Society

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why Virgin Trains really wanted to stop selling the Daily Mail

Is it really ‘censorship’ that Virgin Trains won’t be stocking the Daily Mail any more? An internal company memo to staff this week announced that ‘we’ve decided that this paper is not compatible with the VT brand and our beliefs’ and that staff had raised ‘considerable concern’ about the Mail’s stance on ‘issues such as immigration, LGBT rights and unemployment’. This has prompted accusations that the train company is cracking down on free speech and therefore censoring views that it doesn’t like. Is this true? Many have argued that as Virgin is a private company and not a newsagents, it has no obligation to give every newspaper a platform. This

Tuesday

Toni Saad

The NHS cannot heal itself

Rationing did not end in the 1950s. The largest-scale rationing programme is still in existence: our beloved National Health Service. Its austere regime is part of our national life. We no longer queue for bread or sugar, but we most certainly do to see the doctor. We no longer wait in line at the butcher’s, but we do in A&E departments and on interminable lists for appointments and procedures. There are no books or coupons, but rationing it remains. Indeed, the government has announced it is withholding elective operations and routine appointments this month. Rationing by any other name would smell as sweet. And, like our drawn-out post-war rationing, it

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What the government plans to do with social care after the reshuffle

Will Jeremy Hunt’s new job title make any difference to the rather precarious state of the social care sector? Opposition parties have been accusing Theresa May of ‘window-dressing’ by changing the name of the Health department to the Department of Health and Social Care – though if this reshuffle is about window-dressing, May must never, ever consider a career in retail. Changing names does signal intentions, but it can also have no more effect on policy than a change in stationery. Hunt will be taking control of the government’s green paper on social care, which as I’ve been reporting, hasn’t been so much kicked into the long grass as chucked

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is Virgin Trains really any more ‘progressive’ than the Daily Mail?

Virgin Trains has announced that it will no longer sell the Daily Mail on board its services nor offer it free to first class passengers on the basis that ‘We’ve decided that this paper is not compatible with the VT brand and our beliefs’. It goes on to say its staff have objected to the Mail’s ‘position on…immigration, LGBT rights, and unemployment’ – although it fails to expound exactly what it finds so offensive about the Mail’s coverage on these issues. So is it a victory for the ‘Stop Funding Hate’ campaign – or a reflection that the Daily Mail has been at the forefront of criticism of Virgin Trains

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Welcome to the era of unnovation

For the past few years, another seasonal story has joined the traditional tales of woe about this mysterious, random thing called Winter causing chaos – always at the same time of year, it seems – on the railways of this fair land and of roadworks unexpectedly coinciding with the peak time for people taking long car journeys to visit loved ones (and even their families) thereby adding misery to the mistletoe on motorways across the country. This new glitch concerns a nation of Tiny Tims and Tiny Tears going without the Christmas gifts intended for them simply because the theoretical givers ordered them online rather than go to the bother

Toby Young Toby Young

Toby Young: Why I’m resigning from the Office for Students

I have decided to stand down from the Office for Students. My appointment has become a distraction from its vital work of broadening access to higher education and defending academic freedom. Education is my passion and I want now to be able to get on with the work I have been doing to promote and support the free schools movement. These schools have already done a huge amount to raise standards in some of England’s most deprived areas and the next challenge is to extend those benefits to every area of educational underperformance. The caricature drawn of me in the last seven days, particularly on social media, has been unrecognisable to

Monday

Carole Hayman

Flying round the world? Make sure you do your research

For some reason, I decided to go to the other side of the world for Christmas. I may never do it again. Not because I didn’t like Australia (I loved it) but because it takes forever to get there. And spending 23 hours with your knees under your chin on a long-haul flight to the Antipodes will cure you of ever going further than Calais. When you’re flying economy it’s of paramount importance to choose the right airline. I tried four for size: Cathay Pacific, Qantas, Jetstar and Air New Zealand. Cathay Pacific flew me to Hong Kong. The staff were friendly and smart but, alas, the Boeing 777 was

Joanna Williams

The ‘new suffragettes’ are nothing of the sort

As surely everyone must by now know, 2018 marks the centenary of women securing the vote in Britain. This monumental event represented a giant leap forward for sexual equality and is truly deserving of commemoration. There will, rightly, be television programmes, books column inches and tea towels marking the anniversary. Everyone should know about Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Davison, Millicent Fawcett and their comrades. But there is a danger with every national commemoration that history is rewritten: in the retelling, some facts are conveniently forgotten and others distorted. We forget that 1918 also marks the first year that all men were able to vote and that suffrage was only granted to

Alex Massie Alex Massie

In test cricket, there’s no place like home

It has been a pretty ghastly winter and the best that may be said of it is that by far the worst of it is now in the past. The sooner England can get the hell out of Australia the better. It is true that few people, I think, viewed this tour with any kind of inflated optimism; nevertheless the manner of England’s defeats – after an initial promising two days in Brisbane – has been grindingly dispiriting. When even Glenn McGrath is reduced to saying, in effect, ‘Cheer up cobbers, you were more competitive than last time you ventured here’ you know the game is up.  True, Steve Smith

Steerpike Steerpike

CCHQ social media fail over new party chairman

Oh dear. The new Conservative party chairman has a job on their hands transforming CCHQ into a digitally-savvy campaign machine. So, it’s safe to say, that things haven’t got off to the best start for the new chairman. The CCHQ Twitter feed announced Chris Grayling as the new chairman: However, just moments later the tweet was deleted. The reason? It’s not clear that Grayling is the man for the job – his rival Brandon Lewis has just walked into No 10!

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The problem with Britain’s productivity

Britain has a productivity problem – it lags behind Germany, France and the US, even Italy. But what, if anything, do we need to do about it? Over time, says economist Gerard Lyons, productive economies outperform less productive ones, but productivity statistics are not everything. Unskilled people who in Britain are working in less productive sectors of the economy would not have a job at all if they lived in France. There, productivity figures are high – but so too is unemployment. Yet those unskilled workers act as a drag on Britain’s productivity figures. However, Britain can improve its productivity, and therefore its overall economic performance, by moving into higher

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Announcing a change to Toby Young’s Spectator column

A few years ago, we had a bit of a problem with Toby Young’s column – one that never quite went away. He started writing for us regularly shortly after he’d written a book called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People about his complete failure to make it big in New York. His column was called Status Anxiety and the idea was to showcase his self-deprecating humour, while exposing the pieties of those who take themselves and high society too seriously. From the offset, readers loved it. But in the last few years, Toby’s life has taken a different turn. He dedicated himself to setting up new schools for

Steerpike Steerpike

Must Toby Young’s role in creating schools now be held against him?

The furore over Toby Young’s appointment to the board of the Office for Students (OfS) shows no sign of dying down. The Mail on Sunday splashes on a series of ‘sexist and obscene tweets’ sent by Young – reporting the Prime Minister’s apparent ‘distaste’. Now it seems that some can’t even accept Young’s work in education which contributed to his appointment. Appearing on the Andrew Marr show this morning, the Guardian‘s Polly Toynbee came up with a new line of attack. Toynbee complained that Young had only founded the free school that led to his OfS appointment because ‘he wanted to create a school for his kids’. Happily, Mr S’s colleague Fraser Nelson

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: New Year’s resolutions in verse

The first challenge of 2018 was to provide a New Year’s resolution (or more than one) in verse. Woody Guthrie’s 1943 ‘new years rulin’s’ have considerable charm: ‘Dont get lonesome; stay glad; dream good; shine shoes; wash teeth if any…’ But perhaps it was Friedrich Nietzsche who inspired Basil Ransome-Davies’s entry. In 1882, he resolved to become a yes-man: ‘I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers… I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!’ David Silverman’s spin on Thomas Hood’s ‘No!’ was nice. Alanna Blake, George Simmers and Nicholas

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Beware the Bitcoin bluffers

During the long interval since our pre-Christmas issue, Bitcoin has continued to generate crazy headlines — and crazy profits for those smart enough to sell at the peaks. The price tumbled from above $19,000 to below $13,000 but it did not crash out of sight, as sceptics continue to predict. Meanwhile, from Japan we hear that the ‘wealth effect’ of a million Bitcoin holders who believe themselves richer could be the turbo-boost to consumer spending that Japan’s flaccid economy has been seeking for decades. US news sources express concern about the environmental impact of global computer operations related to Bitcoin, which now consume as much electricity as three million American

Sarah Vine

The irony of the Hampstead ladies’ pond transgender row

How ironic that it should take an invasion of the female-only pond in Hampstead by trans women to make luvvies realise the implications of allowing any old Tom, Dick or Harry who self-identifies as female into women’s spaces. Those virtue-signalling ideals are all very well around your fashionable dinner tables, but remember: it’s real women in the real world — prisons, refuges and anywhere vulnerable women exist — who have to live with the consequences. This is an extract from Sarah Vine’s Diary, which appears in this week’s Spectator

Saturday

Sarah Vine

Hamilton: America 1776? Or Britain 2016?

Hamilton is the most exciting American cultural export in decades. It’s now showing in London every to large, delighted audiences — and we Brits love it. As a musical, it takes a dusty, distant slice of history and infuses it with excitement, intellect, lightning wit and an intoxicating whiff of sexual tension. I know this because I saw it in New York two years ago, just before Britain’s EU referendum. And I was struck by the way it captured — not always intentionally, I suspect, given the impeccable liberal credentials of the cast and writers — the political mood in America and over here: revolution, uncertainty, unrest, the falling of old orders and rising of new.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

3 New Year’s resolutions for Theresa May

In The Sun today, I propose three New Year’s resolutions for Theresa May. She should be decisive on Brexit, bold on housing and try and fix social care. None of these will be easy; and all three of them will be made more difficult by her mistakes in 2017. But if the Tories don’t make progress on these fronts in the next 12 months, Jeremy Corbyn will be that much closer to Downing Street. May’s visibility this week—reiterating her desire to be the Prime Minister who fixes the housing crisis and apologising to NHS patients who have had their operations cancelled—shows she wants to hit the ground running. The reshuffle

Mark Piggott

London’s crime map tells a damning tale of two cities

It’s just a few metres from Bartholomew Court, EC1, where a young man was one of four stabbed to death over the New Year, to trendy Hoxton, famous for its cereal bars and hirsute hipsters. It would be easy to say these two worlds – those of the trendy media types lampooned by ‘Nathan Barley’ and ‘Its Grim up North London’ and the large nearby estates – are separated by an unbridgeable gulf, but it would also be inaccurate. Areas like Hoxton became popular in part because of this edginess, this picturesque urban decay, where drugs can be bought cheaply from local youths and consumed in the safety of the