Society

From ‘The “Via Sacra”’, The Spectator, 1 April 1916: When the war is over, France, Belgium, and Britain will be faced with the problem of finding some form of war memorial adequate to the greatest and longest battle of which the world has any record… We propose that a wide Memorial Road should be laid out in the no-man’s-land, the dead ground, between the two trench lines… from the sea to the Alps — a great road with monuments to the fallen, and to the deeds of heroism done by this or that individual company, regiment, brigade, division, and army, scattered along it.

A fortnight ago, the energy minister, Andrea Leadsom, declared grandly that Britain, alone in the world, would commit to a target of reducing net carbon emissions to zero. ‘The question is not whether but how we do it,’ she told Parliament. It is now becoming painfully clear how this target will be reached: not by eliminating our carbon emissions but by exporting them, along with thousands of jobs and much of our manufacturing industry. This week, Tata Steel announced that its entire UK business is to be put up for sale. That came after Stephen Kinnock, whose South Wales constituency includes Tata’s giant plant at Port Talbot, joined a union

On Maundy Thursday a Muslim shopkeeper in Glasgow was brutally murdered.  Forty-year-old Asad Shah was allegedly stabbed in the head with a kitchen knife and then stamped upon.  Most of the UK press began by going big on this story and referring to it as an act of ‘religious hatred’, comfortably leaving readers with the distinct feeling that – post-Brussels – the Muslim shopkeeper must have been killed by an ‘Islamophobe’.  Had that been the case, by now the press would be crawling over every view the killer had ever held and every Facebook connection he had ever made.  They would be asking why he had done it and investigating every one

Here in Dublin, Ireland is busy marking 100 years since the Easter Rising of 1916. It is being celebrated, but with far less chest-beating and bombast than met the 50th anniversary in 1966.  And this is a good thing entirely. The Rising lasted for six days.  Its leaders seized key buildings around Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic.  It started a series of events that led to an independent Irish state in the south, but also to the partition of Ireland and a bloody civil war which claimed between two and three thousand lives. Emblematic of this year’s commemoration was an event on Good Friday, at a Unitarian church on St

It will hit Consumers: The tax is designed to be levied on soft drinks companies, based on the volume of sugar-sweetened drinks they import of export. But the independent economic forecaster, the Office of Budgetary Responsibility, states the costs of the levy will be ‘passed entirely onto the price paid by consumers’. That means it will be the public, not soft drinks companies that end up paying the costs of the new tax. It will actually cost the Treasury money: The levy is expected to raise a maximum of £520 million per year. However, because the levy pushes up inflation, the British Government will be hit with a £1 billion

After terrorist outrages like the one in Brussels, our leaders always say the same thing: ‘We must defend European values against these evil killers.’ It seems the Metropolitan Police didn’t get the memo. For they have just arrested someone — actually arrested someone — for tweeting something unpleasant about the Brussels attack, in the process trampling their coppers’ boots all over what is surely, or at least ought to be, the most important European value of all: freedom of speech. The arrested man is one Matthew Doyle. He went viral after tweeting about a run-in he had on the day of the Brussels attacks: ‘I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday