From enabling the fast transit of food and medicines across the Channel to ensuring that manufacturers receive critical “just in time” car parts, the Port of Dover impacts all our lives on a daily basis.  

“It’s the most efficient and reliable route for conducting that trade,” says Doug Bannister, who has been CEO of the Port of Dover since 2019. “It’s a joy and a privilege but it’s also an incredible responsibility for all of us who work here to make certain that this iconic, world-class gateway operates seamlessly for the benefit of everyone. 

“Because of its scale and the implications of that scale to the economy, society and the prosperity of the nation, it is probably the single most economically consequential piece of UK national infrastructure.”  

Founded by Royal Charter in 1606, the Port of Dover is the UK’s busiest international ferry port, providing a fast, efficient and sustainable connection to mainland Europe. More than 2 million freight vehicles pass through its gates annually – substantially more than any other port in the country. 

The Port operates for 364 days of the year, welcoming around 10 million passengers and handling more than £144bn of trade annually. A third of all trade in goods between the UK and the European Union comes through Dover.  

As the government seeks to reset and deepen its trading partnership with the EU, the Port of Dover has an essential role to play in helping to deliver long-term economic growth and trade resilience for the UK. The Port is a growth-enabling asset, capable of unlocking trade, jobs, tourism, investment and innovation.  

“We reach every corner of the UK so we’re able to open up access to markets that other routes and other supply chains cannot do,” says Bannister. 

The future growth of the Port undoubtedly depends on targeted investment in upgrading and improving onsite and offsite infrastructure. 

The Port is hugely supportive, for instance, of the Lower Thames Crossing, a new 14-mile A road that will link the A2 in Kent and the M25 in Essex through the longest road tunnel in the UK.  

“It is going to provide a step change in how people travel around the nation – and crucially it’s going to provide a much more robust link between the Port of Dover and destinations north of London,” explains Bannister.  

He would like the government to commit to the dualling of the last seven miles of the A2 into the Port to ensure the strategic resilience of the route for international travel – a move that could unleash disproportionate benefits for national trade. Another ask is to assist the private sector in investing in “suitable, secure, safe overnight lorry parking” in Kent to serve freight traffic passing through the Port, thereby providing even greater reliability and robustness to the supply chains using the route. 

“Taking a system-wide view of these key infrastructure interventions could unlock exponential potential,” he says. “It would be a step change in how trade and travel between the UK and the continent works.” 

The need for both frictionless and secure borders is paramount – not only for border compliance but to enhance operational efficiency, customer experience and long-term national competitiveness. The Port has already introduced an innovative digital solution for the EU Entry Exit System (EES), an EU-wide digital border management system for non-EU passengers. A new processing facility has been built at the Port’s Western Docks, currently being used just for coaches and foot passengers, but the Port’s £40m investment is also to be used for tourist cars later this year. 

“The efforts that our government is making in improving the relationship with the EU, looking at reducing the administrative burden around things like the SPS [sanitary and phytosanitary] checks and making travel and trade more conducive for the British economy and society are great aims – aims we’ve got an interest in and want to support,” says Bannister. 

“From a trade perspective, getting closer to Europe, making these positive moves towards closer working relationships and easing the flow of trade will unlock tremendous potential for the economy here.”   

The electrification agenda is another priority. The International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the EU and the UK have all put forward maritime carbon emission tax plans that will significantly affect shipping lines and ultimately consumers through higher prices on the shelves. The EU has already introduced its scheme and the UK will implement theirs from 2028 but the IMO’s global version has been delayed.  

However, because of the higher intensity of the Dover routes (130 ferry crossings a day) and Dover’s role in serving the whole of the UK, Bannister says that electrifying the route would have a disproportionately positive impact and keep prices down. He believes that establishing a “green shipping corridor” at Dover is not only in the interest of the UK economy and key supply chains but is also urgent and necessary. 

The Port has set clearly staged targets to reach net zero and has reduced its carbon footprint by more than 98 per cent since 2007. One ferry operator already operates hybrid ferries on the 22-mile route across the Channel and the Port is in discussions with another operator on the short straits route between Dover and Calais about transitioning to a fully electric service.  

“The key to us is getting an appropriate supply of commercially viable electricity to the ships,” says Bannister. “At the moment we’ve got a supply of eight megawatts of electricity into the Port but to electrify short straits shipping we’d need around 170 megawatts. It’s not clear to us when the grid will be able to supply that degree of electricity to us at a price that would be economical to use.” 

Despite the challenges it is clear that getting the right supportive policy framework in place for the Port is crucial. 

“I have a greater sense that the government is looking more favourably towards Dover being the jewel in the crown around supply chain, trade and travel resilience,” says Bannister.  

“The future for the business conducted through the Port is bright. The moves that our government is making to create a closer relationship with the EU unlock vast possibilities and the investments into key infrastructure will have a profound effect on supply chains and travel.  

“Driving carbon out of travel is hugely exciting for efficiency and productivity – and, of course, the impact on climate. And then finally, we’re walking into a whole new chapter with the use of digital and technology and artificial intelligence. The Port of Dover is just starting to leverage what these profound new tools will be able to offer to us and, by implication the nation as a whole, and that is exciting.” 

Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.

Can we have a grown-up conversation about energy please? Because right now, we’re not getting one. I’ll get on to the pro-green side of the debate in a bit, but let’s start with the anti-greens — seeing as they now control policy in both the Conservative Party and Reform UK.

If you were to ask Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage about the root causes of our energy insecurities, you can bet they’d reach for a two-word explanation beginning with “net” and ending with “zero”. Indeed, Net Zero has become to the Right what Brexit is to the Left — a general purpose whipping boy for everything that’s gone wrong with the British economy.

But that doesn’t help us with the latest surge in energy prices. After all, it’s not Greta Thunberg blocking the Straits of Hormuz, but an unpredictable, open-ended conflict with Iran.

Crude oil prices are forecast to hit $100 per barrel this week. And if Donald Trump doesn’t wrap this up pronto, there’ll be much worse to come. Even if Iranian missiles and drones don’t destroy the Gulf’s energy infrastructure, the squeeze on tanker traffic is already wreaking havoc. Oil storage facilities in the region are filling-up fast. That in turn threatens a massive shut-down in production and processing — which won’t be reversed easily or quickly. And remember, it’s not just oil. The Qataris are shutting down their LNG export terminals, which is why natural gas prices are spiking too.

But that’s the cost of relying on imported fossil fuels, especially exports from Russia and the Middle East. As well as enriching some of the world’s worst people, we’ve staked Europe’s security on a series of vulnerable bottlenecks — including Russia’s oil and gas pipelines; both ends of the Red Sea; and the aforementioned Straits of Hormuz. Since 2020, all of those have been choked-off — in some cases for months or even years. The harsh truth is that in weighing up the pros-and-cons of different forms of energy we can no longer assume the unimpeded east-west flow of oil and gas.

So when you hear someone urging the country to get real about the vulnerabilities of renewable energy, but without also acknowledging the fragilities of a hydrocarbon-based economy, the argument is either blinkered or made in bad faith.

Of course, the same applies in reverse. For instance, here’s the Business Secretary, Peter Kyle, using the current crisis to call for a “doubling down on renewables.” Well, I’m all in favour of doubling, tripling and quadrupling the deployment of wind and solar power. Not only is it clean and un-depletable, it’s also domestically produced — with obvious benefits for security of supply and our balance-of-payments. One little thing though: what happens when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine? Yes, we’ve kept the lights on so far, but the more wind and solar we deploy, the harder it becomes to compensate for its natural variability.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t find solutions. In fact, the technologies we need to store electrical power are making rapid progress. However, to minimise the costs of this transition, the last thing we ought to be doing is holding ourselves to an artificially accelerated timetable. But that’s precisely what’s happening thanks to Labour’s deranged plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030. Note that there’s no international treaty compelling the country to jump through this hoop. It’s an entirely self-inflicted policy, pushed — and obsessively pursued — by Ed Miliband.

But that’s the problem with our polarised energy debate. To see only the problems with your opponents’ policies leads to virtue signalling with regard to your own.

For instance, the 2030 target only makes sense as a demonstration of ideological correctness. The same goes for another Miliband policy: the ban on new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. Again, there is no international obligation on UK to make this sacrifice. Nor does is it required by Net Zero which is about consumption not production. Even within the constraints of the 2050 target we’ll still be consuming oil and gas for decades to come — albeit oil and gas we’d have to import instead of producing ourselves. There’s also the absurd inconsistency with the government’s belated efforts to boost production from existing capacity in the North Sea.

Perhaps Ed Miliband thinks his virtue signals are setting a good example, but no one in the world is looking at the costs, chaos and contradictions of British energy policy and saying: “I’ll have what they’re having”.

Sometimes, the natural reaction to excessive virtue signalling is to “vice signal” — that is, to deliberately defy the conventions of a prevailing, but failing, moral order.

Thus Kemi Badenoch has made a point of promising to reverse Labour’s ban on new oil exploration in British waters. Assuming that we can squeeze a few extra drops from the North Sea, this would be good for the public purse, our trade deficit and jobs. There’s also a modest environmental benefit in that extracting fossil fuels close to home tends to spew less carbon dioxide than importing the stuff from afar. Nurturing British expertise in marine engineering also produces transferable skills for offshore renewables.

But let’s not get carried away. Opening new fields will, at best, slow down the decline in North Sea production, not reverse it. Any impression to the contrary is a reminder that vice signalling, like virtue signalling, is just a gesture.

I fear that we’re falling into a similar trap in regard to new nuclear. The dangerous glamour of this technology makes tempting fodder for a vice signal, but the reality isn’t quite so titillating. There’s only one nuclear plant currently under construction in the UK and that’s Hinkley Point C in Somerset. Unfortunately there’s been yet another delay to the completion of the project and yet another budget-busting cost increase. In today’s money, the total projected cost now stands at £49 billion and that’s assuming no further bad news. Luckily, it’ll be the project owners picking up the tab for the overrun not the British taxpayer or bill payer (a fact for which we have my old boss, Greg Clark, to thank). But the same is not true of the proposed Sizewell C plant, which was recently given the go-ahead by Labour and for which the British state will underwrite a massive chunk of the construction risk.

In theory a “fleet” of new nuclear power stations could supply an abundance of home-produced, low carbon energy — but at £50 billion a pop, what we need to worry about isn’t the danger of a reactor meltdown, but the financial meltdown if it turns out we’ve paid the French or Chinese for a herd of white elephants. So I’m sorry neutron-fans, the fact is that we need some kind of technological breakthrough before we can sensibly take the nuclear bet. It may be that that Small Modular Reactors are the way forward, but before getting too excited about those wait for a final quote from the builders.

At this point I’d better stop my drive-by shooting of our energy options. There are others, from coal to fracking to energy efficiency, but they all have their problems too.

So if there are no easy answers, how about a hard answer? Well, in extremely condensed form, here are three things we ought to be doing:

Firstly, we need to work toward a full alignment of environmental and energy security objectives. Wherever contradictions crop up in the policy framework, let’s strip them out. That includes anything (or anyone) whose effect is to replace home produced energy with imports.

Secondly, it’s time to stop targeting given quantities of decarbonisation — especially by unnecessary deadlines. Instead, the machinery of the state should be reorientated towards a related, but distinct, objective — which is to relentlessly bear down on the cost of clean and secure energy. Whether this displeases the energy companies or the environmental NGOs is immaterial. The only guarantee of defeating global warming is if clean tech becomes so cheap and reliable that the world can’t afford not to use it.

Thirdly, and most importantly, we have to get serious about industrial strategy. Alongside our allies, we’ve agreed to spend 5 per cent of our GDP on defence and national resilience (the latter of which includes energy security). That is only affordable if we use these vast sums strategically to build-up our economy as a hi-tech manufacturing power house.

The parallel, intertwined effort to secure clean and affordable energy supplies must work with and not against that goal.

Chris Philp MP is the Shadow Home Secretary.

We can all feel that order is breaking down on our streets and within our communities.

Crime and antisocial behaviour are at unacceptably high levels and the social contract that helped make Britain unique is coming apart at the seams.

We used to be known as one of the most orderly countries in the world. But now, every day, too many people witness things that anger and alarm them: towns blighted by graffiti and litter, cannabis being openly dealt and smoked on the street, shoplifting rampant, phones being snatched or yet another headline of a young life cut short by a knife. Our communities have become less civil and more dangerous. I hear it everywhere I go, with good, ordinary, decent citizens telling me they are fed up. People are often afraid on their own high streets.

It does not have to be like this.

We know that when respect for the rules that bind our communities together breaks down, it doesn’t just make the law-abiding majority feel unsafe, but it also fuels a culture of lawlessness that leads to far worse crimes.

The first duty of government is to protect the public. That means taking action against those who make their neighbours’ lives a misery. It means backing our police officers to enforce the law – every law – no matter the perpetrator.

As Conservatives, we are clear who we stand for: the law-abiding majority who agree the police should be backed to enforce the law on everyone.

That’s we we’ve launched our plan to Take Back Our Streets.

The first priority is restoring a strong police presence where crime is most concentrated. Conservatives will recruit 10,000 extra police officers and deploy hotspot patrolling across the 2,000 highest-crime neighbourhoods. A quarter of all crime occurs in these 5 per cent of neighbourhoods. Concentrating visible policing in these places prevents offences and deters repeat offending. Our plan to hire 10,000 more officers will allow us to concentrate police presence in these areas and prevent around 35,000 crimes, including violence, theft, anti-social behaviour and public drug use.

We will also give officers the tools they need to disrupt crime before it escalates. Conservatives will triple the use of Stop and Search to take knives and drugs off the streets and increase arrests.  Stop and Search is one of the most effective tools for removing weapons and drugs and disrupting violent gangs. But political pressure not to use stop and search is shackling the police.  We will roll out stronger Section 60 coverage in hotspot areas and lower the bar to using stop and search by allowing officers to act on a single suspicion indicator outside those hotspots. This will deliver around one million additional searches a year and, based on detection rates, around 300,000 more arrests.

Technology will also play a role in strengthening enforcement, so we will roll out Live Facial Recognition in crime hotspots to catch wanted criminals.  Trials have already shown strong results, including 1,000 arrests of wanted criminals during a Metropolitan Police trial and a 12 per cent reduction in crime in Croydon town centre. Expanding its use in the 100 highest crime areas is expected to lead to around 22,000 arrests of wanted offenders.

Alongside stronger enforcement, our plan will ensure that low-level offences no longer go unanswered. Conservatives will bring in “Immediate Justice” for low-level offences, so police can issue swift, visible community penalties for offences such as criminal damage, drunk and disorderly behaviour, harassment without violence, minor assault and first-time drug possession. We will require offenders to clean graffiti, tidy parks and repair community spaces – with prosecution if they do not. These community penalties will deliver around 2 million hours of visible clean-up work while reinforcing consequences for offences.

The plan will also end the culture of police walking past obvious law-breaking. Conservatives will crack down on cannabis and end the culture of police walking by.  Two-thirds of police officers believe it cannabis use has effectively been decriminalised – in other words, the law is not being enforced. A walk-on-by culture has developed, not least because of political pressure from local leaders like Sadiq Khan. Even where the police do stop people, it often only leads to an informal on-street warning. Under the Conservative proposal, police would be required to intervene in all cases of cannabis possession, issuing formal cautions or Immediate Justice assignments for first offences, and automatic prosecution in magistrates’ courts for repeat offences.

Public safety will also be put first in the management of serious mental illness. Conservatives will overhaul Labour’s Mental Health Act and stamp out the ideology that has seen an obsession with racial targets put ahead of public safety – with tragic consequences. An excessive focus on reducing the use of sectioning on racial grounds, is allowing seriously mentally ill individuals to remain in communities, when they should be detained for the safety of the public and themselves.

We will also tackle the emerging forms of disorder that are making streets less safe. Conservatives will curb dangerous e-bikes and e-scooters on pavements, mandating police intervention and strengthening penalties.  These vehicles are increasingly used for snatch theft and to evade pursuit, and they pose a direct risk to pedestrians, particularly children and the elderly. Conservatives will update the law and raise penalties, so enforcement has real bite.

Finally, Conservatives will stamp out ghost plates that evade ANPR, enabling organised crime, dangerous driving, and wider lawlessness. Current penalties do not reflect the seriousness of number plate fraud which enables serious and organised crime. Conservatives will introduce tougher criminal consequences for manufacturing, selling, and using ANPR-evading plates, and will target the supply chain that makes this possible.

Britain works best when the rules are clear and enforced. The Conservative plan to Take Back Our Streets will restore visible policing, back officers to act decisively, and ensure that crime and anti-social behaviour face real consequences.

We are on the side of the law-abiding majority.   We will relentlessly pursue those whose criminal activity makes life intolerable for the majority with a zero tolerance approach.

It’s time to Take Back Our Streets.

Writing on his Truth Social website, Trump said any attempt to block oil shipments would lead to an attack “TWENTY TIMES HARDER” ― and so severe that it will be “virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again.”

Iran has responded to the US-Israeli military campaign by threatening to attack ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, effectively cutting off some 20% of the world’s oil.

Critics said Trump’s rhetoric went beyond wartime belligerence and crossed a line into something far more ominous. They hit back on X:

John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.

The best news for education in recent years has been the election of Professor Stanislas Dehaene, head of neuroscience in France, to the Royal Society. Dehaene’s work over the past 20 years on the processes of learning, based on direct evidence of brain activity rather than the indirect evidence gained by inferring it from external observation, has provided a clear picture of the way the brain develops from infancy that calls into question every educational practice that is not consistent with it.

His election adds to the substantial number of Royal Society Fellows with a main or significant interest in brain research, and comes at a time when the Society is working to extend knowledge of the field beyond its own members. This is real science, not quackery about “learning styles” or “brain food” (water) that led to so many false dawns in the 00s. The French government has given Dehaene a unit to investigate the application of his work in the school system, and something similar is needed here. Dehaene was kind enough to describe this review of his major work, How We Learn, as “beautiful”, so I suggest it can be taken as an accurate introduction.

Dehaene’s overarching theory, that learning involves an adjustment in thinking to take account of new material, poses challenges to both sides of our current schism over the purposes of education. For Labour and its progressive allies, his demonstration that mental development is a process of adjusting thinking shows that their infatuation with mixed ability teaching is a blind alley. Earlier research, beginning with Santiago Ramón y Cajal´s drawings of brain cells which won him the Nobel Prize in 2006, identified the formation of links between brain cells and the deposit of myelin as an insulator through practice, as the basic process of development.

As the process of intellectual growth is exponential, the highest-achieving children learn at a much faster rate. For example, Marie Clay’s investigation of six-year-old readers in the 1960s found that the most able quarter made very few errors, and were often able to correct their own mistakes. The weakest quarter’s error rate was 20 times as great. They read proportionately less and were rarely able to correct an error. The needs of the two groups were so different that it was not possible for one teacher to meet both at the same time. The same issue arises in maths, though unfortunately, far too few teachers have the skills they need to teach the weakest pupils. Our opponents still control most teacher training and systematically ignore the issue.

David Cameron’s storming defence of his record on education and the responses to it show the challenge to our side. Blazing away as if nothing had gone wrong, it mirrored Jeremy Hunt’s rebuke to me, when I was Chairman of the Conservative Education Society, to focus on what was going right, not on what was going wrong. Did either of them really think our opponents would do the same? And was it not a huge embarrassment to David Cameron and Michael Gove to have trumpeted Perry Beeches School at our Conference, only to have it closed, and the head banned from teaching for corruption?

Chris McGovern, of the Campaign for Real Education, diplomatically suggested that the truth was more “nuanced “. The impact of phonics is one example. International reading scores have risen, in contrast to the progressive miasma in Scotland and Wales, but the inflexible form of phonics enforced by the government, and its prevention of sensible adaptation to meet the needs of children who find learning to read difficult, have been a big factor in the SEND crisis that threatens to bankrupt local authorities. This is not just because of the reading problems themselves, but because of the severe anxiety, poor behaviour and school refusal that failure to learn to read can generate. I am currently teaching a 12-year-old who could not read the, the most common word in the language, which is presented in government lists as an “exception”. Explaining the origin of th by Norman scribes, and demonstrating its frequency in common short words – this, that, then – has solved the problem, and provided the basis for a new neural network, in which each word reinforces the others.

Interestingly, this pupil can now read complex vocabulary related to his interest in marine biology – invertebrate, bioluminescent – following discussion and explanation. Synthetic phonics alone would not equip them to do this, as it would not show him where to place the stress on the words, showed in a very readable book or explain how to handle the variations in vowel (voice) sounds. Two Fellows of the Royal Society have shown in a very readable book (Frith and Blakemore, The Learning Brain) how an area of the brain develops to carry out this discrimination almost 20 years ago. It is high time everyone involved in this area took notice.

The multiplication check, a good idea in itself, shows similar inflexibility. Learning tables requires a major adjustment to the way children think about numbers, as they need to coordinate two columns, one rising in the basic sequence of numbers – 1x, 2x,3x – and the other in a multiple. Children learn these at different rates, and progressives have deliberately avoided investigating this. The government, though, imposed an all-all-nothing test that took no account of development, and gave no credit whatsoever to those who were still in the process of building the neural networks needed for complete success. A simple bronze-silver-gold system would have encouraged pupils and teachers alike, and I still don’t know why this idea was rejected.

Labour has shown, through blocking an Eton-sponsored sixth form in the North-East, and its vindictive VAT levy on independent schools, that it continues to put ideology before progress. On the Conservative side, allowing policy to be determined by ideological fantasists like Dominic Cummings, and ignoring the wiser counsel readily available from experts such as Lord Lingfield and our scientists, threw away a golden opportunity to reverse the progressivism that has prevailed since the days of Richard Crossland and Harold Wilson. It may not occur again.

A new video by the Canary’s Ranjan Balakumaran exposes the Starmer regime’s continued cover-up of Peter Mandelson’s appointment and other paedophile-related whitewashes, conflicts of interest, Starmer’s protection of US-Israeli war-crime enablers Palantir, the attacks on Iran and the global oil-price scam. Quite an achievement for a 5-minute video.

The ‘Epstein class’ and its supporters get more exposed by the day. Watch the latest video here and share widely:

 

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