Society

Sunday

Mark Hollingsworth

The Caribbean island that wants to claim a Russian super yacht

Earlier this year I asked Gretta Fenner, head of a Swiss Foundation that investigates oligarchs and financial crime, about confiscating the assets of wealthy sanctioned Russians and using the proceeds to support the Ukrainian military and rebuild the country. I was surprised by her response. ‘Confiscating assets without proof they are the proceeds of crime is akin to expropriation,’ she told me. ‘This is done by dictators not by democracies that adhere to the rule of law and international human rights. Financial support for Ukraine is vital and urgent. But if western governments undermine their own commitment to the rule of law to obtain that money, then they are violating

Mark Solomons

Get a grip, YouTube hustlers. Don’t watch football with the camera on

Once upon a time, football fans used to come home from seeing their side lose, and they would shrug their shoulders, kick the cat or get roaring drunk. But now, a new generation of self-obsessed morons are taking out their angst by switching on a video camera, putting on the latest multi-sponsored £100 football shirt of their team and, literally, screaming into the microphone. Welcome to the world of fake outrage spouted by, predominantly, young and often photogenic YouTubers and vloggers. Unsurprisingly, it is the ‘big’ clubs that attract the most prominent of this new breed: mostly Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal.  After United lost 4-3 away to Bayern Munich

Saturday

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

London’s e-bikes are out of control

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rental electric bicycles are becoming a bit of a scourge in London. Unlike the old Boris bikes (can we still call them that?), they do not need to be docked, meaning that they are frequently abandoned on the pavement, to the annoyance of pedestrians. Neither do they need to be left in designated parking zones, like e-scooters. More infuriatingly, their motors often cut out when you pass from one borough into the next, so they are often dumped on the border. Yes, seriously.  The current Wild West arrangement is damaging the experience for the consumer and hollowing out the market The reason for

Peter Wood

The incredible meltdown of the Center for Antiracist Research

Professor Ibram X. Kendi has run into a spot of trouble. His fantastically funded Center for Antiracist Research – more than $43 million (£35 million) in the first two years alone – at Boston University is in financial meltdown. What happen to the $10 million (£8 million) from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey? Where are the donations from discount retailer TJ Maxx, food emporium Stop & Shop, and exercise empire Peleton? Why did the centre lay off almost all its staff last week?  No one at Boston University can give a straight answer. The story has made it into the national press, but the most illuminating details come from the student newspaper, the Daily Free

Jawad Iqbal

It’s time football scrapped the Saturday afternoon TV blackout

The Premier League needs to wake up and smell the coffee: there is nothing sacrosanct about football matches that kick off at 3 p.m. on Saturdays, especially in an age when televised games are so ubiquitous. It is time to ditch the arcane rule that imposes a TV blackout of Saturday afternoon games – for the sake of the game as well as fans everywhere. Richard Masters, the Premier League chief executive, confirmed last month that its next broadcasting rights deal – due to start in the 2025-26 season – could see a big rise in live games on TV, increasing from the current 200 to somewhere in the region of 270.

Zoe Strimpel

In defence of the noughties

Russell Brand always seemed repellant to me, but that had little to do with the fact he became famous in the noughties. And yet, since allegations have emerged, we keep being told repeatedly that Brand is a typical toxic product of the early years of the new millennium.  ‘Resurfaced clips give a sobering reminder of noughties culture,’ says the BBC. ‘Nasty noughties: a culture reckoning?’ asks the Week. The noughties was a ‘cesspit’ – ‘a laddish era (that) allowed Russell Brand to thrive,’ said the Daily Telegraph. ‘Back in the noughties,’ began one of many pieces on Brand, ‘pop culture was hard and nasty…It was a period of viciousness and

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Why ‘wokeness’ is doomed to fail

There are two dishonest conversations about wokeness, or identity politics if you prefer the less contentious term. The first from conservatives is wearily familiar. For some on the right, ‘woke’ is now a synonym for ‘anything I can’t abide’. Overuse has made the insult meaningless. On the left, the dishonesty lies in the denial that a new ideology even exists. Nothing has changed, we are told. To be what Conservatives sneeringly call ‘woke’ is simply to be a decent person who cares about the rights of others as progressives have always done. “They’re calling you ‘woke’ if you call out bad things,’ cried the actress, Kathy Burke. ‘If you’re not racist, you’re woke. If you’re

Friday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Falling wages aren’t stopping shoppers from hitting the high street

It looks like a case of recession postponed – again. Figures from the Office for National Statistics this morning show that retail sales volumes were up 0.4 per cent in August. These figures followed a shock fall of 1.2 per cent in July reported last month (and even this has been revised downwards to a fall of 1.1 per cent). Over the past three months – perhaps a better guide than month on month figures – sales volumes are up 0.3 per cent. Somehow, in spite of wages, which until last month had been falling in real terms, consumers are finding the means, and the will, to carry on spending. Today’s

Tom Bennett

After Covid, it’s not surprising kids aren’t coming back to school

The Education Act of 1880 made it compulsory for all children in the UK to attend school between the ages of 5 and 10. The 1918 Education Act saw that rise to 14; in 1944 it went to 15. In 1972, the age crept up to 16, and finally in a gasp of heroic ambition, 2013 saw it hit 18 for full time education. Children, history insisted, had to be in school, for their own good, and for the good of society. And largely, society agreed with that. That is, until March 2020, when every school, nursery and college sent them all home again. Suddenly not only did children not

Thursday

Kelvin MacKenzie

The Rupert Murdoch I knew

I was astonished when Rupert Murdoch announced he was stepping down as chairman of News Corp. He always told me he would be carried out of the building with his boots on. At 92, and after a 70-year career, he deserves a rest, but my experience of him was that he was at his most relaxed when working and quite anxious when having to be sociable. What surprised me most was that he has taken the title of ‘chairman emeritus’. The expression that most sums up his attitude to life is: lower the lifeboat, I’m in I remember that when he hired me as editor of the Sun he had

Michael Taube

Trudeau is right to hold India to account

Justin Trudeau was on the receiving end of nonstop media attention last week. There was a slew of difficult meetings, stilted photo-ops and tense handshakes with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 summit in New Delhi. He was either being excluded from many discussions, or pulling himself out of them.  Trudeau also pushed for a rule-of-law agenda that would have had stronger language. He condemned Vladimir Putin and Russia for its ‘illegal invasion of Ukraine’, and then used language that was seemingly directed at Modi and India. ‘Diaspora Canadians make up a huge proportion of our country’, he told world leaders in attendance, ‘and they should be able to express

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Have interest rates finally peaked?

The Bank of England has voted to maintain interest rates at 5.25 per cent, rather than opt for a 15th consecutive hike. Reports that the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee decision was on a knife edge this week were bang on: the MPC voted 5 – 4 to hold the rate, with four members voting to increase it by 0.25 percentage points. The decision was down to a battle between data sets released this week; wage growth and the latest inflation figures. The Bank places a lot of weight on both sets when making its base rate decisions – but for this month’s meeting, they yielded conflicting results. Wages, for the

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Why don’t we talk more about sexual morality?

The Russell Brand story shows, once again, how sexual morality is only usually debated in relation to allegations of abuse made against male celebrities. I’m tired of the way this happens – and think it’s a pity that ethics around sex aren’t talked about more widely. The status quo means that the scope of the discussion is narrow, and its tone self-righteous.  To widen the scope is dangerous, of course. It means admitting that our culture is in a major muddle about sex, and it’s a muddle that affects us all: there’s no enlightened camp. We don’t know what sex is. Can it be safely separated from committed relationships? Can

Robin Oakley

The murky world of bloodstock agents

Top owners are quitting horse racing because bookmakers nervous of a government and a Gambling Commission that know remarkably little about the horse-racing industry and ignore even the modicum they do know are making it harder and harder for them to have a significant bet, closing the accounts of those who refuse to acquiesce to ever more intrusive demands about their personal finances. The biggest bets, though, are made without interference from officialdom by those who buy unridden, untested and expensive racehorses before they ever set foot on a racecourse purely on their looks and their breeding. Some 12,000 thoroughbreds are born each year in Britain and Ireland and at

Douglas Murray

Politicians can’t win on illegal migration

It is eight years now since The Spectator sent me to Lampedusa to see the boats coming in. That was at the start of the 2015 migrant crisis. The island, which is home to just 6,000 locals, had just buckled under the weight of another 1,300 arrivals. I followed them to Sicily and then on up and across the continent. If I may be self-referential for a moment, it was on Lampedusa that I realised the scale of the problem and got the opening lines of my resulting book, The Strange Death of Europe: ‘Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the

Daniel Rey

Radio 4’s In Our Time is still the best thing on the BBC

For 25 years, Melvyn Bragg and his guests on Radio 4’s In Our Time have discussed most things from antimatter to Zoroastrianism. Their conversations have attracted a live audience of two million, and provide the BBC’s most-listened-to weekly podcast. At 9 a.m. today, In Our Time will broadcast its one thousandth episode. How has the BBC’s flagship intellectual programme achieved such success and longevity? By doing something the corporation rarely does: respect listeners’ intelligence.  In Our Time’s success should be a lesson to broadcasters to stop dumbing down Across the BBC, there seems to have been a fiat not to commission anything that might be called elitist. The Today Programme is a

Bruce Anderson

You have to be truly incompetent to eat badly in Paris

Paris has enough great restaurants to maintain its claim to be the world capital of gastronomy. That said, Parisian residents insist that these days, it is possible to eat badly in their city. Yet I still think that this would require especial incompetence. In Brussels, a strong second in the pecking order, it would be even harder. There is a splendid establishment called Comme Chez Soi. Almost 100 years old, it has established a worldwide reputation without losing contact with its roots. The last time I was there, I observed a couple of ladies-who-lunch, Brussels fashion. There was no question of a watercress salad on a bed of lettuce leaves,

Wednesday

Joan Collins

Elizabeth Hurley deserves a damehood

With the boiling, broiling summer here in Provence now at an end, it’s time to start thinking about rehearsing for the tour of my one-woman show based on my new book, Behind the Shoulder Pads. The show opens in Newcastle next week. I’m looking forward to revisiting some of the places that I was evacuated to during the war. Cheltenham, for instance, where as a terrified six-year-old I had to start a strange new school all those years ago. In Brighton, I remember standing at the balustrade with my aunts, seeing the pebbled beach covered with barbed wire and wishing I could go swimming. It’s always fascinating to interact with

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why wasn’t Russell Brand cancelled in his prime?

In 2014, Rolf Harris was convicted of sexual offences against girls. I wrote in this space that this would have represented more of a cultural change in the treatment of celebrities if he had been unmasked at the height of his fame. Current stars, I suggested, are much more rarely denounced: ‘I would not dream of suggesting that Russell Brand is a sex criminal, but we know, from his own account, that he has slept with a great many women.’ He had even, on his infamous Radio 2 show, boasted of sleeping with Andrew Sachs’s grand-daughter, yet ‘the BBC broadcast this as comedy’. ‘If the celebrity wheel of fortune ever went