Almost 50 people have been injured after a car ploughed into crowds in Liverpool yesterday during a parade celebrating the club’s Premier League victory. A white British 53-year-old man was arrested at the scene. Police say the incident is not being treated as terror-related. Ukraine’s Western allies, including the US and UK, have lifted all range restrictions on Kyiv’s use of their weapons after Russia launched its heaviest-ever barrage of drone strikes over the weekend. Donald Trump says Vladimir Putin has gone “absolutely crazy”. Parents in Japan will be banned from giving their children weird names like Pudding, Pikachu and Caesar. Inventive mums and dads have been getting around traditional rules against “flashy” names by exploiting a quirk of the Japanese language in which characters – called kanji – can be pronounced in multiple ways, meaning an ostensibly sensible moniker can have a second meaning. The new rules will force parents to specify on birth certificates how the name is to be pronounced.

Postcolonial guilt has become “moral insanity”

There’s a reason the government’s decision to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius – an ally of China with no previous claim to the remote territory – is so hard to explain, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. It’s because, for all Keir Starmer’s strange attempts to invoke “protection of the electromagnetic spectrum” or international law (even though the relevant ruling was only advisory), the decision wasn’t really about that. It was about Starmer, his old chum-turned-attorney general Lord Hermer and others “cleansing their consciences” of post-colonial guilt, at the extravagant expense of the nation, and against the wishes of many of the shamefully treated Chagossians.

It’s the same with the hypocritical elements of net zero, which are not driven by practicality or energy security, but guilt. Listen to any debate on this issue and you will hear the “plaintive echoes of self-flagellation”. We were the first to industrialise, they say, so we must “atone for historic emissions” while our enemies go on emitting on a vast scale, and we go on outsourcing all our carbon-intensive needs to poorer parts of the world, “making a mockery of our pretensions”. On immigration, too, we are hamstrung by a “crippling dread” of deporting black and brown people, given how supposedly nasty we were to their ancestors. It’s this “latent paranoia” that underpins the decisions made by asylum tribunals which “serially prioritise the rights of foreign paedophiles and violent criminals” over their victims. As a nation, we should always strive to be “decent and humane”, but this is neither of those things. It has become a kind of “moral insanity”. Only by overcoming our guilt about the past can we hope to shape the future.