24 Wednesday November 10 2021 | the times
Comment
news agenda away from Johnson’s
humiliation over the Owen Paterson
affair. Infantile. Contemptible. But
from this charlatan’s tribe, only
grumbling. The parliamentary party
appear supine in the face of his
bluster and wriggle. So yes, I’m
strangely reassured. A party willing
to be led by someone like this could
never be mine.Tunnel vision
T
hey’re through the clay and
into the chalk now. From my
east London flat, and as the
row about raw sewage discharge
into rivers continues, I’ve been
watching the barges carrying
away hundreds of thousands of
tonnes of chalk. Work on the
15-mile Thames Tideway Tunnel
powers onward. It’s surely the
biggest construction project
for London’s sewers since
the Victorians built them,
and will take away the
rainwater that at present
floods straight into
London’s sewers, then
into the river.
From my balcony
you can see one of the
construction entry-points
to the tunnelling far
below, and the great
flotillas of barges being
loaded up, ghostly white
from the chalk. The tunnelis passing beneath us and last month
a chap visited our flats to survey
them so that, should householders
later claim that cracks are new,
there’s now a record of any historic
subsidence. He astonished me with
the claim that the tunnel will be
almost wide enough to fit three
double-decker buses side-by-side,
and that it’s 60 metres — yes, nearly
200 feet — beneath the riverbed.
Hey there, PR guys for the TTT,
correct me if I’m wrong about any of
this — and (more importantly) may
my assistant and I come down into
the tunnel to have a look?Collected works
Y
ears ago I read an
arresting study of the
origins of the Bible, a
work now considered by
Christians as a sacred
text. Of the book (The
Bible for Grown-Ups, by
the late Simon
Loveday) I wrote: “The
mantle of historical
truth and divine
authority has placed
upon the Bible an
intolerable weight,
crushing it as a creative
work of immense
imaginative and
inspirational power”. How
many churchgoers know,
for instance, that two of theP
ersonal stuff this (and why
should you be interested?) but
it’s a feeling that has been so
strong in recent days. Since
cancelling my membership of
the Conservative Party two years ago,
nostalgia has sometimes got the better
of me. I’ve missed my decent, friendly
local Tory association. I’ve missed Jill
Ratcliffe’s summer luncheon garden
parties — she says I’m still welcome,
but really I can’t. I’ve wondered
whether it was too hasty to flounce
out like that. Should one have been
more patient and fought from within
against the populist tide?
But over this past week I’ve seen
Boris Johnson maskless on a hospital
tour while all the NHS staff around
him are wearing theirs. Then
yesterday I caught the news that
unvaccinated NHS staff are to lose
their jobs. It was “leaked” exclusively
to the BBC, no doubt because only
they would be suckers enough to fall
for this pathetic tactic to wrench the
From peace prize winner to warrior ruler
Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed’s aim to control the Horn of Africa scares his neighbours and the US
war on this corner of an already
restless continent. But that’s exactly
what’s happening. Kenya, which
already has some of the biggest
refugee camps on the planet, is
looking nervously at what is
happening in Ethiopia. As is Sudan.
Perhaps the most anxious country in
the wider region is Egypt. It draws
97 per cent of its water from a single
trans-boundary source: the Nile,
whose source is in Ethiopia. The
dispute predates the election of Abiy
but he has been pushing harder and
harder for a huge dam that will boost
the Ethiopian economy at the expense
of the Egyptians and the Sudanese.
Various mediation attempts have
foundered because of the resistance
of Addis Ababa. The fact is, weak
regional bodies like the African
Union cannot muster a consensus to
counter strident risk-taking
nationalists like Abiy. Egypt has said
that reducing the Nile to a trickle
would be an “existential” issue for
Cairo. That too sounds awfully like a
war waiting to happen.
Abiy’s ambition is to turn Ethiopia
into the undisputed master of the
Horn, a fast growing powerhouse at
the crossroads of the global trading
system. But he hasn’t mastered the
necessary statecraft. His singular
skill has been to make enemies. And
his trump card is to threaten that
without international backing his
state will implode, lawlessness will
reign and Islamists will plant their
black flags all across the Horn and
not just in Somalia.
Back me, or we will blow up in
your faces — that’s the credo of a
great disruptor, not the father of a
new successful nation state.a broadly inclusive nation state. But
he favoured the clean sweep and in
so doing trapped himself in an
ethnic stand-off. The Tigrayans say
they are facing genocide and are
calling for help.
That’s why Abiy’s use of language
matters. As does the discipline of his
forces, and those of the Eritreans who
are fighting alongside the Ethiopians.
Hate speech relayed through radio
stations helped stoke the 1990s
genocidal conflict in Rwanda. That
has remained one of the touchstones
for western decision-makers in
whether to launch an intervention in
Africa or the Middle East. The West,
to its lasting shame, looked away in
Rwanda. So when Muammar Gaddafi
spoke of hunting down rats in Libya
in 2011, the case for a limited aerial
attack was already made as far as
David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy
were concerned. And now the Horn?
Little wonder that the Biden
administration has woken up on
Ethiopia. No one in the US
administration wants an intervention
forced on it. The Horn of Africa —
Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti
— is a strategic tinderbox. It’s the
source of the Nile, a gate to the Red
Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The Horn
adjoins the choke-points of the
world’s major sea lanes and trading
routes, it’s close to the oil-rich Arab
peninsula. Djibouti has become a
garrison state — it’s where the US
has a major drone base and a special
forces staging post; China is there
because it is on the Bab al-Mandab
strait leading to the Suez canal. The
Saudis and Emiratis are there, too. It’s
one of the world’s great spy centres.
So you don’t want a big expandingT
he Nobel peace prize
committee has made some
strange decisions over the
years but no one really
complained when the
Ethiopian prime minister Abiy
Ahmed picked up the gong in 2019.
He had, after all, ended a dusty
20-year struggle between his country
and Eritrea, a war that had brought
in its train massive displacement of
people, starvation and misery. There
was more: a promise of strong,
nimble leadership, a lower
dependency on foreign aid, a new
accountability to young citizens.
Now though, Abiy is turning out to
be a ruthless warrior ruler, not the
modernising democrat that the
Nobel jury had so confidently
talent-spotted. For the past year he
has been waging a military campaign
against the Tigrayans in the north,
branding them as war criminals,
terrorists and putschists. He has
tightly restricted the incoming food
and medical aid route to the
Tigrayan region; he has cut off
telecommunications and banking in
the province in the far north of
Ethiopia. There have been
accusations, and counter-
accusations, of atrocities on all sides.
Abiy’s gloss has gone.
When the Tigrayans broke Abiy’s
siege, he called them a spreading
cancer and mobilised his followers by
swearing: “We will bury this enemy
with our blood and bones”. In the
capital, Addis Ababa, police have
been given carte blanche to snatch
young male Tigrayans off the street
and lock them in warehouses,
presumably to provide a human
shield should the Tigrayan People’s
Liberation Front and their allies try
to bombard or seize the city.
The dehumanising language has
forced even Facebook into action; it
has deleted a post by the prime
minister because it violated the
company’s policies against inciting
violence. The move has just fed into
an increasingly frenzied
anti-Americanism in Ethiopia. Manyyoung people have become
convinced that the Biden
administration wants to topple Abiy.
A seemingly shrewd and very
confident prime minister has turned
into a highly strung rabble rouser,
striking messianic poses,
encouraging the scepticism about the
US president and calling on his
people to fight on the barricades
when the time comes.
Plainly, Abiy should find a way of
addressing the Tigray question. His
election victory in 2018 levered out
the Tigrayan establishment that had
ruled for two decades. Abiy, who is of
mixed Oromo-Amharan parentage,
could have found ways of co-opting
Tigrayans into government to serveThis shrewd prime
minister has turned
into rabble rouser
four gospels make no mention at all
of the virgin birth in Bethlehem?
I’m now reading a new book by
Alan Paton, The Collection and
Codification of the Quran, which
examines the origins of what became
to Muslims a sacred text beyond
contradiction. The Quran did not start
like that, but as fragments “from
leafless stalks of date-palm trees, from
leather strips, from hides and stones
and from the memories of men — to
become, after the Prophet’s death, the
written Quran between two covers”.
Even its authorship is disputed. Many
great religions seem to need a sacred
and authoritative text but it’s rarely
the founder of the religion who
creates or sanctions (or ever even saw)
what later became the received truth.Frank talk
F
rom his sick-bed (he is
terminally ill) I hope Frank
Field, the parliamentarian who
has become a byword for a
passionate but expert study of
poverty, is taking pleasure in a spate
of admiring tributes, not least from
my Times colleague Daniel
Finkelstein. Frank deserves every
word. Elected in the same year, I
have one small recollection to add.
He and I were talking and I’d started
a sentence with “The trouble with the
poor.. .”. He interrupted. “The trouble
with the poor, Matthew,” he said “is
that they don’t have enough money”.Matthew Parris Notebook
I may miss
the party,
but leaving
was right
Gove is wrong to
accuse lenders of
being overcautious
James Coney
W
e are in the era of the
marathon mortgage,
where loans are
supersized and run
and run (and run).
Where once nearly every first-time
buyer would take a loan of 25 years,
now most stretch their borrowing
across 35 and 40 years, never
stopping until they reach 80. So
much for paying off your mortgage
before retirement.
Perhaps someone needs to point
this out to Michael Gove, the
communities secretary, who this week
accused the banks of being
“overcautious” since the 2008
financial crisis. He told MPs on the
housing, communities and local
government committee that simply
building more homes for first-time
buyers was not enough; what they
really needed was banks to improve
affordability too.
It is true that more caution was
injected into the mortgage market
after 2008. Banks were stopped from
lending too much money to buyers
with small deposits — those most
prone to a sudden fall in house prices.
Stress tests were introduced, which
meant buyers had to prove their
finances were able to cope with a rise
in mortgage rates. And there were
changes to affordability, so that buyers
had to prove what their income was.
These were all pragmatic steps to
rein in the excess of mortgage
lending that had pushed the global
financial system to the brink of
collapse. They protect buyers and
they protect the banks and their
shareholders. To undo all this now in
the misguided belief that it would
make life better for first-time buyers
would be a terrible mistake,
particularly as the days of historic
low interest rates are also numbered.
Caution has already been thrown to
the wind. Banks found a way to offer
bigger loans in the existing regime.
Today, 57 per cent of all mortgages
are described as large (meaning
borrowers can take four times their
income), the highest amount since
records began in 2007. Recently a
number of big banks have changed
their criteria so that borrowers can
take five times their income.
So banks can lend more and
they’ve also encouraged buyers to
take longer fixed-rate deals, giving
protection from interest rate shocks
but also allowing buyers to borrow
more. If the Bank of England base
rate does climb from the record low
of 0.1 per cent to 1 per cent then we
need more caution now, not less.
Without a doubt affordability is
the great issue for prospective
first-time buyers who can often
afford a deposit but cannot stretch
their income far enough to pay for a
mortgage. But they need more houses
in the right places at the right price,
not just more money so they can be
encumbered with debt until they die.James Coney is Money editorRoger
B oyes@rogerboyes