Society

Saturday

Alex Klaushofer

Sainsbury’s self-checkout surveillance has gone too far

Sainsbury’s is stepping up surveillance on its self-checkout tills. It’s hard not to laugh out loud. Not only will shoppers in some stores be recorded close-up by a VAR-style camera as they pack their groceries, but should anything appear amiss they may be shown a replay bearing the message: ‘Looks like that last item didn’t scan. Please check you scanned it correctly before continuing’. It doesn’t get much more Big Brother than that. Britain is rapidly becoming a surveillance society. Banks of cameras are part of the furniture on our streets, and in our supermarkets and shops. Some stores even use facial recognition. As I wrote in The Spectator a year ago, this obsession with

Sean Thomas

David Lammy and the trouble with foreign taxis

After decades on the road, I’ve collected a few rules that have served me well. Rule one: always go inside a cathedral. However dull, tiny or ugly it may seem, it will always tell you something. Even if that something is ‘avoid this town.’ Rule two: pack condiments wherever you go. I recommend Tabasco, soy, sriracha, and salt and pepper grinders – they can save the blandest meal. Lord Byron did this, so you’re in good company. Rule three: expect to be ripped off by the first taxi in any new country, and when it happens, grin and bear it. Nothing quite beats the terror of climbing into a cab

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Gary Lineker is a joke

After a lifetime of being irritated by too many public figures to name, a few years back I discovered a way to bypass this minor but persistent feature of modern life. Whenever their asinine blatherings are splashed over the media, don’t read them as if they were the thoughts and utterances of reasonable – or even real people. Simply think of them as great comic creations of the type we see on screen in a ‘mockumentary’. Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap, David Brent from The Office or Alan Partridge. Instantly, your irritation will melt away and you can enjoy a good old snigger instead. The imbecility of the man is almost

Friday

Andrew Tettenborn

A 10mph speed limit is preposterous

The increase of 20mph speed limits in Britain has been sending drivers around the bend. But if an organisation called the Road Safety Foundation (RSF) has its way, things could be about to get even slower – and more frustrating – for motorists. The RSF says that road speeds in cities should be cut to 10mph to prevent deaths and reduce serious injuries. Talk of a 10mph speed limit is preposterous. Does the RSF want to take us back to 1903, when the Motor Car Act of that year first raised the speed limit to what was then a blistering 20mph? Nearly all of human progress involves trade-offs between advantages and risks

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The anti-Israel Eurovision mob are Hamas’s little helpers

Imagine booing a survivor of a fascist attack. People actually did that this week. Pro-Palestine activists heckled and insulted a young woman who survived Hamas’s anti-Semitic butchery of 7 October 2023 by playing dead under a pile of bodies. Take a minute to consider the depravity of this, the sheer inhumanity of tormenting a woman who experienced such terror. It was a spectacle of cruelty masquerading as protest The woman is Yuval Raphael. She’s the 24-year-old singer who’s representing Israel at Eurovision. The last big music event she attended was the Nova festival in the desert of southern Israel on 7 October 2023. What she witnessed there almost defies belief.

Robin Aitken

Why the BBC wants to go German

The BBC’s Director General Tim Davie made a speech this week which suggests he’s leaning toward a radical fix for the Corporation’s financial woes. The question is whether even this government will buy an idea that, to put it politely, seems unlikely to be popular. Davie’s problem is that the writing is on the wall for the licence fee. Last year the Corporation’s annual report noted that half a million households had stopped paying in the previous 12 months. All of which makes for grim reading for an organisation which has seen its real-term income fall by over 30 per cent in the last decade. Finding a replacement to the

Jonathan Sacerdoti

What does Gary Lineker know about Zionism?

When I was a schoolboy, on the rare occasions I was required to line up against the wall to be picked for a football team, I would be picked last. It was fair enough: my abilities matched my interest level – zero. Not much has changed in the intervening decades, and thanks to my lack of any real knowledge or ability in the game, I would be most unlikely to comment on the World Cup or the Euros. But when it comes to coverage of Israel and the Middle East, I’ve spent enough time on the ground amassing knowledge, sources, and experience that this publication entrusts me to explain it

Patrick West

The trouble with BBC Verify

Can the BBC ever be objective and unbiased? It’s a question many of us ask ourselves, sometimes in hope, often in exasperation. It’s also a question that the Corporation forever asks itself, but instead in the spirit of aspiration and ambition. So it’s ostensibly good news that it has announced plans to expand its Verify fact-checking unit. On the face of it, this initiative should result in more accountably and scrutiny in its news output. Verify was born out of insincerity and dishonesty BBC director-general Tim Davie has unveiled a scheme, on behalf of ‘the world’s most trusted news provider’, to ‘build Verify across more services globally’. Davie also wants

Julie Bindel

Why lesbians want out of the LGBT movement

LGBT+ is an ‘inclusive’ way to represent all the different identities in the longer acronym, says the BBC. What nonsense: the reality is that while lesbians and gay men often get lumped together we actually have little in common. It’s time for lesbians to break free of the LGBT+ label. As the LGBT+ acronym has expanded to become more ‘inclusive’, many lesbians like me have come to feel less included As the LGBT+ acronym has expanded in recent years to become more ‘inclusive’, many lesbians like me have come to feel less and less included. The umbrella term takes in all manner of sexual and gender identities, most of which

Thursday

Charlie Peters

Doubted then vindicated, Andrew Norfolk was peerless

Rotherham whistleblower Jayne Senior has endured countless painful conversations with me. Across many years, we have reflected on cases of brutal sexual exploitation and explored cover-ups, bullying and brutal political scheming at the expense of children battling abuse. But the first time I heard her cry was when she phoned to share the devastating news that Andrew Norfolk had died. At the height of the crisis, Jayne passed Norfolk boxes full of key documents exposing the scandal of mass exploitation in Rotherham. When police and the council leadership of the South Yorkshire town were seeking to punish anyone who spoke out, Andrew was the lone voice that heard her and

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Who judges the judges?

I started out as a reporter covering the criminal and civil courts in Ohio. I got to read every piece of paper filed with the clerk’s office, a bottomless source of stories. These were the days when people still trusted reporters and talked to us. I hung out with the prosecutors and cops, and wandered in and out of the judges’ chambers. It horrifies English lawyers when I suggest there is merit in electing judges rather than allowing them to be appointed by the diversity-obsessed Judicial Appointments Commission After the closing gavel, judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers and we reporters would assemble in chief judge Kessler’s chambers for a whiskey. He kept a

Douglas Murray

Should you be arrested for reading The Spectator?

Regular readers will know that I have an obsession with home burglaries. Specifically those occasions when a burglar goes into a British home, helps himself to the contents of the household and finds that the last people on his case are the British police. Scanning some recent burglary statistics, I was struck again by the almost miraculous failures of force after force. Take Kent Police. In a recent breakdown of crime statistics, the force managed a career high. In one of the areas where they are meant to have oversight, there were 123 home burglaries. Of those 123 burglaries, they managed a great, round zero in their detection rate of

The Spectator

Letters: how to clean up ‘Scuzz Nation’ Britain

Decline and brawl Sir: Gus Carter’s insightful portrayal of ‘Scuzz Nation’ (‘Streets of shame’, 10 May) is less of a howl of anguish about Starmer’s Britain than an indictment of previous governments of all stripes since the late 1970s. It is also, to me, a call for more sophisticated thinking about the nature of governance in the 21st century. Carter shows, using lots of telling examples that we all recognise, that neither the state in its current form nor the private sector can cope with the multiplicity of challenges posed by a modern society. Of the state’s impotence, the current government is not the principal offender. To illustrate my point,

Susannah Jowitt

Death comes to the Chelsea Flower Show

It’s a matter of life and death at the Chelsea Flower Show this year. No murders are planned as far as we know, but there will be gravestones and even a coffin. This is to be a celebration of death. The Royal Horticultural Society’s annual Flower Show will include funeral flowers in the Grand Pavilion for the first time since it moved to Chelsea in 1913. The display is being put together by the Farewell FlowersDirectory and, I’m told, there will be no tightly wired whorls of white carnations spelling out ‘LOVE YOU MUM’. Instead, passers-by will be left thinking of country churchyards, wild grasses and meadow flowers; species like

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Leo XIV’s papacy is off to a surprisingly promising start

Rome In the days before the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV, traditionalist Catholics were so worried about interference from evil spirits that, according to reliable sources, they arranged for a priest to conduct what’s known as a ‘minor exorcism’ outside the walls of the Vatican. Such ceremonies, which typically involve the sprinkling of holy water mixed with blessed salt, aren’t such a big deal as the major exorcisms of a demon from a person; they are blessings intended to remove Satan’s influence from places where it may occur. But the fact that some clergy in Rome thought the Sistine Chapel might be one of those places reveals the depth

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

The search for the mother of three abandoned babies

Elsa had been alive less than an hour and her umbilical cord was still attached when she was wrapped in a towel, put in a Boots shopping bag and left on the Greenway, a cycle path built on a Victorian sewage pipe that runs through east London. She was abandoned on 18 January 2024 by a rose shrub on the coldest night of the year. She was not the first baby to be abandoned in that area of the Greenway near Plaistow. On 17 September 2017, a baby boy was discovered wrapped in a towel under a bush about a mile and a half from where Elsa was later found.

John Power

Abolishing the care worker visa is a mistake

For years I worked as an NHS manager, seeing first-hand the consequences of Britain’s broken social care system spill over into hospitals. Elderly patients, who no longer required medical care, were frequently marooned on wards because there was no one to support them at home. Behind every delayed operation or jammed A&E corridor was the same bottleneck: a care sector too understaffed to function. The government’s decision this week to abolish the care worker visa may please Labour strategists wary of Reform, but it’s incomplete. Ministers are killing off a flawed solution without putting anything in its place. The plan, set out in a white paper, is to move the

Toby Young Toby Young

My son took drugs – and they were mine

The weekend before last, I came home from walking the dog at about noon to find Caroline asleep in bed. This was surprising for three reasons. She’d been up and about when I left the house. She’s not one for taking naps. And her mother was coming to lunch. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, prodding her awake. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I felt a headache coming on, took some Nurofen and suddenly started feeling incredibly dizzy. So I decided to lie down for a few minutes and then fell asleep.’ I wasn’t too worried because she does occasionally suffer from dizziness, usually accompanied by a migraine. So I made lunch

Zak Asgard

Should gentlemen wear pearls?

There are few phrases more terrifying than ‘men’s fashion’. It reminds me of yuppies in salmon-coloured jorts on their way to play padel; Hackney mullets; white polo shirts worn by blokes who bathe in Joop!; Olly Murs and the era of the trilby; the Peaky Blinders aesthetic. Men’s fashion has now brought us another monstrosity, the gentleman’s pearl necklace. And no, I’m not talking about the sexual act – get your mind out of the gutter. Timothée Chalamet recently became the first solo man to appear on the front cover of Vogue, where he wore a pearl choker. A pearled-up Harry Styles attended the 2019 Met Gala in what can