Society

Wednesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How Breitbart hijacks right-wing populism

The news that Donald Trump’s new campaign manager is Steve Bannon, head of the right-wing media site Breitbart, has shocked a few commentators. It shouldn’t. For almost a year now, it’s been obvious to anybody who can be bothered to look that the Trump campaign and Breitbart fit together like hand in glove, though who is the hand and who is the glove is harder to fathom. Bitter ex-Breitbart employees now call the site ‘Trump’s Pravda’. The name seems to have been coined by Ben Shapiro, one of Breitbart’s more successful journalists, who finally had enough and resigned over what he saw as a lack of editorial integrity in the age of the Donald.

Helen Nugent

PANKs (Professional Aunt, No Kids) spend more than £350 a year on their nieces and nephews

As acronyms go, it’s a good one. PANK. It stands for ‘Professional Aunt, No Kids’. I’m a fully paid-up member of this group, a 40-something professional woman with little interest in kids of my own but an overwhelming love for my sister’s four-year-old daughter. Now I can’t pass a newsagent without buying the latest Peppa Pig magazine. Browsing the shelves in toy shops for Nemo and Dory has become a popular past-time. And I know all the words to the Sofia the First theme tune. New research, conducted by Opinium for Spectator Money, shows I’m not alone. PANKs lavish an average of £352 a year on their nieces and nephews, with

Helen Nugent

Tax avoidance, care home fees, consumer spending and energy

Banks and accountancy firms that help people to avoid tax face huge fines under proposals set out by the Treasury. A fine of up to 100 per cent of the tax that was avoided – including via off-shore havens – has been suggested in the new rules, published for consultation. Currently those who advise on tax face little risk, while their clients face penalties only if they lose in court. The rules would ‘root out’ tax avoidance at source, the Treasury said. The rules in the consultation document also make it simpler to enforce penalties when avoidance schemes are defeated. ‘These tough new sanctions will make would-be enablers think twice and in turn

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

It’s a bad day for Anjem Choudary – and a good day for secular law

So farewell then Anjem Choudary.  At least for a few years.  Britain’s biggest loudmouth Islamist has finally been convicted in the UK for encouraging support for Isis.  He now faces up to ten years in prison. There have been reporting restrictions on his conviction for several weeks now, as we waited for the conclusion of the trial of his associate Mohammed Mizanur Rahman.  But now it’s over.  At least for a while.  There is much to say, but allow me one particular reflection for now. Like his mentor and predecessor Omar Bakri Mohammed, Anjem Choudary was always a subject of enormous interest in Britain and abroad.  Indeed you could argue

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Equestrianism brings gender equality to the Olympics

Team GB are currently resting in second position in the Olympic medals tables, with a total of 41 medals and 16 golds. This year, our team is made up of more women than ever before; the 164 women make up almost 45 per cent of the whole team. It’s strange but true, however, that apart from the mixed tennis doubles, the equestrian events are the only time you will see men and women on the same winners’ podium at the Olympics. Last Wednesday the medal ceremony for the team eventing competition took place. On that podium were the French team, made up of four men, the German team, made up of three

Emma Lunn

Is the sharing economy over already? Yes, if letting companies get their way

Sitting on the lanai (balcony) sipping a beer, the wind gently rustling through the palm trees and my Hawaiian hosts’ adorable puppy licking my toes: life was sweet. I’d struck gold. I was living the Airbnb dream. David and Doug treated me like one of the family, complete with days out and home-cooked meals. Nothing was too much trouble. When they dropped me off at the airport (no extra charge), we vowed to be friends forever and I cried the whole flight home. I experienced Airbnb exactly the way it was meant to be – living like a local with the locals. But back in the UK it’s a different

Helen Nugent

Rail fares, inflation, pension deficits and savings cuts

Rail fares have increased at double the speed of wages since 2010, research by trade unions suggests. Fares have risen by 25 per cent in the past six years, while average weekly earnings have grown by 12 per cent, analysis by the TUC and the Action for Rail campaign shows. Meanwhile, official figures released this morning show that the UK’s inflation rate, as measured by Consumer Prices Index, rose to 0.6 per cent in July. That compares with a rate of 0.5 per cent in June. Inflation as measured by the Retail Prices Index picked up to 1.9 per cent in July, from the previous month’s rate of 1.6 per cent.

Monday

Charlotte Gill

Wedding rings should be kept away from the Olympics

I felt rather sorry for Chinese Olympian He Zi yesterday. Having picked up the silver gong in a women’s diving competition, her boyfriend decided then was the perfect time to propose. Without a thought for Ms Gold and Bronze, he jumped onto the podium and professed his love to his tearful girlfriend. The media claimed Zi was crying out of happiness, but part of me wondered if she was thinking: ‘Darling, couldn’t this have waited for an Italian restaurant?’ The diver is not the first woman to be proposed to at the Olympics – and she won’t be the last. On Tuesday it was the turn of Brazilian rugby player Isadora Cerullo, whose girlfriend

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Double rhyme time

The latest competition called for poems on the theme of summer in which the last two words of each line rhyme. It was only after the entries started coming in that I realised that my sloppy wording meant that the brief was open to interpretation. In most submissions, the last two words in a line rhymed with one another, which is what I had intended, but a few supplied poems in which the last two words in a line rhymed with the last two in the line below. Either approach was admissible, and variety made the comp all the more pleasurable to judge. This nice four-liner from Robert Schechter turned

Helen Nugent

Are pensioners squandering their retirement cash? New data suggests not

Statistics. Like so many things in life, it’s easy to bend facts and figures to support an argument or make a point. Brexit exemplified that and then some. And so it is with pensions data. Following this morning’s publication of the first full year of pension freedom information, the headlines varied from paper to paper and website to website. ‘Some taking too much from pension pots’ said the BBC. ‘Retirees prove more prudent than expected after pension freedoms’ reported The Guardian. ‘Insurers warn that some people may be plundering pension pots too soon, raising concern money will run out’. That last one was from Thisismoney, part of the Daily Mail

Saturday

Steerpike Steerpike

Clean-eating emergency: the Guardian turns on avocados

Oh dear. First the Guardian declared tea drinkers to possess ‘the worst possible English trait, up there with colonialism‘ and HP sauce to be the condiment of the establishment. Then the paper’s food section took things up a gear by describing barbecues as simply borderline-racist and street parties to be ‘a front for a middle-class nationalism that celebrates austerity’. Now they have turned on their own. Yes, just as French scribe Jacques Mallet du Pan said, the revolution has devoured its children. In the latest bit of food advice from the Grauniad, the paper calls out hipsters for eating avocado toast, the trendy brunch staple. In a piece — titled ‘Can hipsters stomach the

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The return of football marks the return of normality

With parliament in recess, silly season is in full swing. In fact, silly season would be an apt name for the transitional period between the dying days of the previous Premier League season, and the Bacchanalia that greets the opening weekend of the next one. Football’s silly season is a time when Slovenian journalists can sentence Jose Mourinho to three years in jail, when Wales can become (arguably) the third best team in Europe, and when Manchester United can decide that a player – any player – is worth €100 million. That last, silliest of silly season traditions, is the essential contradiction that greets the start of a new season.

Friday

Douglas Murray

Why the Prevent strategy isn’t the problem

Earlier this week the Times had a leader column entitled ‘Protect Prevent’.  As a defence of the government’s counter-extremism strategy it was all well and good, but it missed a very crucial point.  It said: ‘The success of Prevent has been undermined, however, by a failure of public relations. The government failed to cast it as an essential part of child protection, allowing the charge of “spying” to gain credence.  Similar policies designed to prevent sexual abuse or physical violence against children would never be open to that charge.’ But this charge of ‘spying’ did not simply ‘gain credence’.  Nor were other charges against the Prevent strategy mere ‘public relations’ failures. 

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

How more data can make you more wrong

In a one-day international against Australia last year, Ben Stokes was dismissed for ‘obstructing the field’, a rule rarely invoked in-cricket. The bowler had thrown the ball towards the wicket (and hence near Stokes’s head) in an attempt to run him out. Stokes raised his hand and deflected the ball. After some discussion between the two on-field umpires, and a referral to the third umpire, Stokes was given out. What was most interesting was the difference in the conclusions people reached depending on whether they watched the replay in real time or in slow motion (you can find both on YouTube). Seen at speed, his raising of his hand looked

Jeff Prestridge

Bank branch closures are destroying our communities

We are fast approaching a time when massive tracts of this fine country of ours (greenfield, brownfield, urban, rural) will be bank-free zones. Villages and towns stripped of their last bank. Goodbye pub, goodbye convenience store and now goodbye bank. Yes, ultimately goodbye community. Last week’s disappointing report from the Competition and Markets Authority on how to breathe fire into the static current account market will do little to arrest this decline in the bank branch. Its authors seem besotted with the digital age, prattling on about a future dominated by digital banking and open competition. It’s as if the bank branch was already a thing of the past. Over

Helen Nugent

Holiday price hikes, car insurance and inheritance tax

The pound has been in the doldrums this week, and is trading near a one-month low today. Traders are betting on further monetary easing from the Bank of England. According to The Guardian, sterling has fallen nearly 3 per cent since the Bank unveiled a bigger-than-expected stimulus package last week and dropped to $1.2952 this morning, after hitting a one-month low of $1.2936 yesterday. Holiday costs Holidaymakers have been warned that the cost of their summer breaks will rise next year because of the recent fall in the pound, the Daily Mail reports. Travel giant Tui, which owns Thomson and First Choice, warned British holidaymakers that because a number of its

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 11 August 2016

The hate is real Sir: It is clearly an exaggeration to call Britain a bigoted country (‘We are not a hateful nation’, 6 August), but downplaying the recent wave of xenophobic and racist incidents across the UK as ‘somebody shouting something nasty on a bus’ is equally wrong. Verbal abuse in itself is worthy of condemnation, yet the character of recorded harassment is actually much more serious. In the past few weeks, Poles in this country were shocked by vulgar graffiti (West London; Hertfordshire; Portsmouth) and hurtful leaflets (Cambridgeshire) urging them to ‘go home’ in most offensive ways possible, while a family in Plymouth fell victim to an arson attack.

Taki

High life | 11 August 2016

Gstaad   ‘He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, that daring young man on the flying trapeze.’ As everyone knows, life’s unfair, but this is ridiculous. An American daredevil falls out of an aeroplane at 25,000 feet without a parachute and manages to land on a postage-stamp-size net without a scratch. The poor little Greek boy falls off a balcony ten to 15 feet high, lands on gravel and breaks many bones in his body. Being encased in plaster is similar to living under a strict dictatorship, North Korea, for example. There’s no crime, no muggings, but as far as doing what comes naturally, fuggetaboutit. Self-doubt and

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 11 August 2016

At 11 p.m. I sneaked away from my boy’s wedding party to my ground-floor accommodation in the hotel to write for an hour. For two days I had been in sole charge of my boy’s two young sons and sneaking away when possible to snatch half an hour here and there to write last week’s column. But with little or no success. The pair were fanatical for my uninterrupted attention and neither would countenance such a ridiculous waste of our precious playing time. ‘Now look here, chaps,’ I’d said to them on day one. ‘Grandad has had enough of playing games and he is going into his office to do

Melissa Kite

Real life | 11 August 2016

The builder boyfriend colicked for a week after eating a falafel kebab as he and I sat up all night with the colicking pony. And unlike the colicking pony, who was attended to by the vet and given intravenous Buscopan, the colicking builder boyfriend moaned and groaned in agony, untreated. If he had a GP he couldn’t remember who or where it was. He has not sought any kind of healthcare, nor seen the inside of a hospital, since a gang of thugs broke both his arms when he was a ten-year-old boy growing up on the mean streets of Balham. (That was the real Balham, before the independent hipster