Society

In this festive Low Life column from the 19 December 1981 edition of The Spectator, Jeffrey Bernard talks us through some Christmases past. I’ve tried ignoring Christmas but the bastard won’t go away. It’s never been a good time of year for me what with being ignored by Father Christmas — yes, I’m going to have a right old moan today — and three years ago being left completely alone in a freezing cottage. Season of goodwill? You must be joking. But at least I’ve had an office party this year in Kentish Town. Last night I poured a vodka into my electric typewriter and it nearly blew up. There

Ed Miliband’s pledge to crack down on the ‘crack cocaine of gambling’  is a significant moment in the extraordinary moral panic over fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs). Earlier this year, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport found that there was very little data to back up the anecdotal evidence of the anti-FOBT brigade and so decided to commission some research. This process will take 18 months and a decision about stakes and prizes will be made once there is some evidence to study. This eminently reasonable, evidence-based approach has naturally been howled down by the anti-gambling lobby whose campaign has thus far relied on anecdotes and, at best, half-truths. Earlier

There was a food bank debate yesterday in the House of Commons. We all know that, but what few people can tell you is what was said. Instead, there is a furious debate raging about whether the Tories were laughing at poor people not having enough money for food, or whether Labour MPs were laughing too. I’ll leave that to other people to tussle over, suffice to say that it wasn’t the most edifying debate I’ve watched, mainly because as with all arguments in Westminster over food banks, both sides were jeering one another and making ugly accusations about each other too. These accusations tend to boil the problem of

The Silence of Our Friends, my Amazon Singles ebook about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, is published today. I know I’ve written several posts on this subject recently, so I promise to stop, so long as everyone buys the book. Otherwise I won’t. Ever. It’s a subject that has become ever more urgent this year with violence against Christians in Syria, where Islamists have been engaged in ‘religious cleansing’, and in Egypt, which saw the worst anti-Christian violence in centuries. Over the weekend the leading Catholic in Iraq, Patriarch Louis Sako, was in Rome where he lamented the west’s apathy, after a decade in which 1,000 Iraqi

There has been much amusement in the last couple of days after Sophie Gadd, a student at the University of York, snapped a picture of Johann Baptist Lampi’s 1794 oil on canvas portrait of Catherine II the Great while visiting the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. Eagle-eyed Sophie pointed out the immediate and obvious similarities between the Empress of Russia and David Cameron. Her story traversed from the Twittersphere, and made into the pages of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph. But it does not end there. The Spectator can now reveal that the reason Catherine the Great and our Prime Minister look so similar is because they are related. Quite

What’s happening? Tomorrow, former CBI economist Howard Davies will release an interim report on the options for expanding Britain’s airport capacity. Some of the possibilities Davies has been considering include developing the regional airports (possibly with a High Speed rail element), building a new giant hub airport in the Thames Estuary, expanding capacity at Gatwick or Stansted Airports, or building a new runway at Heathrow. What will Davies say tomorrow? Both Sky News and the Sunday Times have reported that Davies is going to back three ‘favoured options’ in his report: Third runway at Heathrow Third runway at Heathrow and one at Gatwick Two new runways at Heathrow As well

I think this following quote, from the Romanian ambassador Ion Jinga, may go down as my favourite of the year: ‘In their overwhelming majority, Romanians in the UK are well integrated and, as Prime Minister David Cameron has acknowledged, ‘work hard, pay taxes and are valued by their employers.’ New figures just out from the police reveal that Romanians in London are seven times more likely to be arrested than other Londoners, and 800 of them were arrested in November alone. I assume that’s because we have a criminal justice system which is institutionally racist and determined to stop upright, law-abiding Romanians from working hard and paying their taxes…….expect that