Society

Thursday

Lucy Vickery

Watching the clock

In Competition No. 3015 you were invited to submit a poem about Big Ben’s bongs.   The decision to remove the 13-tonne bell during the four-year restoration works on Elizabeth Tower has caused a right old ding-dong, with senior ministers, including the PM, joining the fray.   There were lots of poems about health and safety gone mad, though given that being at close quarters to the Great Bell’s 120-decibel bong is the equivalent of putting your ear right next to a police siren, I am not so sure about that. Commendations go to Nathan Weston and Adam Rylander (aged 15). And with echoes of Wordsworth, Gray, Auden, Lear and

Wednesday

Cerys Howell

Pragmatic women have cross-dressed throughout history – but it doesn’t make them transgender

Women passing as men is a well-documented manoeuvre that goes back centuries. The history stretches from the legend of Hua Mulan, the fifth-century Chinese warrior who took her ageing father’s place in the army, to 18th-century pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Cross-dressing women defied all odds and deserve to be honoured and celebrated. But their heroism is at risk of being obliterated by the politically correct liberal establishment who want to recast the boldest women of our history as ‘transgender men’. In Shakespearean England, a cohort of women paraded around the streets of London in ‘broad-brimmed hats, pointed doublets, their hair cut short or shorn, and some of them stilettos or

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Britain has an anti-Semitism problem. Here are the numbers that prove it

A new report on anti-Semitism in Britain makes uncomfortable reading all round. The study, a joint enterprise by the Community Security Trust and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, is an in-depth exploration of anti-Jewish attitudes, the role of animus towards Israel, and the prevalence of prejudice in 2017. It is a sober analysis and the researchers tend towards restraint – sometimes a little too much restraint – in drawing conclusions from their data. It is this very interpretive modesty that makes the findings all the more concerning. While the report caps the ‘hardcore’ anti-Semite population at five percent, it detects a further 25 per cent who feel negatively about Jews and

Tuesday

Martin Lewis

Cutting the student loan interest rate will only help richer graduates

This weekend the papers mooted that Theresa May’s government is looking to cut the English and Welsh student loan interest rate – now at a 6.1% headline rate for those who began uni in or after 2012 – in order to appeal to the youth vote. I find this frustrating. Not because I object; I’ve always believed on principle student loan interest shouldn’t be higher than inflation – charging students for their education is one thing, charging them for the financing of their education is a step too far. Yet if the Exchequer has limited resources to finally shell out something to relieve student loan pressures, cutting the interest rate is

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why social care could be heading for the long grass once again

How are ministers going to deal with the social care crisis? This could be a weekly question on Coffee House for the next few years, along with what is Labour’s policy on Brexit and when will Theresa May decide to stand down. As I wrote last week, the different parties are all claiming they want cross-party talks but not really doing much talking to one another. Now, I understand that ministers are planning to do a lot more talking before they make any sort of decision on how to create a long-term financial settlement for the sector. As she started to unpick her disastrous manifesto proposal for a ‘dementia tax’,

William Dalrymple

Nancy Hatch Dupree, 1927-2017: the preserver of Afghan culture

Nancy Hatch Dupree died in Kabul on Sunday, 10 September.  Nancy Hatch Dupree is sitting in the Gandamak Lodge, the Foreign Correspondents hang-out in Kabul. Most of the other diners, and almost all those propping up the bar, are shaven-headed, gym-going young men in their twenties and thirties: a scrum of adrenalin-surfing hacks and cameramen who grew up watching movies like Salvador and The Year of Living Dangerously and who now fill the bar room with their tales of derring-do in Helmand and close-shaves in Lashkar Gah. None of them, however, have half as good a seem of stories as this tiny, bird-like 86 year old woman, picking at her

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Tories grow increasingly nervous about the Budget

So long, public sector pay cap. After months of speculation – and some public Cabinet feuding – over the seven-year pay freeze, No 10 today announced that the government would be adopting a more ‘flexible’ approach from now on. Police and prison officers will be the first to receive a pay rise with more sectors expected to get a pay increase as it’s rolled out across the board. This concession from the government just months after Philip Hammond argued on Marr that public sector workers get a 10pc ‘premium’ over their private sector counterparts shows that the shift in public mood proved more powerful than any argument for it. The difficult

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The most half-baked thing about the anti-transgender Christian couple isn’t their approach to gender

We live in a society with a tendency towards liberal intolerance, in which the fury of the mob turns on anyone who dares hold a different belief to the mainstream particularly if they are from an unpopular group such as conservative Christians. But we also live in a society where some people who hold non-mainstream beliefs don’t feel they really have to think them through. Last week, I wrote about the difference between directing scorn at Jacob Rees-Mogg for holding unpopular beliefs which he is happy to justify, and directing scorn at those who hold unpopular beliefs which they aren’t prepared to debate in public, possibly because those beliefs are

Monday

Ian Stewart

Let’s not overdo the productivity pessimism

Economists disagree on lots of things, but on one thing at least there is a consensus. Productivity, or the efficiency of production, is the main driver of human welfare. The data bear this out. Consider that growth in living standards in the UK since the late nineteenth century has been driven entirely by rising productivity. It is not surprising that improving productivity is the Holy Grail of economic policy. This is why the stagnation in productivity growth since the financial crisis represents such a challenge. Stagnating productivity means stagnating living standards and public services. To some such outcomes calls into question the legitimacy of the economic system. There are four broad

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen has no future so what next for the French right?

There have been few debates in recent political history as disastrous as the one that unfolded in May when Marine Le Pen faced Emmanuel Macron on live TV. This was the big chance for the leader of the National Front to demonstrate to her people she was presidential material four days before the second round of voting. Boy, did Le Pen blow it. Snarly and sarky, she was the spitting image of her odious father. All Macron had to do was sit tight, correcting her when she got her facts wrong, and voilà, he won the second round by a landslide. Since then Le Pen has rarely been seen and

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

David Tang’s tips for running a corporate empire

Sir David Tang, who died last week aged 63, was once The Spectator’s distributor in Hong Kong. His special achievement in his later entrepreneurial career was to turn his own stylish tastes in clothes, restaurants, clubs and cigars into a highly personal international brand, and to make it all look like great fun. In many ways he was comparable to Sir Richard Branson — except that Tang was a much more lovable personality, capable of filling a room with bonhomie without resorting to Bransonian stunts. But how good a businessman was he? The key to running a corporate empire, Tang told me — over coffee at his house in Eaton Terrace,

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Spectator’s 48-year-old intern shows why it’s time to dispense with CVs

We at The Spectator don’t ask for CVs when recruiting interns so we had no idea that our last one of the summer, Katherine Forster, would be a 48-year-old mum-of-three from Yorkshire. Our aptitude test is intended to draw the most promising talent from anywhere. But her writing up her story for the magazine has caused a minor sensation. She has been on the BBC three times and has been the subject of the lead Evening Standard diary story and is interviewed in p23 of today’s Sunday Times (who took the above photo). She’s an inspiring person with a simple question: why, aged 48, shouldn’t she roll the dice again?

The Spectator

Religion is on the decline – yet our society is underpinned by faith

For Church of England vicars who worry less about what they will preach on Sunday than whether there will be any parishioners to listen to them, the latest findings of the British Social Attitudes Survey will make grim reading. For years the number of people professing religious belief in Britain has hovered around the 50 per cent mark. Now it seems to have dived decisively, plunging from 52 per cent to 47 per cent in just a year. According to a survey we are no longer a Christian country, but then neither — for all the squeals over sharia law — are we becoming much of a Muslim country, or

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Migration is complicated. Don’t pretend it’s not | 10 September 2017

I expect you’ve already noticed it, but in case you’ve been living in a cave or an economics faculty for the past ten years, I’ll repeat it. Goods are not like people. Goods only move wherever they are needed. They don’t come laden with an attachment to a homeland or a social network. Your Bosch dishwasher doesn’t pine for its washing-machine mates back in Stuttgart. Your Ikea sofa doesn’t claim benefits. If you buy a Mercedes, you don’t suddenly find two Audis and a Volkswagen turning up on your drive claiming to be close relatives and demanding to live in your garage. So, looked at dispassionately, the principle that the

Christopher Snowdon

Trying to control our waistlines is beyond the government’s power

James Cracknell, the athlete turned anti-obesity campaigner, was the subject of sniggering and derision in April when he said that North Korea and Cuba had got a ‘handle on obesity’. With impressive understatement, he attributed this to both countries being ‘quite controlling on behavioural trends’. It was a bad point poorly made, but in a roundabout way he drew attention to the major obstacles faced by those who want to reduce obesity rates in the rest of the world: freedom and affluence. Only Venezuela was missing from his list. Its people lost an average of 19 pounds last year as its basket-case economy unravelled, but this only serves to underline

Saturday

Theo Demolder

How students damage the causes they champion

Stepford students have scarcely been out of the media since they earned their soubriquet in this magazine three years ago. If you are offended (and tick the right demographic boxes), university is the place for you. But the social justice warriors are the last people anyone should want fighting their corner. Their legacy – even more than their threat to free speech in itself – will be the spectacular hindrance they have been to the causes they have taken up. The majority of students now avoid controversies for fear of saying the wrong thing, or being ‘too privileged’ to weigh in. Dissent from the Stepfords can only really be gauged

Stephen Bullivant

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s views are more common than his critics might care to believe

To judge from the media’s collective horror, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s views on abortion (‘completely opposed… in all circumstances?’ ‘Yes’) and same-sex marriage (‘I support the teaching of the Catholic Church’ – i.e., against) are absolutely beyond the pale. Such ‘appalling bigotry’, as Suzanne Moore puts it in The Guardian, has ‘no place in public life’. Meanwhile, the Evening Standard’s curation of Twitter vox pops runs the full gamut from ‘extreme’ to ‘extremely out of touch’. Any hopes he may secretly have harboured of becoming PM must, hopes everyone from The Times cartoon to Gary Lineker, now be ‘aborted’. But just how extreme are the Hon. Member for North East Somerset’s views

Sarah Vine

Voted Leave? It’s one way to lose friends, says Sarah Vine

September is my time of year. Summer is all very well if you’re one of those golden-haired, long-limbed types who looks heavenly in a sarong and a waist chain. But for me it’s just an endless battle against heat, direct sunlight, corpulence (chiefly my own) and biting insects. Besides, there’s nothing quite like that back-to-school feeling, the promise of a new term — and a chance to catch up with friends who have been off gallivanting all summer. Hence one of my favourite dates in our social calendar, an annual ‘end of summer’ party in Henley. It’s a bit of a schlep on a Saturday night, but always worth it,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Theresa May’s exit strategy

Nearly all Tory MPs now agree Theresa May should stay on as Prime Minister. She must get the party through Brexit, they say. A leadership contest now would risk splitting the party over the European issue. One senior Tory who was agitating to depose May back in July has told me that he has now decided it would be best if she stays until 2019. But this desire to keep her in place for Brexit should not be confused (especially not by Mrs May) with a desire to see her fight the next election. The number of Tories prepared to even contemplate following her into another battle remains vanishingly small.