Society

Thursday

Debbie Hayton

What has the SNP got against school blazers?

The much-maligned school blazer has come under attack once again, this time by Scottish government. In new guidance issued this morning, head teachers north of the border have been told to either ditch them, or make them optional within their uniform policies. Head teachers who know their pupils rather better than first minister John Swinney and his meddling SNP ministers have been entrusted to ‘be clear that these are not needed or expected’. School blazers are far more than a piece of clothing. For £14 the child is endowed with a mobile office The reasons are not only the perceived cost, but the way in which pupils ‘may feel that uniform restricts

Charlie Walsham

What the BBC gets wrong about the Gaza conflict

This week, the BBC was accused of breaching its own editorial guidelines on more than 1,500 occasions and displaying a ‘deeply worrying pattern of bias’ against Israel in a report that drew its findings from an analysis of four months of BBC output. Editorial bosses at Broadcasting House have questioned the methodology of the research, which was led by litigation lawyer and pro-Israel campaigner Trevor Asserson. But having worked inside the BBC newsroom throughout the conflict, I have drawn some unsettling conclusions of my own when it comes to the Gaza conflict. To find out how we ended up here, we must return to the beginning. Four days after the

Paul Stott

The decline and fall of Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and a well-known figure in the Islamic world, has been convicted of the rape and sexual coercion of a woman in a Geneva hotel, after a court overturned an earlier acquittal. Professor Ramadan has been jailed for three years, two suspended, over the 2008 incident. Ramadan was a poster boy for those in authority The verdict marks a remarkable fall from grace for Ramadan, who was raised in exile in Switzerland, and skilfully navigated the Francophone, English and Arabic speaking worlds as an academic, campaigner and theologian. His father, Said Ramadan, was central to the Muslim Brotherhood’s development in Europe.  While Ramadan

Eliot Wilson

We all know the NHS is broken – but can Labour fix it?

There are few surprises in Lord Darzi’s review of the National Health Service, not least because much of it has already leaked out. Health Secretary Wes Streeting declared immediately after Labour won the election that the NHS was ‘broken’. Darzi, a surgeon and former Labour health minister whom Streeting commissioned to undertake the probe, appears to have reached a similar conclusion in today’s report, though not in as few words. ‘We have crumbling buildings…and parts of the NHS operating in decrepit portacabins,’ Darzi says ‘We have crumbling buildings, mental health patients being accommodated in Victorian-era cells . . . and parts of the NHS operating in decrepit portacabins,’ Darzi says. His diagnosis is that Britain

Melissa Kite

How to find out what organisations are saying about you 

Every time I have a protracted ding-dong with a big organisation, I put in a request under data protection law to see what they’ve been saying about me behind my back. Anyone can do this. If you get into a row with a charity after complaining they’ve put your direct debit up without telling you, for example, you could then do a subject access request (SAR), asking them to send you a copy of anything mentioning you in their files, and they would send you back loads of emails in which various people in their offices discussed how to handle your complaint. The law requires them to do this, but

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 14 September 2024

When is the Premier League not the Premier League? Well, when you have played so badly that you get booted out of the first division into the second and have to come in the top two to qualify for promotion back. Fortunately the first weekend (of three) went well for us but it’s no walk in the park. I was very impressed with the way Sandra Penfold played this hand: West led his singleton Spade. How should South plan the play? If she has a trump loser, she may just have to play a Club to the King at some point. Yes, she can throw a Club from dummy on

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Don’t look back in anger… it’s just how ticket sales work

We expect Ryanair tickets to cost more on holiday Saturdays than term-time Tuesdays and Uber fares to surge in the rush hour. When bidders drive an Old Master painting into the millions, we praise the skill of the auctioneer. And of course dynamic prices can go down as well as up. These are market mechanisms to match supply and demand, recognising that some buyers will pay more than others for desirable scarce goods. So why the hoo-hah about ticket prices for Oasis’s reunion tour, which doubled as supply dwindled for those towards the end of the online queue? Labour ministers, Brussels bureaucrats and US justice officials have all declared that

Douglas Murray

The C of E’s raving madness

In February there was a commotion at Canterbury Cathedral. Or, to be more precise, there was a silent commotion. The cause was a ‘silent disco’ which took place in the nave over two nights. For anyone above the age of 12, a silent disco is where everybody has headphones on and is in their own world. Like the London Underground but with more legroom. There is a DJ as well and so I think (if I’ve got this right) everybody is listening to the same music. In any case, over two nights thousands of revellers came to the cathedral, put on headphones, bought drinks in the side aisles, brushed past

The Spectator

Letters: A cautionary lesson for England’s schools

Lessons to learn Sir: Your leading article ‘Requires improvement’ (7 September) rightly raised concerns that a curriculum review in England might reverse the excellent progress in schools following the Gove reforms. Fortunately, there are two very good examples of what happens when you replace rigour and the acquisition of knowledge with left-wing dogma and woolly thinking. The introduction of the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland has led to a dramatic fall in standards in Scottish education and a resultant collapse in its Pisa [Programme for International Student Assessment] ranking. Last year Wales recorded its lowest-ever Pisa ranking. Its new national curriculum is closely based on the Scottish model, so it

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Why people would hate a property tax

My friend Tim Leunig is a cerebral thinker of the best kind. Though not party-political, he has worked for Tory chancellors and would give the same advice to governments of any stripe. Wikipedia calls him a prize-winning economist and that’s right, but he has a gadfly instinct and a remorselessly rational intellect that takes him into the deeps: into first principles, logical consequences and the reductiones ad absurdum of some of our trains of argument. He writes a substack (timleunig.substack.com) and it was his recent summary there of proposals he wrote as chief economist for the Onward thinktank that caught my eye. ‘I bought this house from savings that were

Peter Hitchens

Why I believe Lucy Letby’s trial was unfair

Even Horace Rumpole could not have secured an acquittal for Lucy Letby. The more I look at this case, the more I suspect that there could never have been any other outcome than a conviction. I think a great cloud of emotion hung over that courtroom during the whole trial. I think that cloud spread outwards into the public mind before and during the long months of the trial. In my view, the actual prosecution of Ms Letby began on Thursday 5 July 2018, two days after she was arrested for the first time, and more than four years before she finally sat in the dock. The prosecution knew throughout that

The Spectator

Which media titles are worth the most?

Media interest This week The Spectator was acquired by Old Queen Street Media for £100 million, around five times its annual turnover. How does that compare with other media valuations (also as a multiple of revenue)? Date / Title / Valuation Aug 2010 / Newsweek / 0.000000006 Feb 2011 / Huffington Post / 10.0 Aug 2013 / Washington Post / 0.4 Jul 2015 / Financial Times / 2.5 Aug 2015 / The Economist / 2.8 Nov 2016 / Buzzfeed / 6.8 Jul 2017 / Vice / 8.1 Oct 2018 / Time / 1.1 Mar 2021 / New Scientist / 4.1 Aug 2021 / Politico / 5.0 Jan 2022 / The

Imogen Yates

The anxiety-inducing world of wellness tech

I first came across the Zoe programme when a bright yellow package arrived on my parents’ doorstep last year. My mother, like many, had been wooed by the TV personality Davina McCall into ‘living her best life’ by ordering a Zoe gut-health testing kit (at an upfront cost of £299, or £599 for the Plus plan).  Zoe is the invention of Tim Spector, the professor-turned-health guru who ran the Covid symptom-tracker app throughout the pandemic. It’s a personalised nutrition programme that promises to make you ‘feel’ healthier and improve your gut health, energy levels and even flatulence. With their branded glucose monitors, my mother and her friends have become walking

Peter Jones

The lessons of Grenfell

We have been told that committees will meet, urgent discussions will be held, the guilty will be punished, and steps taken to ensure that the Grenfell tower disaster will not happen again. Sophocles was not the only ancient to say that it was a foolish man that counted on the future. Fires were so common in densely packed Rome – perhaps a hundred a day? – that there was no point in talking about preventing them. For the architect Vitruvius (d. c. 20 bc), the collapse of wooden buildings was the main concern. He advised foundations should be as solid as possible, whether on rock, clay or loose ground, ‘of

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

My night with the paedo hunters

It’s a Wednesday evening, and I’m getting psyched up to go catch a paedophile with the boys. Playlist on, rocking down the A12 and chatting to my new mate, Nick, in his van. There’s a man not far from here who thinks he’s going to meet an underage girl tonight. He doesn’t know that we’ll be pulling up instead and that his sick fantasy – and his life as he knows it – will be over. Nick is a guy I met on Facebook who runs a team of paedophile hunters called London Overwatch. He says that he’s caught 300 paedophiles, and that tonight’s is one of the worst. This

Ruari Clark

How to roll the perfect cigarette

I recently estimated that, in my smoking life so far and at the age of 29, I have rolled 87,600 cigarettes. The calculation went as follows. Roughly 30 a day for the past six years, maybe 15 a day for four years before that. I attempted to make a reduction for eight months I spent in China, where the most beautiful straights could be bought for the equivalent of 40p per pack. But my mathematical faculties are almost as weak as my pulmonary ones, so I decided to balance those Chinese cigarettes with the thousands of rollies I’ve been asked to construct for friends, acquaintances and strangers. Apart from that

Toby Young Toby Young

Help! I’ve got class envy

The summer holidays were a washout as far as my children are concerned, because we had to cancel our trip to Norway when I discovered two of their passports had expired. But in an effort to make it up to them, I managed to squeeze in a trip to Salcombe last weekend. Unfortunately, I failed to factor in the eye-watering expense of spending two days in the south Devon coastal town. It cost me the best part of £2,000. I’ve had cheaper meals at a London restaurant with three Michelin stars – and this was a beach shack Salcombe must be the most expensive seaside resort in Britain. For instance,

Luke McShane

Speed bumps

‘I don’t think it will be decided on the chessboard… I broke him in the Sinquefield Cup… as long as I can look him in the eyes and understand that there is absolutely nothing he can do to even enter my mind space then I believe that victory will be mine.’ Thus spake Hans Niemann in a recent interview with the YouTuber Levy Rozman (aka GothamChess), referencing the notorious game in which he beat Magnus Carlsen in St Louis two years ago. He was anticipating his clash against Carlsen in the semi-final of the Chess.com Speed Chess Championship, which took place in Paris last week. Niemann’s bombast proved premature. Carlsen won

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Is protest counterproductive?

If I had my life again and was asked to choose a superpower, I’d like to come back as one of those people who can enjoy crowds. As superpowers go, I acknowledge this isn’t all that rare, given the bizarre popularity of events such as Glastonbury, or the widespread compulsion to buy Oasis tickets. But what qualifies it as a superpower for me is that I cannot imagine myself enjoying being in a crowd any more than I can envisage having the power of telekinesis or levitation. I don’t really understand why people pay huge amounts of money to watch live sporting events when you can watch them on television