The world’s autocrats are having “a very bad year”, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. In Russia, a modern-day tsar finds his imperialist ambitions thwarted by an army “a fraction the size of his own”, while thousands of his subjects flee to avoid his hated war. In Iran, the mullahs feel obliged to prove their virtue by “beating to death quietly defiant young women” and shooting dozens of their own citizens. In China, Xi Jinping’s “lunatic” zero-Covid policy and “ham-fisted economic management” reveal a regime in peril.

When Liz Truss raged against the “anti-growth coalition” in her party conference speech, many of its “most powerful members” were sitting in front of her, says James Sean Dickson in UnHerd. Again and again, Tory MPs, councillors and voters oppose the construction of everything from houses to solar panel installations. Elderly homeowners “pose in front of derelict industrial wastelands” saved from so-called “inappropriate development”, all “grinning like Alsatians”. This is the simple reason for Britain’s “anaemic” growth rate: we refuse to build infrastructure and housing in our most productive regions, strangling the supply of workers to well-paying jobs. The nation which produced great Victorian engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel “has lost its nerve”.