Society

Friday

Mary Dejevsky

Labour should be very wary of backing more 20mph zones

Urban speed limits of 20mph and the traps for unwary drivers known as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) really shouldn’t be elevated to the level of national politics. It may be an exaggeration to describe all politics as local, but such small-scale traffic edicts certainly are, and not just because central government has a myriad of other things to do.  This is not good news for those who had hoped that the proliferation of no-go zones for drivers had reached its limits So when the new Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh, said in a recent podcast, ‘There’s no way me sitting in my office can say “this road in Chester should be

Debbie Hayton

J.K. Rowling deserves a break from social media

Let’s give Rowling a break. For four years, she has spoken up consistently and courageously in defence of women’s rights – in sport and elsewhere – when politicians and officials were unable to even to define the word ‘woman’. Now her recent lack of tweeting has led some to suggest that she’s gone quiet because of the lawsuit launched by the boxer, Imane Khelif. This week, the New York Post suggested that ‘J.K. Rowling has gone silent on X since being named in a legal complaint by Algerian boxer Imane Khelif over online harassment she faced during the 2024 Olympics.’ Khelif’s lawsuit named both Rowling as well as Elon Musk – and could lead

Thursday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

All hail Harris! Can Kamala bluff her way to the top?

36 min listen

This week: All hail Harris! As the Democratic National Convention approaches its climax, The Spectator’s deputy editor Freddy Gray explores vice president Kamala Harris’s remarkable rise to the top of the democratic ticket in his cover article this week. Freddy joins the podcast from Chicago (1:30). Next: live from the DNC. Freddy and Natasha Feroze, The Spectator’s deputy broadcast editor, have been out and about at the convention talking to delegates – and detractors – of the Democratic Party. What do these Americans think? And does Kamala Harris have ‘good vibes’? (7:56). Then: should misogyny really be classified under anti-terrorism laws? In the magazine this week The Spectator’s economics editor Kate Andrews argues that the

Ross Clark Ross Clark

GCSE grade inflation is finally over

Today’s GSCE results show essentially unchanged performance compared with last year, with 21.7 per cent of pupils achieving grade 7 or above (compared with 21.6 per cent in 2023) and 67.4 per cent achieving grade 4 or above (compared with 67.8 per cent last year). This is still slightly up on 2019, but the Covid bounce in grades which occurred in 2020 and 2021, when exams were not actually sat and pupils were awarded grades based on teachers’ predictions instead, seems to be over. In 2020, 75.9 per cent of candidates achieved grade 4 and above, rising even further to 76.9 per cent in 2021. The pandemic effect lasted into

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Moscow is blaming Britain for the Kursk attack

Is the sinking of the super-yacht Bayesian and likely death of Mike Lynch a bigger story than Ukraine’s Kursk incursion? The Russian mid-market tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets certainly thinks so, reflecting a clear unwillingness on the part of the Kremlin and the state-controlled or state-dominated media to get to grips with the current crisis in Kursk. Likewise, the stodgy government newspaper of record, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, recently stuck with a piece about plucky locals ready for whatever happens, under the headline, ‘A city with a special history and a spirit that cannot be broken. How Kursk lives today.’ Meanwhile, the stridently pro-Kremlin Komsomolskaya Pravda ran the latest outburst from former president turned maximalist troll Dmitry Medvedev warning that ‘there

Mitchell Reiss

An American’s love letter to Britain

My wife and I relocated to the UK a few months ago after spending the past 37 years in the United States, and I cannot stop comparing the two countries. I oscillate wildly between my irrational exuberance at America’s superior market efficiencies and my sheer amazement at how orderly and polite you all are. These reactions surprise me, as I am hardly new to these shores. I attended graduate school at Oxford, worked for a while in London, married a beautiful and talented Essex girl (TOWIE indeed), and have consulted for the UK government in Northern Ireland for the past eight years. But now I actually live here, there are

The Spectator

Letters: we have let down white, working-class boys

The lost boys Sir: The only statement in your powerful leading article (‘Boy trouble’, 17 August) which can be challenged is that ‘the plight of poor white boys is a new burning injustice’. It is certainly not ‘new’. Even 40 years ago when the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) produced policies designed to counter inequality affecting girls, it was obvious that the problem was no less serious for white working-class boys. But the subject was highjacked by those obsessing about girls, with the results described in your article 40 years later. During the hijacking (for which he was not responsible), ILEA’s former leader Sir Ashley Bramall said to me: ‘Perhaps

Douglas Murray

Shattering the myth of the ‘glass ceiling’

What a thrilling number of glass ceilings have been broken this century – with more still to come, apparently. In 2008 America elected its first black president. In 2012 Barack Obama was re-elected and so became the first black president to win re-election. In 2016 America had a chance to elect its first female president but the public blew it and failed to elect Hillary Clinton. Fortunately they somewhat made up for this in 2020 by voting in the first female vice president. A vote that was made sweeter by the fact that, on that occasion, the public had a two-for-one offer and were also able to vote in the

Michael Naughton

Is the CCRC fit to decide on Lucy Letby’s appeal?

Whatever happened to the likes of the BBC’s Rough Justice and Channel 4’s Trial and Error? Why did human rights organisations such as Liberty and Justice stop campaigning on behalf of UK prisoners wrongfully jailed? Why are there fewer MPs plugging away on behalf of constituents they believe to have been victims of miscarriages of justice? All this activity seemed to be wound down after the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) began its work in 1997. Outsiders were no longer needed to look into the criminal justice system, many believed, now that we had a one-stop shop for prisoners protesting against their convictions for crimes they insist they did not

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The myth of Britain’s fleeing non-doms

According to popular imagination, the skies over Britain have been full these past few months of fleets of private jets carrying their non-dom owners to fiscally safer climes. According to your point of view, this has either rid the country of parasites or denied us investment and trickle-down wealth. Two glossy reports pumped out by financial companies in the past month seemed to promote the idea and were immediately leapt upon by those who oppose the abolition of non-dom status. First, there was the UBS Global Wealth Report 2024, which predicted that the number of dollar millionaires living in Britain will plunge by 17 per cent between 2023 and 2028.

Peter Jones

Should Labour be messing with the school curriculum?

Labour’s new education secretary wishes, as usual, to change everything. She might consider the advice of the Roman educationist Quintilian (d. c. ad 100). In the ancient world education was for the elites, and its purpose was to prepare them to be statesmen and power-brokers. That required mastery of both history, since that was the only way to understand the future, and verbal persuasion, because power depended upon winning legal and political arguments. The building blocks of education were acquiring a firm grasp of grammar and right usage, and reading widely across history and the best literature, poetry and philosophy. But above all else, that education must produce good men

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Can you spot an ‘extreme misogynist’?

Can you tell the difference between an extreme misogynist and a moderate misogynist? Hating women has always seemed, to me anyway, a rather extreme position on its own. The label ‘extreme misogynist’ is surely repetitive. A moderate misogynist is an oxymoron. But then the Home Office announced this week that ‘extreme misogyny’ could be added to the list of ideologies the government monitors to tackle terrorism. I’ve been racking my brain, trying to figure out how the police would tell the extremists from the moderates. Does the extreme misogynist hold women in contempt all week long, while the moderate reserves his disdain for weekends? Does a mild misogynist simply begrudge

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Keep fun out of funerals

There are two untraditional ways to take your leave of this world in Britain. The bleaker is the ‘direct cremation’ method whereby, with no prayers and no mourners, a funeral director will take your remains from mortuary to crematorium to be burnt without troubling your friends and relations. The other is the ‘celebration’. According to Co-op Funeralcare in its new report, called ‘Go Your Own Way’, no fewer than 68 per cent of people it polled regard funerals as a celebration of life, up from 58 per cent five years ago. Out go prayers, black funeral dress and solemnity; in come Doctor Who themes, glittery coffins and guests dressed in

The Spectator

Which European countries are most affected by forest fires?

Grand tours When was there last a genuine British royal tour of Colombia? While the late Queen never visited the country, the then Prince Charles and Duchess of Cornwall spent several days there in October and November 2014. They visited the Peace and Reconciliation Centre in Bogota, and Charles attended a conference on the ‘Health of the Oceans’. The last working royal to visit was Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, last November, when she attended United Nations events tackling violence against women and girls. Burning question Which European countries are most affected by forest fires? Average percentage of land area burned each year: Portugal 1.02 Greece 0.38 Cyprus 0.3 Croatia 0.24

Christopher Howse

A connoisseur’s guide to collecting matchboxes

We’d been told it would be a ‘brat’ summer, characterised by its inventor, the singer Charli XCX, as ‘a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra’. It hasn’t worked out like that for me, so I was glad to discover a counter-culture valuing matches over throwaway lighters. Young people, so the Wall Street Journal tells us, are collecting matchbooks and matchboxes and sharing their collecting habit on TikTok. I suppose it’s better than swapping pictures of their burgers. Once things are collected (as anything can be), exclusive rules put half the world in the wrong. To the ‘phillumenists’ of the British Matchbox Label

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

American salads are weird – but an egg salad is perfect

The Americans are weird about salad. I’m sorry, but somebody had to say it. Really, their use of the word ‘salad’ needs scare quotes around it. Where we generally mean ‘green leaves, and possibly a tomato if we’re feeling adventurous’, an American ‘salad’ can mean anything from pistachio cream with glacé cherries to tuna in sweet jelly. It is a hangover from the middle of the last century, when – in a perfect confluence – canned goods, especially otherwise unavailable fruit, and mass-produced gelatine simultaneously became easily available. The American housewife ran with it, and inexplicably called it a salad. Salad can be maximalist, with everything thrown at it. Bacon!

Toby Young Toby Young

I was wrong about staycations

I hadn’t intended to go on a ‘staycation’ this summer. Quite the contrary, I’d booked a family holiday to Norway. Last August, I made the mistake of renting a villa in Majorca and it was so hot it was impossible to do anything, including sleep. So this year I insisted on going north and arranged to borrow a log cabin near Trondheim. The two oldest children were so unimpressed – they loved the nightlife in Majorca – that they refused to come, which was fine by me. The flights were £200 each way and it meant we only had to rent a Fiat Uno instead of a six-seater. One of

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The simple beauty of the Hundred

Time to come clean: I really like the Hundred. This is the sort of view that normally makes people look at you as if you had just professed an admiration for Gary Glitter. But come on, this is a crisp little short-form cricket tournament, played out at the height of summer to largely packed houses. What really is not to like? Cricket is one of the few sports that works in different formats, so it beats me why the Hundred arouses such venom. It has done wonders for the women’s game, it doesn’t take long and it is all televised – much of it on terrestrial TV. Crucially, it has

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I hide my pregnancy from my boozy friends?

Q. We love having friends to stay at our house in Cornwall. One particular guest has the habit of arriving with the contents of her fridge, which she crams into mine. This can range from a two litre bottle of milk with enough left in it for a cup of tea, to a pot of half-eaten hummus which has had its lid replaced by a piece of crumpled foil, to a half-eaten pack of blueberries which are going mouldy. My fridge is already full with the meals I have planned and I simply don’t want her unhygienic produce. How can I stop her doing this? – Name and address withheld A.