There’s a conflict of interest at the heart of the BBC over Gaza

The BBC struggles to get anything right about Gaza. Last week, it decided not to broadcast a searing documentary about Palestinian doctors under attack, citing vague concerns about “a perception of partiality”. This week, it’s the coverage of Glastonbury and why no one was alert enough to press the mute button on a rap-punk duo called Bob Vylan.

Though it has garnered less outrage the former smacks of either editorial naivety or institutional cowardice.. But, fortunately, the top brass at Channel 4 appear to have more backbone and the film, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, will be shown tonight. People can judge for themselves.

It seems to me to be exactly the sort of documentary which the BBC should broadcast. The film graphically shows the horrors of working in Gaza hospitals these past 21 months in an unflinching and quietly devastating light. It documents a litany of death, violence, cruelty, suffering and inhumanity. There are allegations of the targeting, abduction, torture and effective murder of doctors and nurses, along with denials by the Israeli army [the IDF] that they have been involved in any such things.

No Western media organisation has been allowed free access to Gaza, which makes it doubly complicated to tell the whole truth about what has been happening in a war in which 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced, at least 56,156 Palestinians have been killed and 132,239 have been injured. And, yes, these are Gaza Ministry of Health figures, and the Ministry of Health is controlled by Hamas. But that’s all we have.

There is quite a collective of organisations and individuals who monitor the media round the clock for any whisper of anti-Israeli “bias”. And we can confidently expect the Gaza medics film to be attacked within hours of broadcast. I would expect there to be criticism of the social media feed of the highly-experienced freelance reporter, Ramita Navai, who has described Israel as a “rogue state that’s committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass-murdering Palestinians”.

I would not be surprised if a diligent researcher finds that one or more of the medics who appear in the programme has a second cousin once removed in Hamas. Or personnel who even belonged to Hamas. My own judgement is that, if they do emerge, such claims should not discredit or undermine the overall impact or importance of the documentary.

This film was, I’m told, cleared by the compliance squad at the BBC. The corporation has not advanced any credible reason why it was subsequently suppressed beyond its statement around “a perception of partiality”. If the documentary leads to heated debate about the issues, and whether they have been fairly represented, that’s well and good. That is partly the role of public service broadcasting.

But these are not the only mistakes the BBC has made over Gaza. A previous, unrelated, BBC documentary was withdrawn when it was revealed that a boy narrator was related to a middle-ranking Hamas official. BBC chair Samir Shah told MPs it was a “dagger to the heart” of the BBC’s claims to trust. The BBC Board promptly announced an inquiry. That was on 27 February, and we’re now in July. It’s evidently what Sherlock Holmes would call a three-pipe problem.

Holmes would have quickly divined why it was such a ticklish matter: because it could end up calling into question the judgment of the ultimate editor-in-chief of the BBC, the director general, Tim Davie. The Telegraph has reported that Deborah Turness, the BBC’s chief executive of news and current affairs, watched the documentary before it was broadcast, but failed to question it.

Heads must roll? But this is where the curious governance arrangements of the BBC kick in. And where we are forced to confront other “perceptions of partiality.” The BBC has a board of directors, but most of them have no experience in journalism or broadcasting. The crucial BBC committee is the five-strong editorial guidelines and standards committee. Shah leads it and it includes both Davie and Turness. So if these particular heads are to roll, some turkeys are going to have to vote for Christmas.

The only other person with editorial experience on this committee has, until recently, been Sir Robbie Gibb [the fifth member was former Tate boss Nicholas Serota and, since 3 April, Dame Caroline Thompson]. Forgive the recap, but you may remember Sir Robbie as the former No 10 spin doctor imposed on the BBC by Boris Johnson’s government and then re-appointed last year by Rishi Sunak. He has described himself as a “proper Thatcherite Conservative”. His career has zigzagged between right-wing politics and journalism. There is not even a perception of impartiality about his political beliefs.

But when it comes to his judgments on the Middle East it is even more complicated. You may recall the curious episode which resulted in Sir Robbie becoming the apparent sole owner of The Jewish Chronicle (The JC). In April 2020 he led a consortium to rescue the title from bankruptcy – while refusing to reveal who actually put the money up. He appointed Jake Wallis Simons as editor. And it was Wallis Simons who ran a vigorous campaign for a parliamentary inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of Jews and Israel. He was not a fan.

The Gibbs/JWS era at the JC was not a happy one, with the press regulator twice forced to consider an investigation into standards; with five leading columnists quitting and with a fellow member of his own original consortium saying that the editor was “behaving like a political activist, not a journalist…. it does a disservice to the Jewish community because it consolidates this idea that the Jewish community abroad is in some way sort of complicit by their silence with the excesses of the IDF.”

Gibb resigned as a director just before the editorial calamity which saw The JC publish a fabricated story. Israel newspapers suggested they had been placed in the European media to support Benjamin’s Netanyahu’s negotiating position over Gaza. There is an ongoing inquiry into the matter: the Israeli security service, Shin Bet arrested Eli Feldstein, a spokesperson for Netanyahu, who had previously worked for the far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The long-standing JC columnist, Jonathan Freedland, said, “The latest scandal brings great disgrace on the paper – publishing fabricated stories and showing only the thinnest form of contrition – but it is only the latest. Too often, The JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgments political rather than journalistic.” Wallis Simons parted company with The JC soon afterwards.

So, yes, Sir Robbie Gibb – who presided over much of this – has been, until recently, the only external figure with journalistic experience to sit on the crucial BBC editorial committee. The minutes for two meetings this year show the committee has discussed BBC coverage of the Middle East. In January the committee discussed the timing, scope and methodology for a review of the BBC’s coverage. In March they discussed it as an “emerging editorial risk.”

For an organisation obsessed with “perceptions of partiality”, it seems odd, on the face of it, to have had the very partial Sir Robbie Gibb in such a role. That perception has certainly alarmed more than 400 media figures who have urged the BBC board to remove Gibb. They include no fewer than 111 BBC journalists. So I contacted the BBC to ask if he had, in fact, recused himself from any discussions about the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict. The answer came back: No, he hadn’t.

I asked a further question: did Sir Robbie have any conversations about the Doctors Under Attack documentary, including with the director general or chair? The response was somewhat cryptic: “I can confirm that [Sir Robbie] had no formal role in any of the discussions or decisions about whether the BBC should run the film – I’m afraid I have no way of knowing whether BBC board members have had discussions about various live issues affecting the BBC but as I’ve said before, the decisions about the film were taken by BBC News.”

It is reasonable to assume, I think, that Sir Robbie may have had informal discussions. All this makes one wonder about the judgement of the newish chair, Samir Shah. He came into the job knowing about Gibb’s journalistic track record, along with his obsessive desire to keep secret who is bankrolling The JC. A strong chair, interested in trust and impartiality, would surely have asked him to step out of the room when the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East came up. But, no.

So this is where we seem to be. The BBC junked a film because of “perceptions of partiality”. But the key decisions – including the futures of Davie and Turness – are strongly influenced by Sir Robbie Gibb, who has shown no evidence of impartiality when it comes to the Middle East. It sounds like a two-tier system to me.

Meanwhile, our attention is absorbed by the far less salient question of whether some hapless producer failed to press the mute button for Bob Vylan. I think it’s called deadcatting.

Angela Rayner reveals why she’d never want to be prime minister

Angela Rayner has said she would never want to be prime minister because “it would age me by 10 years within six months”.

“Have you ever seen a prime minister after a year or two in government?” the deputy prime minister joked.

The morning after Sir Keir Starmer scraped through a major rebellion over his watered-down welfare reforms, Ms Rayner was asked whether she is waiting in the wings to take the embattled PM’s place.

“Not a chance,” she told ITV’s Lorraine.

She said: “It would age me by 10 years within six months, it does, anyone who has been prime minister it is a very challenging job.”

Amid mounting questions about the prime minister’s future following a disastrous first year in power, she defended Sir Keir, saying he is “doing the job for Britain”, adding “there’s been a lot going on” in the 12 months since the PM entered Downing Street.

She said: “He’s been all around the world trying to repair the relationships in Europe. We’ve got the trade deals that the previous government wasn’t able to do, tackling the things like the tariffs that the president in the US wanted to put onto the UK, which would have damaged our economy again.

“There’s a lot going on, and the prime minister’s been […] here, there and everywhere, doing the job for Britain.”

It comes after polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice referred to Sir Keir’s first year in office as “the worst start for any newly elected prime minister”.

He told Times Radio that the prime minister was “never especially popular” and that “the public still don’t know what he stands for.”

Asked if she would be interested in being prime minister at some point, Ms Rayner told the ITV programme: “No”.

She said that she is “passionate” about issues including workers’ rights and council housing.

“I’m very interested in delivering for the people of this country, because … to be elected as an MP from my background was incredible,” she said.

“Having that opportunity to serve my community that have raised me, looked after me, given me opportunities, and I don’t forget that. And to be deputy prime minister of this country … it’s got to count for something.”

Kate Middleton reveals ‘life-changing’ cancer journey

The Princess of Wales openly discussed her “life-changing” cancer journey and “rollercoaster” recovery on a visit to an Essex hospital.

Speaking at Colchester Hospital, Kate Middleton revealed the toll cancer takes on family and friends.

“It is a life-changing experience both for the individual patient, but also for the families as well – and actually it sometimes goes unrecognised, you don’t necessarily, particularly when it’s the first time, you don’t appreciate how much impact it is going to have,” the princess told a group of users, volunteers and staff at the Cancer Wellbeing Centre.

The princess was diagnosed with an unknown form of cancer in March last year, in the same year as the King was also diagnosed with cancer.

After the diagnosis, she faced a nine-month battle and underwent “preventative chemotherapy”.

On 14 January, she confirmed that she is officially in remission for cancer, on the same day that she made a surprise visit to the Royal Marsden Hospital, where she was treated.

On her recent visit to the Essex hospital, the princess praised the centre’s “holistic” approach to the support it offers patients, relatives and carers, which includes counselling and dietary advice.

“There is this whole phase when you finish your treatment that you, yourself, everybody expects you, right you’ve finished your time, go, you’re better, and that’s not the case at all,” she added.

“You have to find your new normal and that takes time.”

After visiting the centre, the princess planted several coral-pink Catherine’s Rose plants in the hospital’s Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) wellbeing garden, which offers a restorative space for staff, patients and visitors.

The RHS named the flower after her to raise awareness about the importance of spending time outdoors for people’s physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing.

Discussing her rollercoaster healing journey, the princess added that a support network is invaluable.

“Someone described the sort of healing, recovery journey to me as being like a sort of zig-zag,” she said.

“It’s a rollercoaster, it’s not one smooth plain, which you expect it to be, but the reality is it’s not, you go through hard times and to have a place like this, to have the support network, whether its through creativity and singing or gardening, whatever it might be, is so valuable and it’s great that this community has it.

“It would be great if lots of communities had this kind of support.”

Proceeds from the sale of Catherine’s Rose, bred by Harkness Roses, will support a national training programme for clinical teams to help patients who need intensive support live well with and after cancer.

Harkness Roses and Kensington Palace are donating 500 roses to wellbeing and community gardens across the UK this summer.

North Korea to ‘send 30,000 more troops to support Russia’

North Korea is preparing to send up to 30,000 extra troops to boost Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, Kyiv has claimed.

The troops could arrive in the coming months and may be used to fight in parts of Russian-occupied Ukraine, according to an intelligence assessment seen by Kyiv.

They come on top of the roughly 12,000 sent to Russia in November, who are so far only believed to have fought on Russian territory as Moscow looked to expel Ukrainian troops from its Kursk region.

North Korean troops will be used “to strengthen the Russian contingent, including during the large-scale offensive operations”, the assessment says.

Moscow, it adds, is capable of providing the necessary equipment and weaponry for the extra troops.

The news comes after Washington decided to partially suspend some shipments of air defence missiles and other munitions to Ukraine over concerns about low stockpiles at home.

A senior Kyiv MP has described the decision as “painful”, while the Kremlin says it will bring the war to a quicker end.

Popular Jellycats targeted by criminal gangs in soft toy crimewave

Fluffy, colourful and cute — Jellycats have become the latest collectable to go viral with their popularity rivalling the Beanie Baby craze of the 90s.

The Prince and Princess of Wales were even gifted two of the toys plushies during a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace last month, with William saying: “These are like gold dust, my children go crazy for these things.”

But the fame and expensive price tag of the toys means they have also become a target for thieves, including organised criminal gangs.

Independent garden centres and bookshops up and down the country are facing incidents of shoplifting that has left retailers thousands of pounds out of pocket.

The stolen items, traders have told The Independent, end up on dedicated Facebook pages for buying and selling of the toys, as well as listings on online marketplaces like eBay and Vinted.

Prices range from £12 for a smaller toy up to £200 for a giant one.

Just last week, Dorset Police issued an appeal after a woman entered a bookshop in Christchurch twice, stealing almost £250 worth of Jellycat toys.

On Friday, West Mercia Police arrested a 38-year-old woman after Jellycat toys were stolen over three incidents at St Peter’s Garden Centre and Evesham Country Park, both in Norton, Worcestershire.

And in February, a woman admitted stealing almost £3,000 worth of Jellycat toys from three different garden centres in Norfolk. Ruby Smith, 35, of Eye in Suffolk, was sentenced to a 26-week prison sentence, suspended for 24 months.

In March, the Gorge Bear Company suffered an overnight ram raid at its store in Cheddar, Somerset, when around 300 of the toys were allegedly stolen. A man has been arrested by police while inquiries continue.

And in Bridport in Dorset last year, Charlie Groves, owner of Groves Nursery, spotted on on CCTV a woman pushing a baby in a pram while allegedly stealing eight Jellycats worth more than £300.

A woman in her 30s has been charged with shoplifting in connection with the incident. She is due to appear at Newton Abbot Magistrates’ Court for a plea hearing on 14 August.

Mr Groves said: “The Jellycat toys are collectable, and it’s just another sought-after good criminals appear to turning to, while independent retailers like ourselves lose out. There’s a clear cost to all this.

“We think the toys are stolen and then sold online, it’s very difficult to stop, but we’ve tried to up our security in store.”

The success story behind the Jellycat toy started in 1999 when brothers Tom and Will Gatacre founded the brand and displayed their products at a London trade show, attracting the attention of major retailers such as John Lewis and Selfridges.

Today, the company has around 1,200 stockists across the UK, although has reduced the number recently to “offer the best shopping experience for customers”.

Katy Bourne, the national lead on retail crime for the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC), told The Independent she was also aware of a “high number of cases” involving Jellycats.

She is encouraging targeted shops like garden centres to provide details on thefts to an information-sharing schemed used by police forces called Project Pegasus, which she launched in 2023.

She said: “The Jellycat toys are so resaleable, so sought after and valuable — we are seeing some people stealing them in bulk.

“They are so resaleable because people want to buy them for their kids. It is a mix of people stealing. We have seen organised criminal gangs, but you also get the opportunists. Shops need to work with police on stopping the thieves.”

In April, figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the number of shoplifting offences had reached a record high. A total of 516,971 offences were logged by forces in 2024, up 20 per cent from 429,873 in 2023.

Nearly a quarter of people have witnessed shoplifting taking place in a shop over the past 12 months, said the British Retail Consortium, which estimated the crime costs retailers in the UK £2.2bn last year.

The body said it suspected Jellycat toys were being stolen to relate online due to their high value.

Speaking about retail crime generally, Graham Wynn, assistant director of business and regulation, told The Independent: “While the causes are manifold, the rise in organised crime is a significant concern, with gangs hitting stores one after another.

“Sadly, such theft is not a victimless crime; it pushes up the cost for honest shoppers and damages the customer experience.”

How to host a Macmillan Coffee Morning like you’ve never seen before

What comes to mind when you think of a fundraising coffee morning? Soggy digestives, weak tea and sitting in a school hall having forced fun? Think again.

Macmillan Cancer Support are celebrating 35 years of the iconic Coffee Morning fundraiser, and we’re here to help you give your next Coffee Morning a glow-up. Behind the fun, Coffee Mornings help raise vital funds for people facing one of the toughest challenges of their lives.

Almost one in two people in the UK will get cancer in their lifetime, and no two experiences are the same. Where you live, who you are, or whether you have another health condition can all affect the care you receive – and that’s not fair. Macmillan is working to change that, doing whatever it takes to make sure everyone gets the best possible care, whoever and wherever they are.

So while tasty treats and fundraising fun of course get to stay, we’re leveling up the atmosphere with fresh ideas to keep everyone entertained.

Want to be a Coffee Morning Host?

Best of all, these new ways of raising vital funds don’t have to be expensive. In fact, they might even save you a bit of time, wardrobe space and money. Here’s how to host a Macmillan Coffee Morning like you’ve never seen before…

Organise a ‘style swap shop’

Clear out your wardrobe, raise money and bring your community together all at the same time by organising a ‘style swap shop’ – with all your finest, unworn or unwanted clothes and accessories.

Pack up the majestic hats you bought for a wedding but only wore once, the satin gloves that make you feel like Audrey Hepburn but don’t go with anything you own, or maybe that lace vintage dress your aunty wore to Glastonbury in the 70s, which now lives in an unexplored drawer in your bedroom.

Fill up a bag with your best cast-offs and get your friends, family and neighbours to do the same. Everyone pays £5 entry to the ‘style swap shop’ and then you all get to browse through each other’s preloved treasures – grabbing what takes your fancy.

One person’s hand-me-down is another person’s new look – so elbows at the ready! Want to raise extra cash? Add a £1-£2 price tag on each item that’s been donated.

Strut your stuff at a cake walk

We know that staying healthy and being physically active can reduce the risk of cancer, so why not combine the classic Coffee Morning with a walk around the block? Creative costumes, silly hats and streamers at the ready as we leave behind the school hall and instead take our cakes and cookies for a little jaunt to stretch our legs.

Up the fun, and the stakes, by upgrading from a cake walk to a cake race – the bigger and messier the dessert, the better!  And get the kids involved in the baking and racing too.

Or if you want to keep it indoors, turn your catwalk into a cake walk and give your best strut with your favourite pudding in hand. It’s giving egg and spoon race, jelly wobbling on a plate and doubling over with laughter as you sashay along clutching a platter filled with your finest roulade.

Dance away the morning at a sober rave

Why sit or stand when you can dance? Sober raves are all the rage – and ideal for a morning of fun with friends, family and neighbours. There’s no hangover, no late night and the kids can join in too – so, no need for a babysitter.

Grab your glow sticks for a Coffee Morning like no other, and you can still eat cake and have a brew or a cold drink. It’s a club night where nobody has to worry about the morning-after-the-night-before! You can host it in any hall, all you need is music and a disco ball.

You might feel silly at first, but soon you’ll be grinning with joy as dancing is proven to release endorphins (natural painkillers and mood boosters) as well as reducing stress and keeping you fit. Now, who does a good Big fish, little fish, cardboard box?

Run an Is it cake? competition

If you haven’t seen the Netflix hit Is it cake? – an American game show-style cooking competition, you’re missing a treat. Contestants compete to both identify and recreate their best version of everyday items – in cake form.

That could be fire hoses made from vanilla sponge and icing, kitchen utensils that cut open to reveal red velvet cake, replica designer handbags that are actually edible, and even other food items such as burgers, which are of course, cake.

Up the baking ante by running your own cake lookalike competition inspired by the show. The best thing about it is that even if your cake looks like a pair of stinky old sports shoes, it’ll still taste great!

Whether you’re swapping styles, raving sober or sculpting a sponge handbag, every slice of fun helps Macmillan Cancer Support do whatever it takes to help everyone living with cancer.

Signing up to host your own Macmillan Coffee Morning this year couldn’t be easier! Find out more today on the Macmillan website

Macmillan Cancer Support, registered charity in England and Wales (261017), Scotland (SC039907) and the Isle of Man (604). Also operating in Northern Ireland.

If Trump wants to earn the Nobel Peace Prize, he needs to get a grip on Israel

Donald Trump claims to have brokered a 60-day “ceasefire” between the warring parties in Gaza. If it works, a two-month suspension of the bombing of the territory, and of killings at human feeding pens, would be welcome. But it will solve nothing, because both Israel’s rulers and Hamas are committed to their core belief in a saying that begins “From the river to the sea …”

How the phrase ends, though, is the point of contention: “Israel will be sovereign” – or “Palestine will be free”. The former version, in so many words, is part of the founding documents of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party; the latter is a chant often taken to mean that Israel, along with its population, should be extinguished.

The only solution to these mutually exclusive slogans is tolerance and hope. Trump’s ceasefire offers neither. Violence and impunity have created a landscape of horror – and Trump isn’t the guide out of it.

Hamas is blood-soaked, murderous. It has sacrificed tens of thousands of innocent civilians to the Israeli war machine in its long campaign to shatter any chance that Palestinians might ever hope for their own state and freedom, alongside Israel, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

Hamas remains the dominant force in Gaza. It has mistaken – and will continue to mistake – worldwide public dismay at what Israel has done to the Strip for endorsement of its zero-sum agenda. It will take the 60 days as a breather and a rearming opportunity.

The struggle for Gaza’s population will be how to resist the temptation to take up emigration opportunities. Israel has smashed their world into rubble and dust, and thereby may deliver on the Netanyahu government’s clear desire to flush the territory’s 2.2 million survivors into the Egyptian Sinai desert and beyond.

A poll conducted in May this year by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed that 43 per cent of Palestinians were now willing to emigrate – to anywhere.

The Palestinians have nowhere to turn for leadership. Eight months ago, 36 per cent of Palestinians said they supported Hamas, and 21 per cent said they supported Fatah, which dominates the West Bank. Support for Hamas since then has decreased by four percentage points, according to the poll.

Marwan Bargouthi, the most popular Palestinian politician with 50 per cent support, is in an Israeli jail serving several life sentences.

Since the murder of nearly 1,200 people and the abduction of 240 from Israel by extremists led by Hamas on 7 October 2023, Israel has waged a war of staggering brutality against Palestinians. The indictment of Netanyahu along with Yoav Gallant, then Israel’s defence minister, for war crimes, and the issuing of arrest warrants, is not a measure undertaken lightly by the International Criminal Court.

Israel has changed. There is a battle raging internally for its soul, as Netanyahu continues to do everything he can to stay in office – he is facing corruption charges. He has suspended plans to destroy the independent judiciary, but only temporarily. Meanwhile, the population is showing signs of radicalisation.

Some 82 per cent of Israeli Jews support the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, according to a recent poll by Pennsylvania State University. And 54 per cent strongly support this. It asked 1,000 Jewish Israelis if they supported the idea that all of the people in towns conquered by Israel should be killed, in the same way that Jericho was flattened in the Bible; 47 per cent backed the idea of mass slaughter.

The results of this survey were published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The left-wing publication has also published allegations that, since May this year, the Israel Defense Forces have deliberately killed more than 400 Palestinians seeking food aid.

Trump has leverage over Israel. He has cut foreign aid almost entirely around the world, except there and in Egypt. Before the US president slashed the help provided to the world’s neediest, the Jewish state received up to 20 per cent of America’s total overseas aid.

According to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the US provided Israel with $22.8bn (£16.8bn) in military aid in the first year of its Gaza campaign.

“Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid since its founding, receiving about $310bn (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance,” read a November 2024 report by the US Council on Foreign Relations.

Trump says he is putting pressure on Netanyahu, who is shortly to visit the White House. But the US president has previously endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with the fantasy of settling its population in neighbouring countries while turning the territory itself into a beach resort.

His calls for a ceasefire warn that life will get worse for Palestinians – they don’t focus on any kind of option that would undermine the standing of Hamas with hope.

The US has instead been silent as Gaza has been carpet-bombed and Jewish settlers run amok on the West Bank, where illegal Israeli settlements have marched across the landscape and physically obliterated the space where a Palestinian state could ever take form.

If Trump wants to earn the Nobel Peace Prize, which he thinks he already richly deserves, he needs to put a stop to Israel’s impunity by ending the subsidies that allow the country to make war.

Hamas and its fellow recidivist travellers to armageddon can only be put out of business if the Palestinians, who already despair of all their leaders, can be offered a path that doesn’t end in apartheid, occupation and indignity for generations to come.

Trump could help end a zero-sum Grand Guignol by forcing Israel to back away from its “river to the sea” policies, while Hamas’s demands for sovereignty over the same space can be swept aside by a genuine return, among Palestinians, to faith in liberty.

Not long ago, two-thirds of people on both sides thought it would be possible for the two nations to live side by side between the River Jordan and the Med. They need freeing from the subsidies that trap them in misery there.

UK accused of hypocrisy at landmark UN foreign aid conference

The UK has been accused of “hypocrisy” over its lack of high-level participation at a key global development finance summit, on top of cuts to Britain’s aid budget – while talking up its role in helping lower-income nations.

The accusations have been made at the fourth Financing for Development Conference (FfD4), a once-a-decade summit happening all week in Seville, Southern Spain, where delegates are aiming to tackle the perennial problem of how to help developing countries access the money they need.

Thirty-two African countries currently spend more on debt repayments than on healthcare, and 25 African countries spend more on debt payments than on education, an issue that activists say needs urgent action.

Some 50 world leaders are due at FfD4, including Emmanuel Macron of France, Mark Carney of Canada, and Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. The UK, however, has only sent a government minister in the form of Baroness Chapman, the international development minister.

“A level of ambition from the UK government would have been demonstrated clearly by sending higher level participation such as the prime minister or Foreign Secretary,” Lydia Darby, a senior policy advisor at Save the Children, told The Independent.

Ahead of fDf4, writing in The Independent, Baroness Chapman called for a “new era for global aid and development”, that would see developing countries helped in building their own tax systems, and greater investment in developing countries from the private sector, among other measures.

Hannah Bond, Co-CEO at ActionAid UK, said that it is “hypocritical” for the UK to talk about “fair finance” while cutting overseas aid.

“If the UK truly cares about fair finance, it must honour its overseas aid commitments, tackle unfair debts, and pay its fair share in addressing the climate crisis,” Bond said. “Without this, talk of fair finance is nothing more than empty PR.”

Baroness Chapman’s appearance comes off the back of the UK cutting its foreign aid budget from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI) – which is expected to reduce foreign aid by £6.2 billion by 2025.

Alex Farley, from advocacy group Bond, said that it is “impossible” to see how the UK can deliver on existing funding commitments, respond to humanitarian crisis, and tackle climate change, following he 0.5 to 0.3 per cent cut.

“Let alone undo the damage these cuts have done to our reputation and credibility with countries,” she added.

“It would be nice to hear the government expressing regret for its cuts to the aid budget, rather than blithely claiming that they are somehow doing developing countries a favour,” Michael Jacobs, from the think tank ODI, told The Independent.

Mr Jacobs added that the claim that private sector money can substitute public funds is “silly at best, disingenuous at worst”.

This is because “the private sector wants returns, while much aid – for health, schools, sanitation, climate adaptation – doesn’t make a profit, so is not investable”, he said.

Catherine Pettengell, executive director of NGO network Climate Action Network UK concurred that the UK had “failed to sufficiently support developing countries’ calls for fairer debt, tax, international cooperation, and climate finance” in build-up to the conference.

“It’s a crushing blow that only compounds the recent UK aid cuts,” she added.

Attendees of FfD4 say, however, that it is not all doom and gloom in Seville.

The final agreement of the talks – the Compromiso de Sevilla – was in fact agreed to just ahead of this week’s conference. According to Save the Children’s Ms Darby, there is notably positive language on matters including international tax cooperation and an agreement to initiate an intergovernmental process on debt.

“The document is an important step with plenty to build on in the months and years to come,” Darby said – though she acknowledged it has inevitably fallen short of “the transformative ambition that civil society and vulnerable communities worldwide had called for”.

While the UK, along with the EU, has been accused of watering down key priorities for low-and-middle-come countries, these countries have at least contributed much more positively than the US, which withdrew from talks ahead of the conference over the refusal from the rest of the world to delete the goal of “sustainable development” from the text.

This story is part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid series