Society

Tuesday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Worklessness hits eight-year high

Britain already has the worst post-pandemic workforce recovery in Europe. New figures out today show the problem is getting even worse. The number of those ‘economically inactive’ (not in work or looking for it) rose by a remarkable 150,000 in the last three months to 9.4 million – equivalent to the adult population of Portsmouth and some 850,000 since the first lockdown. Taken as a share of the working-age population, it’s now at an eight-year high – and significantly worse than it was during Covid or its aftermath. What’s driving the worklessness? The biggest single factor is long-term sickness, also at an all-time high. Is this just economic long-Covid, the

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Why can’t Stonewall’s ex-boss come clean about its trans obsession?

The few days since the publication of the Cass report – the probe into ‘gender identity’ services for young people – have been a revelation. The report, compiled by Dr Hilary Cass, has at long last, and so publicly it couldn’t be ignored, blown some of the gilt off the trans gingerbread, confirming that medical interventions on minors weren’t backed up by solid research. This has woken up some of the great and the good, who have finally realised that parroting phrases like ‘trans women are women’ might not have been such a wise idea. It must be galling for Rutherford, the foremost science communicator, to have missed such a big medical scandal One of those who used those

Monday

Robin Ashenden

How was ITV’s trans drama Butterfly ever made?

In the wake of the Cass Report’s damning verdict on the reckless ‘social transitioning’ of children and the prescribing of puberty blockers to minors, it’s perhaps an apt time to recall a mini-series that appeared on ITV a few years ago cheerleading for both. Butterfly was broadcast in October 2018 just as Theresa May’s national consultation about proposed changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act was nearing its end, and dealt with the issue of trans children. Written by Tony Marchant and directed by Anthony Byrne, its lead consultant was Susie Green, the then-head of transgender youth support charity Mermaids, who took her son to Thailand for sex reassignment surgery on

Zoe Strimpel

Why shouldn’t teenagers be allowed to use WhatsApp?

For my thirteenth birthday, which coincided roughly with my Bat Mitzvah (the Jewish ceremony for entering adulthood), I had begged for – and got – my own phone line. This was so that I could talk for hours on the phone to friends I had seen all day, or possibly all weekend if they were at a different school, without tying up the whole family’s phone system. Friends would call and whoever picked up would holler to me that ‘Lexie/Sarah/Jessica/Anna is on line two’ and put the friend through. There would be a click and off we went, at liberty to gab privately for hours. I don’t actually remember spending

Mikhail Fridman

The sanctions against me are a huge injustice

Early on the morning of 1 December 2022, 50 helmeted and body-armoured National Crime Agency officers and a media relations officer burst into Athlone House, my home in Highgate, north London. They seized telephones and computers and issued a derogatory press release. The police could not name me, but pictures of the inside of my house with police officers inside soon circulated on social media. My assets and businesses in Britain and the EU have been in effect nationalised Raids of this kind may be familiar in repressive regimes. But I did not expect them in Britain, a perceived champion of fair play, the rule of law and a declared

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France and Britain have both shamefully neglected the white working class

Emmanuel Macron told a communist newspaper earlier this year that he didn’t consider Marine le Pen’s National Rally part of the ‘Republican arc’. By extension, the French president presumably thinks the same of the 13,288,686 million men and women who voted for Le Pen in the second round of the 2022 presidential election. In the event of a war with Russia, or another hostile state, would the president therefore consider Le Pen voters unworthy of serving in the Republic’s military? The average Le Pen supporter has much in common with Britain’s Red Wall voter; they tend not to have gone to university, to have been hit hard by deindustrialisation and

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Long live the litter lout snitches!

Most of us are, I think, temperamentally opposed to the idea of a society in which we are surveilled 24/7. We look at the proliferation of Ring doorbells, the thickets of CCTV cameras that capture our every trip to the shop from multiple angles, the algorithmic harvesting of our data by every website we use to shop, to exchange messages with friends, or to scour the wisdom of the internet for information, and we give a slight shudder of revulsion.   We are put in mind of the grim grey men in headphones listening in on bugged conversations for the Stasi in the grim grey film The Lives of Others.

Sunday

Robin Ashenden

The sacking of Frank Skinner is a loss to British comedy

The recent news that comedian Frank Skinner had been sacked from his job at Absolute Radio after fifteen years as presenter feels like a misstep to say the least. It has not been without a whiff of scandal, coming amidst accusations of ‘ageism’. The man himself lamented: ‘I’m not going to pretend I took it well… I don’t want to go.’ Many of us will feel the same way: if, from May when his contract runs out, Frank Skinner is to be not only off our television networks but also national radio as well, it would seem to be comedy’s loss. His brand of humour – smutty, confessional, nudging and

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

JK Rowling and the Cass report reckoning

Boyish girls, climb the nearest tree and give a Tarzan whoop of victory – girly boys, fashion a floral crown and caper copiously. Thanks to the Cass Report, failing to follow sexist stereotypes (which decree that girls play with dolls and boys play with themselves) will no longer get you marched off to the sex-correction clinic. You’ll no longer be stuffed like a five-bird roast with the best that Big Pharma can tout and later shuttled off to the abattoir to have your perfectly healthy sexual organs hacked off. For the Great Trans Con has been bust as wide open as the space between India Willoughby’s ears. Why did so many

John Armstrong

Why academia failed to challenge trans ideology

Dr Hilary Cass’s long-awaited review into healthcare for transgender children and young people was released this week. Her verdict was damning, and was delivered with Swiftian understatement: ‘The adoption of a medical treatment with uncertain risks, based on an unpublished trial that did not demonstrate clear benefit, is a departure from normal clinical practice.’ But perhaps even more shocking was this quote: ‘There is minimal research evidence to inform questions regarding likely trajectories and outcomes particularly in the context of: a) physical treatments (e.g. hormone blockers to suppress the onset of puberty); b) social transition (where a child presents to other people as their experienced gender e.g. using preferred gender

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The power of talking as thinking

The world’s greatest scientific building recently celebrated its 225th birthday. In 1799, a group of natural philosophers (the word ‘scientist’ hadn’t been invented) founded the Royal Institution (RI) in Mayfair. The fact that the RI went on to achieve a greater rockfall of discoveries, including nine elements and the principles of electromagnetism, than has been witnessed anywhere else is extraordinary – all the more so when one considers that the organisation wasn’t originally created to do research. It was created to talk about it.  The relationship between the laboratory in the basement and the lecture theatre on the ground floor proved two-way. The discoveries its scientists made downstairs added lustre

Friday

Matthew Lynn

The Bank of England can’t blame IT for its dodgy forecasts

It hires the cleverest young graduates every year. It brings in talent from around the world. And it has the budget to acquire all the resources it needs. With all this at its disposal, you would think the Bank of England could at least come up with a better excuse for its dismal record on forecasting how the economy works than blaming it all on a creaking IT system. Its response to the review published today by the former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is not going to wash – and sooner or later the Bank will need an honest reckoning with its failings over the last decade.  Sooner or

Charlie Walsham

How did the BBC get the trans debate so wrong?

What must it feel like to realise you are part of an organisation that has placed so-called progressive values ahead of evidence, risking real-world harms to countless vulnerable young people?   In the wake of the publication of the Cass review into gender identity services for under-18s in England, I know exactly how that feels. No, I’ve not been moonlighting for the now defunct Tavistock clinic: I work as a journalist for BBC News. Regrettably, I believe there is a straight line between the BBC’s capitulation to extreme trans rights ideologues and the disturbing findings in Dr Hilary Cass’s 388-page report. Regrettably, I believe there is a straight line between

Thursday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

The real reason French spies aren’t caught in honeytraps

French spies are impossible to blackmail in honeytraps because their wives already know they’re having affairs. And if you believe this, I have a tower in Paris to sell you. The source for this story is wafer thin yet nevertheless it has attracted prurient attention worldwide. It was ‘revealed’ on Tuesday night in a documentary screened on France 2 and has subsequently been repeated on news platforms worldwide. ‘Ooh la la! Those saucy Frenchies!’ That’s the general line, improbable as it may seem. An agent, ‘Nicolas’, who appeared anonymously on the show, said that Soviet defectors talked of the ‘French paradox’ – that if you tell a Frenchman with a mistress ‘“we’ve

Jawad Iqbal

Prize money doesn’t belong at the Olympics

Lord Coe, the president of World Athletics, has come up with the daft and damaging idea that athletes should be paid for winning gold at the Olympic Games. In doing so, the track and field governing sports body would become the first to offer prize money in the history of the Olympics. The idea of rewarding competitors with pots of cash runs counter to the spirit of everything the Olympics supposedly stands for – which is why the International Olympic Committee has never awarded money for participating or winning a medal at the games. Competing should be glory and reward enough.  The idea of rewarding competitors with pots of cash runs

Colin Brazier

Britain’s farms are facing disaster

Could it be that this year, for the first time since the second world war, some UK farms will not produce a harvest? Not even a grain? It may sound like hyperbole, but as an agronomist friend of mine told me recently: these are the worst growing conditions in living memory. The only thing being sown right now is panic.  There are farms with sheds full of seed that will never go in the ground The problem is the sheer amount of rain that has fallen recently. Farmers can’t plant seeds in rain. And on average, a crop – once drilled – can only be submerged in water for up

Rachel Johnson

Women don’t want women-only clubs

In my experience, men offer this infuriating comeback when challenged about the continuing exclusion of women from clubs such as the Garrick (for now at least – the Garrick is voting on 7 May on the admission of women as members). ‘But why don’t you set up your own women-only clubs,’ they sulk, ‘and leave us alone?’ My interlocutors are often members of not one but multiple men-only clubs. My husband, father and brothers, for example, frequent a combination of White’s, the Beefsteak, Pratt’s (men-only until last year) and the Garrick. Two of my siblings à l’époque graced the Bullingdon at Oxford. Women-only clubs are all marketed as networking hubs,

The Spectator

Who uses Grindr? 

Meet market Who uses the gay dating app Grindr?  – The site claims 27m users worldwide, 80.5% of whom identify as gay. – 13m users are active on a monthly basis. Some 923,000 are paid users. – 80% are younger than 35. – 39% are single. – 48% are in the US. – The average user is on the site for 60 minutes per day. – The ‘explore’ feature – which allows users to see who on the app lives in a particular town or city – is accessed more in London than any other city in the world. – Grindr accounts for 3% of global use of dating apps.

Laurie Graham

I want to see a doctor – not do another NHS survey

Nye Bevan did not make old bones, and perhaps that’s just as well. According to a recent British Social Attitudes survey, 52 per cent of those polled are dissatisfied with the NHS, in particular with the difficulties in getting a GP appointment, with long A&E trolley waits and with huge delays for hospital appointments. All this, in spite of ever more money being chucked into its maw. If invited, I could immediately save the NHS a packet by dialling down the thermostat that has turned hospitals into Hotel Tropicana for bacteria, and by asking, wherever possible, patients’ relatives to provide food, thereby reducing the amount of unappetising slop that goes

David Whitehouse

Farewell, Voyager 1

Some time soon we will have to say farewell to our most distant emissary – the Voyager 1 spacecraft. After almost 50 years in space, it’s 15 billion miles away and showing signs of wear and could soon stop transmitting. Late last year, Voyager 1 began to decline, sending back spools of gibberish to its handlers on this planet. A few days ago, Nasa engineers finally traced the problem back to a single chip but it’s clear that Voyager 1 will shortly have to cut contact and make its way out across the universe on its own. It’s strange to think that it will be exploring on out into deep