What the commentators said
Putin must be delighted with the way this chemical weapons attack has played out, said Edward Lucas in The Times. The crisis added a “welcome sizzle of international intrigue to the final days of a lacklustre election”, and in the process has undermined the credibility of the divided, ineffectual West. “What happens now if, cloaked as usual by bluster and denial, the Kremlin follows up on Salisbury with a stunt in the Baltic states?” The good news, said William Hague in The Daily Telegraph, is that Nato has recognised that it needs to devise a response to the sort of “hybrid warfare” Moscow is engaging in, and is set to discuss this at a summit in July. Were the alliance to update its doctrine to allow graduated retaliation against such tactics, that would be “a far stronger check on a bullying Kremlin than any number of diplomatic expulsions”.
The UK should take some measures of its own in the meantime, said James Forsyth in The Spectator. First, it must boost its defence spending to better protect itself from threats, both in cyberspace and real life. Second, it must make itself less reliant on Russian gas.
Despite the claims of Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, I “remain unconvinced” that Putin ordered the Salisbury attack, said Ivor Gaber in The Independent. What I do know, though, is that in today’s Russia, the state, big business and organised crime are “intertwined” – and Britain has been “too welcoming to a panoply of Russian spies, oligarchs and gangsters who have brought to London their deadly games”. Not for nothing is Britain’s capital known as “Londongrad”, agreed Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post. The UK’S banks, law firms, private schools, estate agents and art galleries have all eagerly accepted oligarchs’ money. So, too, has the Tory party (the wife of a former Putin minister donated £160,000 to the Tories in exchange for a game of tennis with Boris Johnson and David Cameron). Britain could easily end this complicity. It could make it impossible to buy property anonymously; it could ban dubious Russian firms from its stock exchange. But such action would deprive many people of a lucrative source of income. “Does May have the nerve to do that. Do any of us?”
The Gambling Commission has recommended that the maximum stake on fixedodds betting terminals (FOBTS) is reduced from £100 to £30, disappointing campaigners who had been pushing for a £2 limit ( see page 15). FOBTS currently take bets of up to £100 every 20 seconds, but a third of sessions resulting in losses of more than £100 involved average stakes of no more than £20 – hence the call for a much lower cap. However, to the relief of the gambling industry, the commission concluded that the “risk of harm” from the machines, known as the “crack cocaine of gambling”, did not justify a cut to £2. A cross-party group of MPS has alleged that the industry used “biased” research to lobby against the £2 limit. MPS will announce the result of their own review in coming weeks. The commission said that any limit that did not exceed £30 would be consistent with its advice.
NHS pay cap to end
Unions and ministers agreed a deal this week to give 1.3 million NHS staff pay rises of at least 6.5% over the next three years, without any loss of holiday. The deal, which will cost the Treasury £4.2bn, covers most NHS staff except doctors, dentists and senior managers.