Society

Tuesday

The Spectator

How much more expensive have houses got?

Lock, stock and barrel Jeremy Hunt committed the Conservatives to maintaining the Triple Lock in their manifesto. How much is the policy costing taxpayers? – The Triple Lock – which guarantees a rise in the state pension equivalent to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), average earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is the highest – was introduced in 2011. Since then the state pension has increased with CPI six times, average earnings three times and 2.5 per cent three times. – The basic state pension is currently £156.20 per week. Had it increased only with CPI it would now be worth £140.90 and had it increased only with average earnings

Ross Clark Ross Clark

You’re not being paranoid: smart meters are out to get you

If anyone was still in doubt as to why the government is keen to press ‘smart’ meters onto us, those doubts will surely now be dispelled by the latest intervention of Ofgem, which has proposed abolishing the current electricity price cap and replacing it with a cap which varies throughout the day in response to the wholesale price of electricity. No, the smart meter sitting in your home is not there just to help you manage your electricity use – it is there to facilitate a future ‘dynamic’ pricing structure for electricity consumers. It is there so that we can be offered cheap electricity when wind and solar power is

The Spectator

Letters: Rod was right about Bob Marley

Copping out Sir: Both the Police and Crime Commissioner Dr Andrew Billings and your recent correspondent John Pritchard are partly right (Letters, 16 and 23 March). Policing has gone wrong for two reasons. First, the massive cuts in staff instigated by Theresa May as home secretary resulted in a large number of the most experienced officers leaving. Even the replacement of these officers under Boris Johnson took time and could not make up for the loss of experience. Secondly, the inspection regime under the Inspectorate of Constabulary fails to address the crimes that matter to the public. During the years I was PCC for the Thames Valley, I made household

Peter Jones

Why Rome didn’t need the Garrick

What fun to mock the elite in the Garrick! But there were no Garricks in Rome: clubs were for those lower down the scale. They were called collegia and consisted of citizens, freedmen (ex-slaves) and in some cases slaves. All usually had some religious connection and were properly organised with presidents, treasurers and so on. Some were dedicated to maintaining ancient cults; others served the locality; then there were burial clubs, dedicated to appropriate gods, providing (for a regular fee) monthly group dinners and a guaranteed urn for their ashes in their private facilities (for their slaves and freedmen Augustus and his wife Livia provided buildings with 6,000 urns). The

Candida Crewe

The utter horror of UHT milk

On a trip to Italy via Paris last month, my travelling companion and I went to the Gare de Lyon at sparrows to catch a train to Rome. We badly wanted coffee. I came to coffee late in life and am infantile and uncool in my love of frothy buckets of what is effectively a hot coffee milkshake. It is almost all about the milk, preferably whole and organic but, at the very least, fresh. So it was that Starbucks – which uses conventional milk in the UK – twinklingand open in the middle of the freezing station, made the heart lift. I recognised in my childhood that the French did

Justin Brierley

A Christian revival is under way in Britain

Tom Holland recently invited me to attend a service of Evensong with him at London’s oldest church, St Bartholomew the Great. Holland, who co-hosts the phenomenally popular The Rest is History podcast, has been a regular congregant for a few years. He began attending while researching Dominion, his bestselling book which outlined the way the 1st-century Christian revolution has irrevocably shaped the 21st-century West’s moral imagination. It also recounts how Holland, a secular liberal westerner who had lost any vestige of faith by his teenage years, came to realise he was still essentially Christian in terms of his beliefs about human rights, equality and freedom. Christianity is not just a

Harry Mount

Could I find love at the British Museum?

Mirabile dictu, as we Latin lovers like to say. In other words, wonderful news! Attractive women have fallen for ancient Rome – and for classicists. Well, that’s what the British Museum thought when it cooked up its advertising campaign for its new show, Legion: Life in the Roman Army, about Roman legionaries. The Museum put up a controversial social media post, promoting the exhibition as an opportunity for single women to find single men. I spotted a lissom blonde in green T-shirt and tie-dye trousers. We fell in step as we approached the gift shop The post read: ‘Girlies, if you’re single and looking for a man, this is your sign

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Going electric requires electricity. Who knew?

A lead article in the sober-sided New York Times is seldom funny. Yet ‘A New Surge in Power Use is Threatening US Climate Goals’ earlier this month cracked me up. Check out this sternly dramatic first paragraph: ‘Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.’ Personally, I’d have headlined that article ‘Well, duh’ – perhaps with the subhead ‘Aw, shucks’. Lo and behold, when you push people to electrify everything in their lives – cars, cookers, heating systems – while bribing them to go all-electric with lavish government subsidies, it turns out they use more electricity. Who

Yascha Mounk

Why the British think differently from Americans

When I first started teaching undergraduates at Harvard, the grading system the university employed struck me as very odd. Even ambitious students at top colleges in the United States see it as their job to answer any essay question in the most thorough and reasonable way. They regurgitate the dominant view in scholarly literature in a competent manner. If they pull this off without making major errors, they fully expect to get an A. And with grade inflation rampant in the Ivy League, they usually do. This attitude has had a significant influence on American public life. If you read an opinion piece in the New York Times or the

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Britain’s prisons shame us all

Many years ago, for my Great Lives BBC radio programme, we recorded Jeremy Paxman’s championing of the life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. It was an excellent choice and Mr Paxman persuasively laid out that great campaigner’s achievements in the reform of child-labour legislation and the lunacy laws. ‘As we look back baffled,’ I asked him, ‘by how civilised Victorians could even contemplate chaining the mentally ill to walls, or sending small boys up chimneys, what do you think future ages will lay, with comparable perplexity and horror, to our own age’s account?’ Paxman said he’d need notice of the question. I don’t. With no shadow of

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Let’s kick ‘racial justice’ out of the Church of England

Holy Week is the most important part of the year for many Christians, but it will come as little surprise that some members of the Church of England appear to be focusing on racial justice rather than Jesus. ‘I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn,’ the Venerable Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, archdeacon of Liverpool, wrote on Twitter. ‘It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender. So yes, let’s have anti-whiteness, & let’s smash the patriarchy. That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression.’ Miranda Thelfall-Holmes is a name for a trendy vicar that a comedy show would strike out for

Monday

Alexander Larman

Will the slimmed-down monarchy cope without Kate and the King?

The reaction to the Princess of Wales’s courageous and affecting video, in which she discussed her cancer diagnosis, was largely as might be imagined. Most people, including those who had previously exhibited confusion or scepticism about the various failings in the royal family’s communication strategy, found it both shocking and deeply moving, and commended Kate for her candour. However, there remains a small but vocal minority who seized upon the statement to lambast her further. What this story has inadvertently done is to reveal the weakness of the slimmed-down monarchy We do not need to give the deluded and vicious the oxygen of publicity, but nonetheless, once the initial burst

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why bullies win

Remember when Friends Reunited was a thing? Twenty-something years ago, before Facebook even existed, this primaeval social networking site connecting people with their old schoolmates was the most searched thing on the UK internet. It is, now, at one with Nineveh and Tyre. In fact, the only truly memorable thing it achieved was to inspire a black-hearted spin-off site called ‘Bullies Reunited’.  That site purported to help reconnect the pre-teen thugs of yesteryear with their sniggering accomplices, or the boys and girls whose knees they’d skinned, pigtails twisted or Y-fronts wedgied to shreds. It was a joke, but a good one. The nastiest, most aggressive, most tantrum-prone ten-year-olds grew up

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Will Sunak renege on ‘foreign powers’ owning newspapers?

Last week, a rebellion in the Lords drew a government pledge to ban foreign governments and their proxies from owning British newspapers and magazines. It was a historic moment for the defence of press freedom in the era of acquisitive, well-connected autocracies. It will have global significance. But the devil was always going to lie in the detail, and that will come in the third reading of the Digital Markets Bill due Tuesday. The risk is that ministers may row back and allow the Emiratis to become part-owners of this magazine and the Telegraph by keeping a low stake of 5 per cent or even 1 per cent. This would still grant them

Joe Bedell-Brill

Hunt: Tories will keep the triple lock on pensions

Jeremy Hunt: Russian government creating a ‘smokescreen of propaganda’ On Friday night, a terrorist attack at a large concert in Moscow led to at least 133 deaths. Russian officials vowed revenge and suggested Ukrainian involvement, despite Islamic State claiming responsibility. On Sky News this morning, Trevor Phillips asked Jeremy Hunt how much Russia’s version of events could be believed. The Chancellor said it was always a tragedy when innocent people lost their lives, but that the UK had ‘very little confidence in anything the Russian government says’. He suggested they were creating a ‘smokescreen of propaganda’ to justify their invasion of Ukraine. Hunt guarantees Tories will keep triple lock on

Christian Wolmar

Don’t blame health and safety for killing the Harry Potter steam train

When the operators of the most popular steam train service in Britain decided to challenge the safety authorities, they were confident that sentiment and nostalgia would win out. They’ve been proved wrong. The health and safety brigade has triumphed and consequently the Jacobite train, popularised in a Harry Potter film and running along one of the nation’s most attractive rail lines between Fort William and Mallaig on the West Coast, will no longer operate. It’s the culmination of a lengthy battle between the train-spotters and the grey men of the Office of Road and Rail (ORR), who are insistent that a temporary concession to allow the trains to operate without

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Is London the ‘most anti-Semitic city in the West’?

The last time I saw Amichai Chikli, he was struggling to put on a suit jacket at the Israeli embassy in London. ‘Do I really have to wear one of these things just to make a speech?’ he muttered. He got it on by hoiking it over his shoulders like a rucksack.  That was last September, when the Israeli diaspora affairs minister visited London to mark Rosh Hashanah. Chikli had sparked controversy with comments about Tel Aviv’s gay pride parade (‘vulgar’), the Palestinian Authority (‘neo-Nazis’) and George Soros (‘his actions and investments are feeding the flames of anti-Semitism’). But the hotheaded minister finds it as easy to restrain his rhetoric

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The hounding of Kate was a new low for Britain

Shame on the ghouls who spread lies and rumours about the Princess of Wales. And the idiot conspiracy theorists who wondered if she might be dead or getting divorced. And the tragic social media sleuths who squealed ‘That isn’t her!’ when a video showed her shopping at a farmers’ market. And all the rest of you who knew Catherine was ill, and knew she’d had serious surgery, and knew she was craving privacy, and yet who wailed ‘WHERE’S KATE?’ on a loop, like lunatics, for weeks. For now we know the truth. She’s not in hiding. She’s not in a coma. She’s not fleeing ‘the Firm’ in a huff over

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Kate’s critics should be ashamed of themselves

Who is this speaking with a sneer on their lips and contempt in their voice before news of the Princess of Wales’s cancer broke? A monarchist or a republican? ‘Kate’s admission that she had doctored the photograph, and her apology for doing so, were the latest self-inflicted wound by the House of Windsor, for which trust and integrity are fundamental commodities.’ There is a limit to how much of this treatment modern members of the royal family will take Those who do not know the UK might assume it was a revolutionary who wants to undermine trust in the integrity of the monarchy because they want it gone. Republican sentiment in the

Jawad Iqbal

Where did it all go wrong for Brazil’s football team?

When England play Brazil in a friendly at Wembley tonight they will go into the game as firm favourites to win. It is hard to imagine writing that sentence at any other time in the last fifty years, which is a measure of how much the tables have turned. How so? Today’s Brazil side are very beatable The Three Lions are unbeaten since being knocked out of the last World Cup in Qatar two years ago, and they have finished top of their qualifying group for Euro 2024. They have a long-serving manager in Gareth Southgate, who knows the strengths and weaknesses of his present squad. Brazil, meanwhile, are in disarray,