi Sunak might scrap the project are welcome. HS2 will do “next to nothing for the north”, which is far more in need of investment in local railways and roads. If northern leaders were given the chance to redirect the £135m a week going on HS2 to something else, “I bet they would jump at it”.

Sorry, but if you think the money saved would go on local transport in the north, says Matthew d’Ancona in the Evening Standard, you’re deluded. The case for “doubling down” on HS2 is that national infrastructure is an organism that grows or atrophies. “Big schemes spawn smaller schemes.” New rail links bring new jobs, new investment, and lower carbon emissions. Besides, we’ve been here before: the Channel Tunnel and Crossrail were both scorned as white elephants, but ended up as triumphs. Sunak and his “accountant’s axe” of fiscal conservatism aren’t going to help build the “engine of growth” we need to meet the 21st century’s challenges. “As the Iron Lady herself might put it: this is no time to go wobbly.” 

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦🚄 Despite its name, the “core aim” of HS2 was never speed, but capacity, says The Economist. Britain has less than half the length of railway track it had a century ago; as a result, freight, long-distance and commuter trains “have to share the same few lines”. Track use in Britain is around 60% higher than the EU average, and the resulting congestion accounts for an estimated 70% of all delays. If properly completed, HS2 would free up space for local services by moving inter-city travel on to a purpose-built line. 

The overall winner of the Ocean Photographer of the Year award was Jialing Cai’s image of a paper nautilus drifting on a piece of ocean debris at night. Other top picks include snaps of a spider squat lobster in the Philippines; a gentoo penguin hurtling across the water in Antarctica; a coral reef perfectly reflected on the sea’s surface, off the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean; and humpback whales wallowing in shallow waters off the Turks and Caicos Islands. See more here.

When The Washington Post unveiled its new slogan in 2017 – “Democracy dies in darkness” – it triggered widespread mockery. But that wasn’t actually our first choice, says Martin Baron, the paper’s former editor, in The Atlantic. Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, had been fully involved in the decision – “I’d like to see all the sausage-making,” he said – and after two “tortuous, torturous” years of work agreed on a different option: “A free people demand to know”. But when he ran that past his then-wife, the novelist MacKenzie Scott, she immediately dismissed it as too clunky – a “Frankenslogan”. So Bezos had to pick something else.

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How the “supercontinent” will (possibly) look

Bristol University scientists have run simulations to predict what the world will look like in 250 million years, says New Scientist, and the result is rather dramatic. The seven continents of Earth will fuse together into a single “supercontinent”, similar to the one on which the dinosaurs lived; temperatures will regularly exceed a rather toasty 60C; and extreme weather will be complemented by huge bouts of volcanic activity. On the bright side, all mammals will have died out long before any of this happens.

Ibram X Kendi: “all ideas and policies are either racist or antiracist”. Jason Mendez/Getty 

Why the right’s plutocrats are so effective

The turmoil at Ibram X Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research, which recently laid off more than half its staff, has been a “schadenfreude bonanza for the right”, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, the simplicity of Kendi’s vision – “all ideas and policies are either racist or antiracist” – attracted millions of dollars from guilty white liberals to fund an institute at Boston University. The money, according to Kendi’s “grandiose vision”, was to pay top academics to “understand, explain and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice”. Three years later, little real research has been produced, and the university has opened an inquiry into rampant “mismanagement” at the centre.

Compare that to the extraordinary success of the conservative “Koch network”. This “plutocratic donor consortium”, founded by the right-wing industrialists Charles and David Koch, makes “patient”, long-term investments in the political right’s intellectual infrastructure. It shepherds young conservatives “from college to the highest rungs of American power”. It keeps scholars, activists and organisations going during “politically unpromising” moments, so they can leap into action when opportunities arise. Liberals have tried to create their own version of this network, backed by the likes of George Soros. But because they’re so useless at working together, these efforts have had little long-term impact. Until the left learns to resist “messianic” chancers like Kendi, and think systematically about the future, it’ll go on being steamrollered by the right.

Biden struggling to get up to Air Force One in 2021

Amid growing fears that a “bad fall” in public could scupper Joe Biden’s re-election chances, says Axios, his team have been secretly working on a “don’t trip strategy”. The 80-year-old has taken to wearing tennis shoes to avoid slipping, and does regular balance-enhancing exercises with a physiotherapist. He has even started boarding Air Force One via a lower deck, so he can use a shorter staircase.

It was remarkable to hear Suella Braverman claim that “multiculturalism has failed”, says The Times’s Hugo Rifkind on X (formerly Twitter). “She’s a British home secretary descended from Indians from Mauritius and Kenya, married to a Jewish husband, in a government headed by Britain’s first Hindu PM. What would successful multiculturalism look like?”

It’s an artist’s impression of a proposed bar deep beneath the streets of London. Australian financier Angus Murray has spent £220m buying up a “warren of tunnels” under Holborn from the telecoms company BT, says Bloomberg, and he plans to turn them into a tourist attraction to rival the London Eye. The passages, which occupy more than 86,000 sq ft some 130 ft below ground level, were built in the early 1940s as bomb shelters. By 1944 they were occupied by spies, including the real-life equivalent of “Q branch” from the James Bond books, and after the war they were used to store 400 tons of highly sensitive documents.

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

Gore Vidal

That’s it. You’re done.

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