Society

Monday

Christopher Snowdon

The public health plot against large wine glasses

Professor Dame Theresa Marteau seems to have something of an obsession about glasses and tableware. In the last ten years, she and her team at Cambridge university have carried out numerous experiments in the bars and restaurants of Cambridgeshire to see whether restricting the size of wine glasses reduces the amount of wine consumed. This has yielded a mixed bag of evidence. When they combined their findings in a ‘mega-analysis’ (sic) in 2020, they found a possible effect in restaurants but not in bars. Marteau nevertheless suggested that ‘regulating wine glass size is one option that might be considered for inclusion in local licensing regulations.’ Anyone who believes (wrongly) that

Sam Leith Sam Leith

What Katharine Birbalsingh gets wrong about secularism

Katharine Birbalsingh is back in the papers again. The head teacher at Michaela, a free school whose outstanding academic record and ultra-strict behaviour policy have made it a culture-wars lightning rod, tells the Sunday Times that she and her staff have been getting death threats ever since her board of governors imposed a policy banning any form of prayer on school grounds.  Until not all that long ago, the story runs, pupils were permitted to pray in the playground at break. This policy of tolerance worked fine for a bit, but only because none of the kids wanted to. It was a purely theoretical rule. But last March, a girl knelt on her

Sunday

Joe Bedell-Brill

Shapps: Netanyahu’s rejection of a two-state solution is ‘very disappointing’

On a call with Joe Biden this weekend, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated Israel’s demand for security control over Gaza once Hamas has been destroyed, and said that this was incompatible with Palestinian sovereignty. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps described Netanyahu’s views as ‘disappointing’, and said that the two-state solution is the only option. However, he described Israel’s government as a ‘rainbow coalition’, and said it was important to distinguish between the view’s of Netanyahu as an individual, and the UK’s support for Israel as a country.  Is the UK preparing for war with Russia? Nato military chief Admiral Rob Bauer claimed this week

Hans-Joachim Voth and Sascha Becker

Did ‘shallow Christianity’ help the Nazis rise to power?

‘Spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison,’ C.S. Lewis famously said. In western countries, organised religion has been declining for the last two centuries; Friedrich Nietzsche even declared that ‘God is dead’. Does the decline and fall of religion have political consequences? Can totalitarian ideology grow in the void left by religion? To find the answer, it’s worth looking to 1930s Germany. Did shallow Christianity – a lack of deep-rooted Christian beliefs – make Germans more susceptible to the Nazi party’s message during the years of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power? In the less-than-fertile Christian soils of Germany, there was room

Saturday

James Forsdyke

Was the Post Office’s Horizon software used to wrongly convict a man of murder?

Robin Garbutt, the postmaster who lived above the village shop with his wife, Diana, was a popular figure in Melsonby, North Yorkshire. The last time I saw him, I was six years old, bouncing on the trampoline in my grandparents’ garden. Robin had travelled to visit the village where he’d grown up to see his mother, and had stopped by to ask my grandfather for tips on growing vegetables. A few weeks later, his face was plastered across the newspapers: Garbutt had been arrested for killing his wife.  A year later, in 2011, Garbutt was convicted of murder: sentenced to life in prison, the 58-year-old remains behind bars. But is he guilty? Garbutt

Zoe Strimpel

How Israel is failed by its war of words

Sitting in a room at the Israel Defence Forces’ Hakirya base in Tel Aviv, I listened – along with a room full of delegates, mostly European MPs and members of the House of Lords – to a briefing from an IDF spokesman. He was a British-born reservist recruited back to the front lines of Israel’s communications war, and he did not inspire. He repeated basics about what happened on 7 October, and the horror of those events – something that everyone in that room, all there as pretty major fans of Israel, desirous to see it triumph in its hour of adversity, already appreciated. We wanted new information: dispassionately and

Friday

Alexander Larman

Prince Harry’s libel case humiliation

As flies are to wanton boys – and this particular boy is as wanton as it gets – so Prince Harry is to court cases. Most Spectator readers would avoid the stern and unforgiving – not to say financially ruinous – environs of the Old Bailey for all they were worth, but the endlessly litigious Duke of Sussex has been haunting its halls with the grim determination of a man who knows that right is very much on his side. Until now, it would appear. The news that Harry has withdrawn his libel suit against the Mail on Sunday has been greeted with a mixture of surprise and disbelief. That

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Will the high street slump spell trouble for the economy?

Consumers seem finally to have thrown in the towel: they are no longer propping up the economy. After a year in which the predicted recession kept failing to arrive, the high street finally ran out of steam in December with a hefty 3.2 per cent fall in sales volumes compared with November. Non-food was down 3.9 per cent. Year on year, according to the retail sales figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning, sales were down 2.8 per cent in December. This would appear to mark a headlong descent into recession – except that GDP figures published last week appeared to show the opposite: the economy

Thursday

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Are the Saudis really ruining boxing?

There’s a new mantra in championship boxing. Try speaking to anyone from that world – a big-time promoter, trainer or fighter – and before you can get a word in, they’ll say something like: ‘I’d like to thank His Royal Highness King Salman Abdulaziz al-Saud, the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and, of course, the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, His Excellency Turki Al al-Sheikh.’ In the last few years, the Saudis have spent hundreds of millions, more than anyone else can offer, to stage the world’s greatest bouts on their holy sand. They’re trying to take over golf and football too. Everyone in the

Alexander Larman

Charles, Kate and the changing attitude to royal illness

It was a detail that most novelists or screenwriters would have rejected as being too much. Shortly after yesterday’s announcement that the Princess of Wales will be hospitalised for up to a fortnight after abdominal surgery at the London Clinic, a second proclamation was made. We learnt that King Charles is to attend hospital next week for treatment of an enlarged prostate. One day, two senior royals, two health conditions. Yet what makes the events newsworthy beyond mere gossip and speculation are the differences – and similarities – in how the stories have made it into the public domain. Most well-wishers will be grateful for the relative candour with which

Andrew Tettenborn

In defence of Katharine Birbalsingh’s prayer ban

We won’t know for some time what the outcome of the claim that a London school has broken the law by refusing to allow ritual prayer on its premises will be. But whatever the result, the case neatly exposes the problems of the rights culture we now live in. The school is Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela School in Brent, an non-religious establishment where roughly half the intake is Muslim. Until recently Muslim pupils engaged in a daily prayer ritual. But after this created disorder, unpleasantness and some intimidation of teachers, the governors introduced a blanket ban on all ritual prayer, apparently with the result that calm and order were quickly restored. 

Sarah Kuszynski

Self-driving cars are not yet safe enough to hit the roads

Despite warnings that self-driving cars are not yet safe to hit the roads, the government is pushing ahead with making automated vehicles (AVs) legal. But their rush to get driverless cars approved before the technology is ready is irresponsible – and could turn our roads into a giant testing ground. This would bring risks not only to other drivers, but to those using the AVs themselves. The government has heralded AVs as the start of a transport revolution and the solution to road safety concerns. Indeed, research has suggested that AVs could create 342,000 additional jobs in the UK, bring in £66 billion to the economy by 2040 and improve the mobility of the disabled and the elderly.

David Shipley

Why do we send the wrong people to prison?

In prison, I met a lot of men who said they shouldn’t be there. They presented detailed mitigations, and listed all the flaws in the prosecution’s evidence. The truth is though, that most of us had been sentenced for crimes we’d committed. There were very few men inside who shouldn’t have been there. Mark, though, did not belong in prison. I first met Mark in HMP Wandsworth when he became my fourth cellmate. He was a quiet lad, with dark floppy hair which he hid behind, avoiding my gaze. It didn’t take long to realise something was very wrong with him. We watched the news; we watched the soaps: Mark

The Spectator

Christmas crossword solution: the winners

The first prize of £100, three prizes of £25 and six further prizes of The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie (Vintage) go to the following. In addition, the first four winners will each be sent a bottle of champagne. First prize Jennifer Church, Oxford Runners-up Greg Watson, Great Chesterford, Saffron Walden; Jill Briggs, London W14 ; L.J. Purkiss, Prittlewell, Essex Further runners-up Dr John Doran, South Birmingham; A. Kent, Wantage, Oxon; J.M. Eunson, Edinburgh; Ian Whiteman, London SW15; Frances Wood, Upper Sundon, Beds; Patricia Gibbs, Barrow-upon-Soar, Leicestershire

The Spectator

Letters: how to pardon the postmasters en masse

Delaying justice Sir: Charles Moore argued (Notes, 13 January) that sub-postmasters in the Post Office/Horizon scandal should not be pardoned ‘en masse’, but rather that each case should be treated individually. He gives two reasons: the possible future risks associated with precedent and because each claim, being different, merits separate consideration. Theoretically, he may well be correct, but this would inevitably add many more wasted years to the endlessly protracted legal process. It would serve only to delay further the justice and the compensation to which the victims are entitled. The only real beneficiaries would, of course, be the lawyers. Richard Longfield Weston Patrick, Hampshire Ancient precedent Sir: Charles Moore

Robert Hardman

The day the King could have killed Rishi

We are familiar with the perfectly sensible convention that monarchs should not fly with their heirs. But should they also be discouraged from foraging for their prime ministers? While researching my new book and film on the King, I was at Balmoral to see the visit of the Sunaks. At one point, the King vanished into the grounds of Birkhall to pick mushrooms for his guests, who also included Sir Nicholas and Lady Coleridge. It’s a favourite form of royal relaxation (the King was picking Birkhall mushrooms on the day the Queen died). When I mentioned this to a privy counsellor last week, he was troubled. He pointed to the

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The one question the Covid Inquiry must ask

The Covid Inquiry grinds on. The process is ‘too focused on office tittle-tattle’ says one former minister in my newspaper this morning. Possibly – though it may also be that the warped focus consists in the media reports filtering out the worthier but more boring stuff. The inquiry (say others) is too focused on the speed or otherwise with which Britain locked down, rather than whether we should ever have locked down as we did in the first place. Others too complain that the inquisition is overly focused on ‘gotcha’ headlines when better results would flow from a sober review that accepted that everyone was doing their best. There’s truth

The Spectator

Is the Iowa caucus really so important?

State of play Iowa became the first US state to pick its election candidates in 1972. How many times since then has the small Midwestern state predicted the eventual winner? – On nine out of 13 occasions, Iowa has chosen the Democratic candidate who went on to win the nomination. However, in three of those years, the winner was the sitting president, with an obvious advantage. – In the first two contests ‘uncommitted’ received more votes. The year when the nationwide primaries least followed the example set by Iowa was 1992 when Tom Harkin won 76% of the vote and the eventual winner, Bill Clinton, just 3%. – As for

James Bartholomew

Why isn’t Lenin as reviled as Hitler?

Around the corner from me is a barber’s shop decorated with black-and-white photographs of icons of the 20th century. James Dean is there with the usual cigarette hanging out of his mouth; Marilyn Monroe is perching on the edge of a pool table. A poster for the film Taxi Driver is alongside a photo of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack – and also a photo of Lenin. I guess the aim is to appear edgy, alternative and rebellious. But obviously there is no image of Hitler. That would be unacceptable: Hitler was a fascist who invaded countries and killed millions of people. It would be tasteless to display an

Peter Jones

Is government wise to follow the will of the people?

Given the failure of all political parties to deal with the Post Office’s wrongful conviction of so many postmasters, ITV’s re-enaction of the story has been a triumph for democracy (Greek demo-kratia ‘people-power’) in rousing the people to force parliament to act. But will justice be done by the popular demand that parliament overrides past legal process by mass exoneration? Classical Athens (5th-4th century bc) saw the invention of the world’s first and last democracy, in which all citizens (defined as registered Athenian males over 18) met almost weekly to take every decision in the sovereign Assembly about how their city state should be run, while those over 30 also