Society

Day two of the Rotherham scandal—or rather the fallout from the latest report on it—and there’s a marked, obvious change in the coverage of it from the last time the subject surfaced. It may be the sheer scale of the thing —1,400 girls, and counting—and the horror of the cruelties perpetrated on the victims, but I don’t think that anyone is now trying to evade the reality of the thing: that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly men of Pakistani Muslim background and the victims white. But that, I think, is squarely down Alexis Jay’s report, which made the point not only that the rapists and abusers were from one ethnic and religious group and the

This is an extract from this week’s Spectator, available from Thursday. To subscribe, click here. I was waiting on an office forecourt recently puffing on an e-cigarette when a security guard came out. ‘You can’t smoke here,’ he shouted. ‘I’m not, actually,’ I replied. He went to consult his superior. A few minutes later he reappeared. ‘You can’t use e-cigarettes here either.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you are projecting the image of smoking.’ ‘What, insouciance?’ ‘Go away.’ I did. This phrase ‘projecting the image of smoking’ — along with ‘renormalisation’, ‘gateway effect’ and the usual ‘think of the children’ — appears frequently in arguments for restricting the use of e-cigs in

In this View from 22 podcast special, Alex Massie, Isabel Hardman and Fraser Nelson analyse this evening’s going on in Glasgow, as Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling took part in the second round of their independence debates. The polls released immediately after the debate from The Guardian/ICM has Salmond the clear winner on 79%, with Darling on just 21% of the vote. But are the Yes campaigners right to be ‘cock-a-hoop’ about tonight, or will things appear differently in a few days when the dust has settled?  listen to ‘Scottish Independence Debate special – with Isabel Hardman, Alex Massie and Fraser Nelson’ on Audioboo

The FTSE100 index stands precisely where it did in the first week of December 1999. Whichever way you look at it, shareholders — including pension funds — have had a rotten run on the economic rollercoaster of the past 15 years. So it’s reasonable to keep asking whether the rise in executive pay over that same period is justified: a report from the High Pay Centre says remuneration of the average FTSE100 chief executive is now at a multiple of 143 times that of the average worker in the same companies. In 1998 that multiple was 47, indicating a tripling of top pay relative to workforce earnings while shareholder returns

The recent challenge to come up with misleading advice for British tourists travelling abroad produced a postbag that was infused with a spirit of sadistic mischief. As usual with comps of this kind there was an element of repetition. A fair few of you echoed Basil Ransome-Davies’s wise counsel about that ‘quaint British custom’ queueing. ‘Let go of your inhibitions,’ he suggests, ‘and take part in the enjoyable free-for-all of a waiting line in, for example, a French post office.’ There were also several variations on Sean Haffey’s ‘The only state in the USA where marijuana is legal is Florida. However, it is mandatory to declare drugs at Miami customs

Philip Hammond this afternoon ruled out Britain working with President Assad in the fight against Isis, arguing that simply being aligned against a common enemy ‘doesn’t make us friends with someone’. It is nearly a year since the Commons rejected intervention in Syria against the Assad regime, and now figures such as Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Lord Dannatt are arguing that there may need to be some kind of alliance against the Syrian leader in order to defeat Isis. But the Foreign Secretary said: ‘We may very well find that we are aligned against a common enemy, but that doesn’t make us friends with someone It doesn’t make us able

China have won the Olympiad in Tromsø. I believe that we can now look forward to a sustained Chinese dominance in international team events, reminiscent of the Soviets. The Chinese take sporting success very seriously and in China international competitive chess is most definitely regarded as a sport, with all the benefits in state backing which that implies. China finished with 19 out of 22 possible, while Hungary, India, Russia and Azerbaijan followed at a respectable 2 points distance.   In the other bitter contest at Tromsø, the former world champion Garry Kasparov failed to unseat the incumbent, the eccentric billionaire and self-avowed alien abductee Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, in the battle for