Society

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Milkshake me!

Nine days of campaigning to go and I haven’t been milkshaked yet. I’ve hung out near McDonald’s in the hope – anything to get ten seconds on the evening news. It seems that in my constituency, the rank, sanctimonious, narcissistic and dim-witted monomaniacs of the new, kind and gentle left are somewhat thin on the ground. Nigel Farage copped a milkshake early on, and members of rival political parties and the BBC tried to pretend they were concerned. It didn’t work with theBBC because when the side-splitting but fabulously unfunny comedienne Jo Brand suggested it would be better to throw battery acid at Farage, she was not sacked or even

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France’s ‘Somewheres’ want revenge

The builder who has been working on my house in Burgundy will be voting for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally on Sunday in the first round of the French parliamentary election. So will the electrician. I haven’t asked the plumber, but I suspect I know where his vote will go, given that his assistant is voting for Le Pen. My neighbour, a farmer, is voting Le Pen, as is a teacher acquaintance. The local policeman is also voting Le Pen. ‘What do I think of Macron?’ retorted the electrician. ‘Put it this way, he’s not my friend’ It’s not that surprising in this neck of the woods. The National Rally

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why won’t Dawn Butler show solidarity with Kemi Badenoch?

Behold the exquisite hypocrisy of the Labour MP Dawn Butler. This is a politician who has raised the alarm over the verbal abuse received by female MPs. And yet now she’s gleefully telling anyone who will listen that she agrees with the preening luvvie David Tennant who said Kemi Badenoch should ‘shut up’ and, better still, disappear off the face of the Earth entirely. So sexist barbs are fine if they’re aimed at Tory ladies, Dawn? Is it acceptable again for men to tell women to pipe down? Yes, Ms Butler, the MP for Brent Central, has weighed in with her usual tact to the Tennant-Badenoch showdown. It was at

Terry Barnes

Many Australians are revolted by Julian Assange’s return

Convicted spy Julian Assange has come home to Australia. Assange’s chartered private jet touched down in Australia’s capital, Canberra, early in the evening local time to a hero’s reception. That the plea-bargaining deal ensuring his freedom was executed in a remote courthouse on the American territorial island of Saipan, in the isolated western Pacific but satisfying American demand that Assange be convicted on American territory, added a bizarre touch of the exotic to the whole tawdry business. It was a rubber stamp stopover en route from London to Canberra. Assange is a figure of whom we are ashamed to call our own It’s appropriate the deed was done on Saipan.

Alexander Larman

What happened to all the celebrity election endorsements?

JK Rowling’s denunciation of Labour leader Keir Starmer marked a rare moment in the election – a campaign in which the celebs have fallen quiet. At the 1997 election, Labour’s landslide was accompanied both by explicit endorsements from the great and the good. Noel Gallagher and Geri Halliwell, those two Britpop icons, both appeared alongside Blair in public. In New Labour’s later years, Gordon Brown had Rowling, and Ed Miliband spent time and dignity in courting the once-influential Russell Brand, leading to the much-ridiculed Guardian headline: ‘Russell Brand has endorsed Labour – and the Tories should be worried.’ The resulting Conservative majority disproved his point. Even Jeremy Corbyn could count

Zoe Strimpel

Europe’s war on tourists is no laughing matter

‘Enough! Let’s put a stop to tourism!’ So goes the slogan to be bellowed at a planned protest on 6 July in Barcelona. The city’s mayor has pledged to drive Airbnb out of the city within five years by revoking more than 10,000 licenses for short-term tourist rentals. The announcement follows anti-tourist protests in Mallorca, and the Canary Islands which, like France’s indiscriminately angry gilets-jaunes, has begun with a specific beef that will likely become raggedy and riot-prone as times goes by. This year also saw the introduction of a tourist tax in Venice (reports suggest it’s completely unenforced), and clampdowns in Amsterdam, including a reported ban on the building of

Tuesday

Gray Sergeant

How Edinburgh kowtowed to Beijing

Zhang Biao, Beijing’s man in Scotland, warned earlier this month that a proposed friendship agreement between Edinburgh City Council and Taiwan’s southern city of Kaohsiung would ‘hurt the feeling[s] of the Chinese people’. The people of China, from Shenzhen to Harbin – all 1.4 billion of them – can sleep easy tonight: the proposal has been pulled from the council’s agenda. Whether it will reappear is unclear. The city’s leader, Cammy Day, has announced that ‘more discussion is required before taking this agreement forward’. Discussions which could presumably, if necessary, go on indefinitely.  Edinburgh Airport feared the agreement could harm work to increase the number of direct flights to China Anyone with

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why do some anti-fascists have a problem with Jews?

Is it still okay to ‘Punch a Nazi’? I’m asking for a friend. In fact, I’m asking for many friends who watched those violent protests outside a synagogue in Los Angeles over the weekend and wondered to themselves if that old left-wing slogan about walloping bigots still holds. If it was acceptable to punch alt-right Jew-haters back in the 2010s, then why not the keffiyeh-wearing variety of today who taunt Jews at their very place of worship? What a thin excuse for mobbing a synagogue ‘Punch a Nazi’ was the cry of every self-styled anti-fascist a few years ago. It was mostly bluster – none of these coddled, vegan kids

Mary Dejevsky

The Assange compromise leaves a lot to be desired

Stella Assange’s elation was palpable, after what she has described as a whirlwind 72 hours. She was speaking to the BBC in Australia, where she was waiting to be reunited with her husband, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had just been freed from prison in the UK under a three-way deal between the UK, the US and Australia.  Assange was due to travel to Australia via the Mariana Islands, a US dependency in the Pacific, where a judge was expected to accept his plea of guilty to a single charge under the US Espionage Act, relating to classified material published on his WikiLeaks site back in 2010. He was to be

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

King Charles has much in common with Japan’s Anglophile Emperor

The Japanese Emperor is in London today for a state visit, the first by the occupant of the chrysanthemum throne to the UK for 26 years. Along with a trip to Buckingham Palace, Emperor Naruhito, accompanied by his wife Empress Masako, will inspect the Thames barrier, which the Emperor studied as a student. He’ll then proceed to Oxford where he spent happy years as an undergraduate. The Emperor will also pay a private visit to St. George’s chapel and lay a wreath at the tomb of Queen Elizabeth II. Naruhito is a genuine Anglophile. You may not hear too much about this visit, due to other salient events obviously (there

Andrew Tettenborn

Assange is released – but there is still a danger to press freedom 

James Cleverly may now be a care-and-maintenance Home Secretary, but even so he will be heaving a sigh of relief as he finally tapes up the file on Julian Assange. The Australian journalist and WikiLeaks founder was on the point of being extradited to the US for revealing state secrets obtained from agents in that country. Last night we heard that Assange’s lawyers had closed a deal with American prosecutors. The arrangement is this. Assange voluntarily surrenders to US officials in the Marianas Islands; he pleads guilty to one offence of revealing US classified information, and gets five years. The court then providentially notices that he has already spent more

Jawad Iqbal

The moment of truth beckons for Gareth Southgate

England manager Gareth Southgate has led a charmed life for far too long – eight years and three international tournaments before this one, to be precise. The moment of reckoning is now most definitely upon him. Everything, from the reputation of this supposedly stellar group of players to Southgate’s credibility as a coach, is on the line. It all comes down to how England perform in their final group phase game against Slovenia at the Cologne stadium tonight. It is an encounter that presents opportunity and danger in equal measure. The opportunity is there because the Slovenians are eminently beatable, ideal opponents for an England team low on confidence and looking

Monday

Alexander Larman

Let’s hope Princess Anne makes a swift recovery

This year has been one of the worst imaginable for the Royals. The King and the Princess of Wales are both battling cancer, and now Princess Anne has been hospitalised, suffering what is said to be ‘minor injuries and concussion’ following an incident involving a horse. The Princess Royal, who is 73, was rushed to hospital after she was hurt during an evening walk on her Gatcombe Park estate in Gloucestershire yesterday. Anne, who is being treated for concussion and minor injuries to her head, is expected to recover shortly. Nonetheless, the annus horribilis for her and her family is continuing, even before we reach the halfway point of this most eventful

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Who can blame the Greens’ co-leader for not getting a heat pump?

Far be it from me to give advice to the Green Party. From their insistence that ordinary people put up with being poorer and colder to ‘save the planet’ to the alarmingly high number of Israelophobic, 7 October-denying cranks on their candidates list, I’m really not a fan. Still, I’d gently suggest that the golden rule for any Green vying for election is to practise what you preach on climate. If you are standing on a manifesto of national immiseration, you’d better be willing to go without the fossil-fuelled comforts you want to rip away from everyone else. The Greens co–leader has been caught out as an eco-hypocrite Not so for Carla

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

England’s witless footballers could learn a lot from the Scots

Scotland 0 Hungary 1: The Guardian called the game ‘a grim slog’, presumably preferring the fare offered by the twinkle-toed Latinos. Me, I loved every deeply flawed second. This was a League One play-off final, full of fury, grit and consummate uselessness. I’d far rather watch that than Spain and Italy – and even more so awful England, with their stupid, mind-numbing, witless, languor. Hell, at least these two sides TRIED. Far too late in the day the pundits are turning against Southgate Hungary were marginally the more proficient and employed the tactic of making sure Scotland had lots of the ball so they could do nothing constructive with it.

Patrick West

Let’s take no lectures from Emma Thompson on the climate

The actors are out in force again, speaking politics. Only days after Brian Cox appeared on the BBC bemoaning that Brexit is reducing our GDP by 4 per cent, this weekend Dame Emma Thompson led thousands at a Restore Nature Now march in London. The protest was designed to draw attention to the plight of nature and the climate, and was attended by charities, businesses and direct action groups. Actors at their worst are a notoriously shallow and vain lot During the march, the national treasure, millionaire and jet-setter Thompson was asked if she supported Just Stop Oil, days after the group had vandalised Stonehenge. ‘I think I support anyone

Debbie Hayton

Labour’s dreadful gender recognition reforms

Is Keir Starmer trying to snatch an unlikely defeat from the jaws of victory, or is he so confident of winning that he thinks he can ignore sense and reason – certainly on the issue of sex and gender? When the Labour party manifesto dropped a couple of weeks ago, it included a pledge to ‘modernise, simplify, and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law to a new process’. This morning we learned some of the details. This might not trouble privileged men like Starmer but it is an issue for vulnerable women reliant on publicly funded services According to reports, Labour will remove any need for someone to ‘live in their

James Kirkup James Kirkup

J.K. Rowling’s glorious refusal to be kind 

‘Spread happiness, peace and calm.’ That’s the slogan on a T-shirt you can buy at M&S. It’s pink, has frilly sleeves and is decorated with flowers and a unicorn. It is, of course, listed under ‘girls’ clothing’. There’s nothing unusual about that T-shirt. You can buy similar items for girls in most fashion retailers. ‘Be kind’ is practically society’s mantra for a generation of girls. Pretty much everyone else in the country is currently sucking up to Keir Starmer because he’s about to have power. Not JKR though Another staple of childhood for those girls is Harry Potter. On the same page of the M&S site you can find a

Sunday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Why Japan is unlikely to legalise same-sex marriage

Thailand has just passed a ‘landmark’ marriage equality bill, which will pave the way for the recognition of same-sex unions in the Land of Smiles. The upper house in Bangkok comfortably approved the measure on Tuesday, and as soon as King Maha Vajiralongkorn signs it off Thailand will become the first Southeast Asian jurisdiction to formally legalise gay marriage. Equality campaigners in Japan will be watching these developments closely. With a general election expected before November and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s scandal-wracked Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) administration under considerable pressure, advocates for same sex marriage in the one G7 country that still denies it, will have hopes that, following the

Jawad Iqbal

Why is Euro 2024 so dull?

It is still early days but Euro 2024 in Germany has yet to take off as a tournament. It is hard to say why exactly. It has not been uniformly dull – England’s failings have generated interest aplenty. The opening match between Germany and Scotland was a goal-fest, ending in a 5-1 win for Germany. In fact, there have been some brilliant goals in the tournament so far – Mert Muldur scored a spectacular volley for Turkey against Georgia on Tuesday night. There is a limited number of genuine superstars Great goals can go a long way towards making a tournament look and feel good but far too many of