Society

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

When will David Lammy learn that Nazi smears don’t work?

Is the Third Reich living rent-free in David Lammy’s head? Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister has accused Donald Trump of being a ‘neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’, likened the Tory European Research Group to Hitler’s National Socialists – and now he has claimed that Reform leader Nigel Farage ‘flirted’ with the Hitler Youth as a youngster. ‘I will leave it for the public to come to their own judgements about someone who once flirted with Hitler Youth when he was younger,’ Lammy said of Farage. Who knew Reform’s leader – born in 1964 – had been around in 1930s Germany? In response to Lammy’s latest Nazi sighting, a Reform source told the BBC: ‘It’s disgusting

Chas Newkey-Burden

The thought of Lucy Letby’s innocence is too appalling to bear

Lucy Letby’s barrister says she has ‘new hope’, as he prepares to submit 1,000 pages of fresh evidence that he believes will ‘clear her name’. In an ideal justice system, evidence that proves an inmate’s innocence would of course lead to their release, but we don’t have an ideal justice system, as I learned as a student. During my late teens and early twenties, I spent a lot of time in maximum security prisons – thankfully, only as a visitor. My secondary school was run by a secretive cult which made me feel sad and trapped. Months before I left, I read Error of Judgement, Chris Mullin’s book about the case

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Labour conference is more deluded than a Doctor Who convention

The Labour conference, given the government’s current levels of popularity – somewhere about the same rung occupied by, say, galloping dysentery or Huw Edwards – was always going to be a macabre spectacle. But there’s an aspect to this Grand Guignol that I wasn’t expecting; the unpleasant sight of various members of the cabinet vying, in their addresses, to show who can wave the flag with the greatest gusto. We’ve had Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper railing against Reform, describing them as ‘plastic patriots’ We’ve had Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper railing against Reform, describing them as ‘plastic patriots’. Housing Secretary Steve Reed is trying to reinvent himself as a likely lad,

Christopher Snowdon

‘Inequality’ isn’t changing children’s brains

Last week, the Office for National Statistics published data showing that income inequality in the UK has fallen to its lowest level since 1996. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that – you’ll have doubtless noticed the improvements in social capital, trust and general wellbeing yourself. How, exactly, does income inequality cause anything? Because that is how things work according to The Spirit Level, the 2009 bestseller which claimed that almost everything is connected to inequality. Through a series of scatterplots, the social scientists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett sought to prove that ‘more equal’ countries do better on everything from life expectancy to recycling while the benighted

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What does Reeves want from businesses?

Is Labour serious about welfare reform? It hasn’t given that impression over the past year, given the flagship welfare reform bill ended up being gutted, largely because the Treasury had decided to use it as a vehicle for a load of blunt cuts, rather than the real – and very costly – business of wholesale benefits and back-to-work reforms. But the huge benefits bill and high levels of economic inactivity means the problem can’t be ignored, and so Rachel Reeves had another go at the back-to-work bit this week at Labour conference. The problem with the Chancellor’s plans, as we discussed at a Spectator/IPPR fringe meeting today, is that they

Joanna Williams

Who will take responsibility for closing schools during Covid?

‘I have never hated someone so much.’ ‘I hope you commit suicide.’ These are just two of the messages I received back in 2020, when I argued that schools should remain open despite the pandemic. Now that the interminable national Covid-19 inquiry is finally getting round to considering the experiences of children, school closures are in the spotlight. Education was massively disrupted as schools shut their doors to all but the children of key workers and those considered most vulnerable. Between January 2020 and July 2021, children were kept out of the classroom for extended periods, missing almost half of the time they should have been in school. Even when

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Emma Watson won’t recover from JK Rowling’s takedown

JK Rowling has broken her silence on Emma Watson. And if I were the Harry Potter actress, I would lie low for a few months. In fact, I would go full hibernation and spend the rest of winter in some far-flung cottage sans internet. For Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating. It is one of the truest and most cutting takedowns of the blissful ignorance of moneyed moral poseurs I have ever read. Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating Once upon a time, Watson was known merely for playing Hermione in the film adaptation of Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Of

Sam Leith Sam Leith

America, where did it go wrong?

Say what you like about Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, but his ‘flooding the zone’ thing really works, doesn’t it? Bannon’s thesis about political communication – which is, really, a thesis about political communication as political warfare – is that you need to pump out such a torrent of outrageous and chaotic actions and pronouncements that the press and your opponents are overloaded, flummoxed, thrown into confusion. Nobody can see the big picture. Nobody can focus on anything for any length of time because there’ll immediately be something else still more bizarre or disconcerting to digest. America isn’t just a place. It’s an idea. An idea to do with freedom I say this only because, a few days ago,

Daniel Masters

ID cards just aren’t British

A North Korean escapee recently told me about the ‘slavery cards’ he and his fellow countrymen were forced to carry. These cards allowed the state to know everything about you; they could stop you working or walking the streets without fear. They ultimately owned your existence. You can imagine his reaction to Keir Starmer’s new ID scheme. Wherever ID is introduced it is because the state does not trust its people Starmer’s digital ID plan is a façade to a deeper problem: unlike the North Korean escapee, many in Britain seem to have forgotten what made us so free. Once, ID cards were tantamount to the death of England –

Monday

Mike Pitts

Has the history of human evolution been rewritten?

A new report from the field of human origins had sub-editors reaching for their hyperboles. A million-year-old skull, we have learnt, has rewritten humanity’s story. The finality of this is misleading, but there is nonetheless something going on here. If Neanderthals, Denisovans and sapiens evolved away from each other a million years ago, there must have been earlier human forms not yet seen For decades, Chinese archaeologists have been investigating a site known as Yunxian, beside a tributary of the Yangtze river. The researchers have been rewarded with human fossils – to date, three skulls around a million years old. These bones have been preserved well but the skulls have been

Patrick West

No, Keir Starmer: Reform’s migrant plans aren’t racist

Keir Starmer’s behaviour, demeanour and language has taken a rapid and strange turn of recent. Unable to do anything meaningful about this country’s economic woes or the chronic immigration crisis, the Prime Minister now resorts to words in preference to actions. He relies increasingly on alarmist rhetoric and hollow gestures in order to make us believe that he is a competent and purposeful leader. It’s the customary response of low-intelligence fringe-leftists The decision to officially recognise Palestine, a country with no borders, no capital city and no meaningful government, was merely one indication of this lurch. His endless pronouncements on his determination to ‘smash the gangs’, rather than do anything

Druin Burch

Starmer’s ‘racist’ Reform remark is his ‘deplorables’ moment

Reform’s proposal to scrap indefinite leave to remain for foreigners is racist, according to Keir Starmer. ‘I do think it’s a racist policy,’ the Prime Minister told the BBC yesterday. ‘I do think it’s immoral – it needs to be called out for what it is.’ Removing people who were here legally, he said, was wrong. That’s a reasonable stance for a lawyer, but odd for a PM, whose role isn’t compliance with the law but deciding what new laws should say. Starmer is wrong about Britain. We live not only at the least racist point in history, but in one of the least racist countries in the world Supporters

Patrick West

How ID cards destroy freedom

Those who make the case in favour of national ID cards invariably do so on pragmatic grounds. As they have reminded us in recent days following Keir Starmer’s announcement of the rollout of digital ID, these would make life more simple, more convenient, secure easier access to public services, reduce fraud, criminal activity and even stem the tide of illegal immigration to this country. Those who repeat the canard of ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ should ask themselves the underlying belief they are really articulating Who could possibly object to such reasonable-sounding arguments? National ID cards would be ‘for own good’ they continue, or more ominously: ‘if you’ve nothing

Alex Klaushofer

Britain’s free speech crisis could get a whole lot worse

If you think Britain’s free speech crisis is bad now, if Ofcom gets its way it could get a whole lot worse. The broadcasting regulator-turned-internet-policeman is currently consulting on proposals to beef up the Online Safety Act. The proposals in its blandly-title ‘Additional Safety Measures‘ document could reduce the internet in Britain to a shadow of its varied, vibrant self. Ofcom’s proposals are alarming A big chunk of the 309-page consultation concerns livestreaming. In Ofcom’s world, livestreams are of particular concern because of the ‘risk’ posed by humans interacting with each other in real time. The proposed measures go way beyond protecting children from online predators, encompassing all livestreaming services

Sunday

Alexander Larman

Harry and Charles’s ‘reunion’ will never be free from sabotage

There has been a recurring theme when it comes to meetings between the Duke of Sussex and his now estranged family in recent years. If he has any such meeting, sympathetic media outlets (if such a thing exists) will somehow learn of the contents and a (typically pro-Harry) story will appear shortly afterwards. Unsurprisingly, the royals have long since become sick of this and so Prince Harry and, by extension, Meghan have been treated with the kind of caution that most people would reserve for alluring women approaching them in late-night bars.  It was therefore a strictly observed proviso of the King’s meeting with his prodigal son two weeks ago

Alexander Larman

The Hack is proof Jack Thorne needs a break

When ITV executives commissioned The Hack, the new drama series dealing with the News International phone hacking scandal, they surely hoped they were getting another Mr Bates vs. The Post Office. Not only did it star that show’s Toby Jones as – bizarrely – Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, complete with ludicrous wig, but it was another left-leaning account of how journalistic ethics, as personified by David Tennant’s Guardian investigative writer Nick Davies, could triumph over the forces of Machiavellian wickedness. If we didn’t get the message already that Rupert Murdoch was a villainous figure, he is played in the show by none other than a prosthetics-encased Steve Pemberton, in a

Saturday

Nicholas Farrell

The immortal beauty of Claudia Cardinale

Claudia Cardinale, who died this week aged 89, was one of few Italian actresses to achieve global stardom along with Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren.  Whereas Lollobrigida and Loren embodied the beauty of Italy, Cardinale – I always feel – embodied the beauty of the Mediterranean. Her face and physique were the irresistible but perilous fruit of its people and cultures. The Italians call it: ‘Me-di-terr-aneo.’ Many years ago, when I was involved with a woman from the Italian deep south, someone told me: ‘If you want to marry such a woman, you must not travel by plane to seek the consent of her father, nor by train or car,

Katherine Dee

We are all witches now

Two days before Charlie Kirk was murdered, Claire Guinan, a writer for the US women’s website Jezebel, paid witches online to hex him. When I first read Guinan’s article, my thought was that it was quintessential Jezebel: clickbait that might have interested 19-year-olds in 2011, back when witchcraft still had a frisson of feminist rebellion. She bought curses on the online marketplace Etsy from sellers like ‘Priestess Lilin’. She imagined Kirk’s socks sliding down, his blazers shrinking, his thumb growing too big to tweet. The piece was meant to be funny, a way to channel political rage into something absurd, petty and hopefully entertaining. Forty-eight hours later, Kirk was dead.

Alexander Larman

Time for the House of York to fall

It is tempting to imagine Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson enduring a mutually resentful existence in Royal Lodge. Like an aristocratic version of Roald Dahl’s The Twits, perhaps. Or, to be vulgar, one might call them The Twats instead. The less-than-grand old Duke of York has now spent several years beset by stories linking him to disgraced paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, and there seems to be no way back for him in any kind of public role. Yet, at the beginning of the week, he might have thought the tide had turned for a couple of days. For once, it was Fergie who was bearing the brunt of deeply unflattering headlines when it emerged that,

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

They don’t make MPs like Ming Campbell any more

Tributes are pouring in for Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, and generally considered a decent chap for a politician. He hailed from the Scottish Liberal tradition, one which dominated politics north of the border in the 19th century, and made a modest return in the second half of the 20th. His instincts were broadly centre-left but he was not a firebrand like Jo Grimond. He articulated his party’s internationalist conscience with the passion, if not the glitz, of an Archibald Sinclair. Truth be told, Menzies Campbell was not the sort of leader that could have rescued Britain Campbell will be remembered for his incisive foreign policy analysis,