John Healey’s resignation as defence secretary is the latest skirmish in a wider campaign to secure an increase in defence spending. ‘You have been unable,’ Healey wrote to Keir Starmer, ‘and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.’ MPs, commentators and journalists have been falling over themselves to condemn the government’s delay in publishing the Defence Investment Plan to follow last year’s Strategic Defence Review on the future of the UK’s military capability. Tom Stevenson described the SDR as the ‘object of a proxy battle between the armed forces and the Treasury’ and it seems that, for now, the Treasury is winning the battle over whether to stump up an additional £28 billion over the next four years. Most of the media, however, are on the side of the armed forces.
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that we are living under a kind of house arrest, unable to go out, with an oppressive sense that an assault could occur at any moment. Members of ethnic minority communities have asked their white friends to accompany or drive them to work, hoping it would reduce the risk of being targeted. With more protests announced for today, schools closed early. I had to try to explain to my daughter why she would be missing her ukulele club this afternoon.
New York Knicks fans outside Madison Square Garden (Alamy / Kerry Burke / New York Daily News)
I’m following the NBA Finals thousands of miles from midtown Manhattan. In my North London flat, I set the alarm for 1.20 a.m. on game nights, just in time for tip-off, and watch on my laptop. I inherited my fandom from my father. When he landed in Brooklyn as a teenager, nearly fifty years ago, rooting for the Knicks was one of the ways he became American. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a fan. Knicks stars were my earliest childhood heroes; their rivals, including the Spurs, the first targets of my disdain.
Among the unvaccinated, one in five people who get measles in the US will be hospitalised; one in twenty children will get pneumonia; one in a thousand will develop encephalitis, which can lead to blindness, hearing impairment and other disabilities; and one in a thousand will die. Measles can also lead to immune amnesia: that is, the virus can erase the body’s memory of how to fight all the pathogens it has previously encountered.
During popular insurrections like the one underway in Bolivia, which is calling for President Rodrigo Paz’s resignation after just six months in office, the experience of time and space changes, acquiring an extraordinary charge from day to day, even hour to hour. Indigenous campesino insurgents have long characterised such moments as belonging to ‘another time’.
Out-of-towners, including Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, merged with locals outside Southampton police station to form a crowd of several hundred. The troubling speed with which the protest was organised caught the city’s small but diligent antifa and its broad coalition of anti-racists by surprise. Given the severity of the rioting, it might have been for the best that we didn’t have time to organise a response.
My back’s feeling better so I’ve started driving for Snapp! again. My first passenger of the night was a man in his mid-fifties, with white hair and a neatly pressed shirt. His mild aftershave permeated the car. Before we reached the highway, his phone rang. ‘Everything in my life is there,’ he said. ‘House, office, bank accounts …’ He didn’t sound tired or angry, just resigned. From snatches of his conversation, I realised he had lived in Dubai for 24 years. His business was good: several properties, several accounts, a successful life outside Iran. With the start of the war, though, his residency was withdrawn, and now he was stuck in Tehran.