Denmark is often hailed as the world’s ideal country, says Ed West in his Substack newsletter. It’s the least corrupt, the third most equal and the third freest. “Getting to Denmark” is sometimes used as a shorthand to mean “reaching the pinnacle of political development”. Yet the “sting in the tail”, for liberal admirers, is its “almost comically right-wing” stance on immigration. If rejected asylum seekers refuse to leave, they are locked in “return centres” until they change their mind. The government is doing everything it can to kick Syrian refugees out of the country. And Britain’s Rwanda resettlement policy was originally thought up by Denmark.

After more than two months in lockdown, Shanghai is opening up again, says Austin Williams in UnHerd. But “horror stories” abound. Employees were locked in offices for months. A woman walking her neighbour’s dog was “snatched” and taken to a quarantine hotel, where she was kept in one room, with the dog, for 10 weeks. Health workers barged into people’s homes, drenched their belongings in disinfectant and sent them off to “detention camps”. Not only have these mad zero-Covid policies battered the economy, they have also angered locals – germinating “the seeds of dissent that the Chinese Communist Party has spent decades carefully suppressing”.