Society

Monday

Toby Young Toby Young

Can I be cancelled twice?

One of the biggest regrets of my life was saying yes when Jo Johnson asked if I wanted to be on the board of the Office for Students (OfS) in the autumn of 2017. It wasn’t a particularly prestigious position: the OfS was to be a new regulator of higher education in England and I would be one of 15 non-executive directors. But because it was a public appointment it would be made by the prime minister, which meant I was a political target. When it was announced on 1 January 2018, the offence archaeologists went to work, sifting through everything I’d said or written dating back 30 years in

Michael Gove

‘I’m a new kind of Christian’: Jordan Peterson on faith, family and the future of the right

Professor Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, author and commentator whose latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, is about the psychological significance of Bible stories. He speaks to The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove about supernatural relationships, the folly of net zero and what’s next for Europe. ‘A lot of the atheist argument misses the mark because the God that’s being disbelieved is never defined’ MICHAEL GOVE: In your book, you work intimately with Bible stories to bring out their meaning, their relevance and their importance. Why should anyone read the Bible? JORDAN PETERSON: The simple answer is because you have to have your story straight or you go off

The Spectator

Letters: Where to find the best negroni

Free thinking Sir: Your leading article (‘Article of faith’, 14 December) appears to have forgotten the connection between rationalism and natural rights. Liberals indeed think in utilitarian, Rousseauian and what they consider ‘rationalistic’ terms. But what about the logic of natural rights that come from John Rawls or Robert Nozick? The Declaration of Independence, the political culmination of Enlightenment-era thought on reason and rights, was in large part the product of irreligious minds. This document has been the model for a free society for centuries. And what about Milton Friedman’s argument for a free society? That nobody can know with certainty what sin is; therefore, no one can coerce anybody

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

My business predictions for 2025

Headed for ‘the worst of all worlds’ is not where any of us would wish to find ourselves at the start of the new year. But that was the phrase used by the CBI economist Alpesh Paleja to sum up the predictions of member businesses – of reduced hiring and output, rising prices and weak growth. Since that survey, a revision to zero of the official growth figure for the third quarter of 2024 and reports of depressed pre- and post-Christmas consumer spending have provoked even darker whispers of a return to recession. Whence cometh such pessimism? Has it bubbled out of the Tories’ black hole of fiscal shame? Can

Peter Jones

Lessons for Keir Starmer from Cicero

The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and his chosen Attorney-General, Baron Hermer, both professional lawyers, seem to take the view that lying is just an aspect of public relations and parliament an irrelevance. As the Roman republic collapsed under the assault led by Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony, Cicero reflected, in those perilous times, on the nature of the relationship between civil law (ius civile, the term given to the bulk of statute law in Rome) and government and how it might be enabled to control the situation. He turned, for example, to the jurists. These freelance experts in law, though they had no professional standing whatsoever, provided opinions on

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The downside of charity

I blame Charles Dickens, personally: he of David Copperfield, Little Nell, Oliver Twist and, of course, Tiny Tim. He’s the father of what you might call the orphan-industrial complex, which is to say, the discovery that there is a fantastic amount of money to be made out of the sentimental feelings aroused in the well-heeled and tender-hearted by waifs in general and orphans in particular. It has taken more than a century for the orphan-industrial complex to reach its final form, but I think we’re there.  A report in yesterday’s Sunday Times described the experiences of a young Nepali girl called Rijya, who grew up in a privately run orphanage

Edward Howell

The Jeju Air crash ends a terrible year for South Korea

This year will go down in history as an annus horribilis for South Korea. December alone has seen a series of crises. The month started with the then-President Yoon Suk Yeol’s invocation of martial law. Just over two weeks and two (acting) presidents later, the month has ended in tragedy. The fatal crash of a Jeju Air flight from Bangkok at Muan International Airport (in the south of the country), killing 179 out of 181 passengers, will go down as one of the deadliest aviation incidents in South Korean history.  The Jeju Air plane crash is a massive shock for a country with such a strong aviation safety record. Before this week,

Nick Boles

Keir Starmer, conservative prime minister?

According to Keir Starmer’s critics, the Prime Minister has spent his first six months in office re-enacting Henry VIII’s plunder of the monasteries, Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks and Herod’s slaughter of the firstborn. But while there may be good grounds to oppose the imposition of VAT on private school fees, the extension of inheritance tax to farmland and means testing of pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, revolutionary acts of Marxist Leninism they are not. The hyperbolic reporting of these modest adjustments to a few taxes and benefits affecting the better off has hidden a more surprising truth about the UK’s first Labour government for fourteen years: the soft left human rights lawyer from

Sunday

Patrick West

Chocolat doesn’t need a trigger warning

Trigger warnings have become a totemic feature of our times, symptomatic of an age that is both hopelessly fragile and insufferably judgemental. They have spread like a canker as publishers and authors have sought to parade their sensitivity and flaunt their moral superiority. And they are increasingly a means of a virtue signalling and projecting one’s ego. Evidence of this has been on show this week with the revelation that Joanne Harris has begun to add content warnings to her own books. Readers of her bestselling 1999 novel, Chocolat, will now be cautioned that the story contains ‘spousal abuse, mild violence, death of parent, cancer, hostility and outdated terms for travelling community

Chas Newkey-Burden

Who’d want to survive a nuclear war?

The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East keep raging, Vladimir Putin has lowered the threshold required for Moscow to nuke Europe and Donald Trump is shadowboxing ahead of his return to the ring. You’d need almost divine reserves of Zen to not worry about where all this is heading. Some people are really worried: they’re paying ‘eye-watering’ and ‘extortionate’ prices of up to £48,000 for nuclear bunkers in case the bomb drops, according to Metro. But surviving a nuclear war ‘doesn’t have to set you back thousands of pounds’, said the Daily Mail. You can build a shelter with ‘objects commonly found around the home’ like internal doors and shower curtains,

Saturday

Robin Ashenden

The triumph of When Harry Met Sally

Look at any list of the ‘greatest ever romcoms’ and you’ll find When Harry Met Sally near the top of the list, if not heading it. This 1989 movie, directed by Rob Reiner and written by the late Nora Ephron – with terrific performances from Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as the title characters – is about as good as the genre got, the high peak of romantic comedy before its slump to the present day. With its New Year’s Party ending and rendition of ‘Auld Lang’s Syne’, it’s also the perfect film to watch in the week after Christmas (hence, no doubt, the BBC’s decision to screen it this coming

Miriam Cates

Taboos around incest are there for a reason

Since Tory MP Richard Holden called for first-cousin marriage to be banned in the UK earlier this month, few people have been prepared to speak in favour of the practice. While not unheard of among white British families, cousin marriage is rare and viewed as rather odd. So, when writer Charles Amos agreed to speak to GB News in defence of such relationships, we welcomed the opportunity for debate. The interview with Andrew Pierce and myself took an unexpected turn when, having argued against a ban on cousin marriage on the grounds that the state should not interfere in such matters, I asked Amos if this view extended to sibling marriage.

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

2024: Cindy Yu, Michael Simmons, Angus Colwell, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Mary Wakefield, Fraser Nelson and Michael Gove

38 min listen

On this week’s 2024 Out Loud: Cindy Yu examined Chinese work ethic (1:13); Michael Simmons declared his love of the doner kebab (6:28); Angus Colwell reported from Israel in July (9:27); Igor Toronyi-Lalic explained the inspiration behind the cinema of Marguerite Duras (14:41); Mary Wakefield analysed the disturbing truth of the Pelicot case (20:38); Fraser Nelson signed off as editor of The Spectator (27:01); and Michael Gove revealed his thoughts as he sat down at the editor’s desk (33:15).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Francis Pike

How the Black Death helped bring prosperity to Europe

As the media alarms us about an approaching ‘quad-demic’ of diseases this winter (Covid-19, Flu, RSV, Norovirus) it is a timely moment to think about the travails of our mediaeval forebears. Their common scourges were typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis, anthrax, scabies and syphilis – all untreatable at the time. And then there was the plague. The plague tore up the foundations of society and paved the way for dramatic economic, political and social change Arriving at the ports of Venice, Pisa and Marseilles in 1347, shipboard rats carrying the Yersinia Pestis bacterium disbursed the bubonic plague in Europe. Originally it is thought that plague was brought by Genoese ships from their

Debbie Hayton

The gender war is slowly being won. But there’s no room for complacency

For ten years, gender identity ideology ploughed through western societies. It started quietly, a decade earlier, when a group of human rights experts gathered in Yogyakarta, in Indonesia, and established gender identity as an innate human quality. They demanded that it must be protected in law and policy. If Wes Streeting signs off a clinical trial, he will be held responsible for any and all adverse outcomes. Surely he knows it Their 2006 ‘Yogyakarta Principles’ probably passed most people by, but they prepared the ground for subsequent campaigns to enshrine gender identity in legislation. The outcome has been terrible. Women’s sex-based rights became unspeakable and second-rate males barged their way

Friday

David Shipley

Open prisons are the answer to our jail crisis

Britain should move thousands of inmates into low-security open prisons, according to David Gauke, the former Tory justice secretary, who is chairing the government’s Sentencing Review. Gauke’s comments have sparked a predictably furious backlash, but he’s absolutely correct – and I should know. Locking someone up costs the public about £52,000 per prison place each year “We don’t make as much use of open prisons as we might do,” says Gauke, who thinks open prisons might be the answer to addressing the prison overcrowding crisis and reducing reoffending. The reality is that open prisons are one of the few parts of the justice system that work well. It makes sense to

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Pulp have always been in the wrong place at the wrong time

Pulp, the legendary band fronted by Jarvis Cocker, have revealed that they’ve signed a new recording deal with equally legendary independent label Rough Trade. Although they formed in Sheffield in 1978, when Cocker was 15, Pulp’s biggest success – and it was very big – came in the second half of the 1990s, with smash hit singles such as ‘Common People’ and ‘Disco 2000’, and albums including ‘His ‘N’ Hers’ and ‘Different Class’. They broke up in 2002 but have reformed, on and off, for celebratory live appearances since 2011. But the Rough Trade deal is the first sign of new songs for 22 years. Pulp are back. This is

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What was Badenoch hoping to achieve with her attack on Farage?

Kemi Badenoch believes she has caught out Nigel Farage with a bit of digital sleuthing. No sooner had Farage announced that the official membership of Reform has surpassed the 132,000 declared membership of the Conservative Party than Badenoch declared it is all a con. All Badenoch has really achieved is to emphasise how shrunken the Conservative party has become “Manipulating your own followers at Xmas, eh Nigel?” she tweeted on Boxing Day. The counter that Reform has been showing us is a fake, she declared. “It is designed to tick up automatically. We’ve been watching the back end for days, and can also see that they have just changed the code

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The problem with rugby union

Rugby union has always attracted a certain type, the ‘play hard, party hard’ sort. I remember a former teammate – a prop, perhaps not surprisingly – who could drink a pint of his urine in under ten seconds. An England prop, Colin Smart, once downed a bottle of after shave after a Five Nations match and spent the evening having his stomach pumped in a Paris hospital. That was in the 1980s, the same decade when England’s Dean Richards and Scotland’s John Jeffrey took the Calcutta Cup for a tour of Edinburgh pubs after a match. As one of them later quipped – probably before he was presented with the

David Shipley

How can we stop football academy rejects ending up in prison?

‘The first team at Wormwood Scrubs is said to be better than QPR’s’. That line from Toby Young’s article from November has stuck with me. Could it be true? Are our jails full of talented footballers who didn’t quite make it? Are players regularly ‘spat out’ without any qualifications? Is there an academy-to-prison pipeline? One day, Brian was at a friend’s house when his dreams were shattered To find out, I spoke to some former academy players who had been to prison. ‘Brian’, who played for a London first division club’s academy in the mid-2000s, missed a lot of school to train. He’d leave classes at lunchtime on Wednesday for