Society

Monday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The plight of Hatun Tash shames Britain

There is a Christian preacher, a woman, who has suffered the most heinous persecutions. She has been chased by mobs, arrested, unlawfully jailed and even stabbed. Where did this hellish hounding of a follower of Christ occur? Afghanistan, perhaps? Somalia maybe? Actually it was right here, in Britain. An angry mob formed around her Her name is Hatun Tash. She is an ex-Muslim originally from Turkey. She’s now a Christian convert and colourful street preacher. She regularly gave impromptu sermons at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, where she’s been known to hold up a desecrated copy of the Koran while spreading the word of Christ. Her style is not to

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is there really a ‘butterfly emergency’?

Anyone else getting fed up with ‘emergencies’? There was a time when that word meant something, but not any longer now that every other quango or town council has declared a ‘climate emergency’, ‘housing emergency’ or ‘nature emergency’ (not that the existence of multiple emergencies seems to stop their staff cutting their hours to four days a week or expecting to work from a beach on the Med).     But the latest declaration really will have the blue lights flashing. Apparently we now have a ‘butterfly emergency’. This one has been declared by a charity called Butterfly Conservation, on the back of its annual Big Butterfly Count which it claims observed

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why are you proud to be British?

Introducing a tub-thumping op-ed in the Mail yesterday, Robert Jenrick quoted Orwell: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’ Mr Jenrick’s thesis is a familiar one. It is that ‘England’s political and media elite’ (he didn’t get ‘metropolitan establishment’ in the text but it was supplied in the headline) ‘seem to actively disapprove’ of their nationality, and that this will not do. ‘I can’t stomach such lofty arrogance,’ he declared, calling instead for a willingness to ‘confront complex issues of identity’ while at the same time being unreservedly ‘proud to be British.’ In support of his call for complexity he reeled off

Sunday

Debbie Hayton

The truth about Led By Donkeys

Love them or loathe them, it’s hard not to have noticed Led By Donkeys. The protest group – made up, naturally, of four former Greenpeace workers – has taunted Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and David Cameron with its high-profile stunts. It is best known for projecting its protests – including one branding Boris a ‘liar’ – on to the Houses of Parliament. The group’s members seem mighty pleased with themselves. But what has Led by Donkeys actually achieved? It’s hard to say that the group has won anyone over to the cause. The group’s members seem mighty pleased with themselves An exhibition ‘Adventures in Art, Activism and Accountability’ has opened

Chas Newkey-Burden

Calm down, most cows aren’t ‘killers’

There must be carnage in the countryside. That’s the only explanation for a stampede of anxious headlines about the danger of cows. ‘Are these the UK’s most dangerous animals,’ asked the front page of the Guardian this week alongside a picture of a bemused bovine. The Daily Star was at it too: the paper called cows ‘mooing killers’ and quoted a campaign group which suggested that the true number of cow attacks was being wildly underestimated. You’d be forgiven for thinking twice about going for a walk in the British countryside. So let’s all take a deep breath before turning to the data: between March 2019 and March 2023, cows

Saturday

Patrick West

Starmer’s freebies and the truth about Labour’s double-standards

The Labour government’s u-turn on freebies, its disclosure last night that it will no longer accept donations for clothes, is an admission that it has got it wrong. But ‘wrong’ in which sense of the word? Wrong in that they admit that they committed an error, or wrong in that they have behaved immorally? Their language would suggest very much the former. Nearly two-thirds of all voters say Starmer’s decision to accept freebies for his wife was unacceptable Keir Starmer’s allies concede that there was a ‘perception’ issue after the Prime Minister accepted clothing worth and spectacles together worth more than £18,000. This has been accompanied by similar gifts accepted

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

No, Rich Lowry didn’t say the N-word

Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of National Review, is being cancelled for calling Haitian immigrants the N-word. One problem: he didn’t. Lowry was on Megyn Kelly’s podcast to talk about the claims, amplified by Donald Trump and JD Vance, that Haitians have been snacking on local cats in Springfield, Ohio. He commented on a combative interview Vance gave to CNN’s Dana Bash and scoffed at Bash’s dismissal of the feline-fressing allegations on the grounds that city records only showed complaints about geese. Lowry observed: ‘I think it was in that interview where Dana Bash says the police have gone through 11 months of recordings of calls and they’ve only found two Springfield

Paul Wood

Paul Wood, Ross Clark, Andrew Lycett, Laura Gascoigne and Henry Jeffreys

33 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: as Lebanon reels from the exploding pagers, Paul Wood wonders what’s next for Israel and Hezbollah (1:24); Ross Clark examines Ireland’s low-tax project, following the news that they’re set to receive €13 billion… that they didn’t want (8:40); Reviewing Ben Macintyre’s new book, Andrew Lycett looks at the 1980 Iranian London embassy siege (15:29); Laura Gascoigne argues that Vincent Van Gogh would approve of the new exhibition of his works at the National Gallery (22:35); and Henry Jeffreys provides his notes on corkscrews (28:01).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

University isn’t sexy anymore

Freshers’ Week. It sounds so appealing, even to an uneducated counter-jumper like me who finds the word ‘uni’ so repellent that it’s right up there with ‘gusset’ and ‘spasm’. At British universities it mostly means drinking a lot of alcohol – our historical reaction to most situations – which may contribute to outbreaks of what is known as ‘Freshers’ flu’ in the first few weeks of the university term. But getting the lurgy is the least of the troubles bothering the student body nowadays as they head back to university this week. Thousands are going straight from their studies to long-term sickness, according to an alarming headline in the Times: ‘Students

Matthew Lynn

Smart meters aren’t so clever

Smart meters were meant to make our lives easier. They were designed to help us reduce energy consumption and cut bills. Over the last five years, the government has been pushing energy firms to install these meters as quickly as possible. Millions of homes have been fitted with one. The flashing screen monitoring how much power is being used has become a ubiquitous feature in households across Britain. We’re constantly nudged to switch off a couple of lights, or skip a load in the washing machine, as we see what this energy use is costing us. But there’s a big problem with smart meters: millions of them don’t work properly.

Alexander Larman

Morrissey’s martyrdom knows no bounds

Say what you like about Steven Patrick Morrissey – lead singer of The Smiths, the Mancunian miserabilist, ‘the Pope of Mope’ etc – but he has a knack, nearly four decades after his band dissolved acrimoniously, for coming out with attention- and headline-grabbing pronouncements. At first glance these declarations might seem like revelatory news stories, but on closer inspection they tend to rather fall apart. Just this month, Morrissey declared that his unreleased new album, Bonfire of Teenagers, has been ‘gagged’ because of an apparently controversial song about the 2017 Manchester bombing. He proclaimed in a recent interview with the Telegraph that ‘every major label in London has refused [it]

Friday

Ian Proud

Britain is losing the spy game to Russia

Russia’s decision to kick out six alleged British spies in August prompted a strange sense of deja vu. After the Salisbury nerve agent attack in March 2018, I sweated for a week in the British Embassy in Moscow, waiting to hear if I’d be kicked out in the diplomatic tit-for-tat. We need a better plan for Russia expertise if we really want to outsmart Putin Russia’s announcement was timed to embarrass Keir Starmer as he travelled to Washington last week for talks with Joe Biden. It was also a blow to the critically small pool of Russia experts in the British government. In the hostile goldfish bowl of UK-Russia relations,

Andrew Lilico

Should Huw Edwards be stripped of his BBC pension?

With the Huw Edwards court case complete – and the disgraced BBC News presenter given a six-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, after he admitted charges of making indecent images of children – attention has returned to the fact that he could still receive a £300,000-a-year BBC pension. Many are horrified by this. There have been demands that some way should be found to withhold payment from Edwards. I disagree. Imagine if we did decide that those convicted of crimes such as Edwards’ have no property rights A pension is part of the remuneration we receive for work done. It isn’t some extra perk or discretionary bonus handed to

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

How pistols in St Paul’s Cathedral shaped the science of sound

18 min listen

In the winter of 1951 shots from a Colt revolver rang out in St Paul’s Cathedral in an experiment designed to solve the mystery of how architecture shapes sound. In this episode of Holy Smoke, Damian Thompson talks to Dr Fiona Smyth, author of a new book on the subject, and choral musician Philip Fryer, about the perfect acoustic – an increasingly important topic for churches, since many of them rely on the income from hiring themselves out as concert and recording venues. And it raises the question: should we think of a church as a musical instrument? 

Alexander Larman

The wickedness of Mohamed Al Fayed

The allegations against Mohamed Al Fayed are dreadful: the former Harrods owner has been accused of raping five women and sexually abusing at least 15 others when they worked at his department store. A BBC investigation, which detailed the allegations, claimed that this abuse took place from the late 1980s to the 2000s. The name of the ‘phoney pharoah’, as Private Eye so aptly christened him, should live in infamy forever The consistent thread of the allegations against Al Fayed – who died last year aged 94 – was that he used his power and wealth to target women who worked for him at Harrods. Al Fayed, it seems, had a well-established

Zoe Strimpel

TGI Fridays was doomed from the beginning

Few will mourn the demise of TGI Fridays, whose parent company collapsed into administration this week. The restaurant chain’s 87 branches in the UK have been put up for sale. Only a fool would think they could turn around TGIs’ fortunes. The truth is that the British obsession with American food, and specifically American diners, was never going to end well. Attempts to imitate American cuisine over here are a bit embarrassing When TGI Fridays first opened in Britain it was, for a time, a roaring success. The original TGIs was a cocktail bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan which opened in March 1965. It was an instant

Thursday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Farage’s plan, the ethics of euthanasia & Xi’s football failure

45 min listen

This week: Nigel’s next target. What’s Reform UK’s plan to take on Labour? Reform UK surpassed expectations at the general election to win 5 MPs. This includes James McMurdock, who Katy interviews for the magazine this week, who only decided to stand at the last moment. How much threat could Reform pose and why has Farage done so well? Katy joins the podcast to discuss, alongside Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, who fought Nigel Farage as the Labour candidate for Clacton (1:02). Next: who determines the morality of euthanasia? Matthew Hall recounts the experience of his aunt opting for the procedure in Canada, saying it ‘horrified’ him but ‘was also chillingly seductive’. Does

James Innes-Smith

Can Sadiq Khan save Oxford Street?

Oxford Street’s spiralling tawdriness is a miserable advert for London. The ‘candy’ stores and tourist tat ‘luggage’ emporiums, the gang fights and phone snatchers are an embarrassment: tourists who are told that London is the greatest city on earth must struggle to reconcile that promise with the reality of the city’s main shopping street. Oxford Street has been on its uppers for as long as I can remember and I’ve been living nearby for over 20 years. Is it any wonder despondent locals like me steer well clear? But all that might be about to change if London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to pedestrianise the capital’s benighted thoroughfare gets the go ahead.

David Shipley

Why aren’t some released prisoners being tagged?

As hundreds of prisoners are released early on to the streets of Britain, it’s vital that the authorities keep track of these criminals. Worryingly, this doesn’t seem to be happening: several recently released prisoners who have been out of jail for two to six weeks told me they have still not been tagged. It’s anyone’s guess what these people are up to – and where they are going. Even probation officers struggle to get clear answers about whether or not tags have been fitted A backlog in fitting tags appears to be causing this situation. But there are rumours that there is a wider shortage of tags. Whatever the reason,

Debbie Hayton

The trouble with Trafalgar Square’s transgender tribute

Seven hundred and twenty-six plaster face casts of transsexual, non-binary or gender non-conforming people were unveiled yesterday in London’s Trafalgar Square. Mil Veces un Instante (A thousand times an Instant) by Mexican artist, Teresa Margolles, sits proudly upon the Fourth Plinth around Nelson’s Column. The casts are arranged in the form of a Tzompantli, or a ‘skull rack’, that exhibited the remains of war captives or sacrifice victims, and the art is intended to draw attention to the rights of trans people worldwide. But is it really necessary? As another Transgender Day of Remembrance approaches on 20 November with its pseudo-religious trappings, this imagery is not what London needs. How