Society

Thursday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Would Jesus really be against the Rwanda Bill?

Sitting in the Chamber late on Monday afternoon for the Lords debate on the UK-Rwanda treaty, I was impressed by the standard of oratory. Most of the best speeches came from those – Lords Goldsmith (the Labour one), Kerr of Kinlochard, Anderson of Ipswich – who argued that the treaty was not, in itself, proof of the government’s contention, which the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to turn into law, that Rwanda is now a safe country. Not for the first time, I felt an unease about how the government has got itself into this tight corner. But then up popped the Bishop of Gloucester: ‘I will

Richard Dawkins

This week’s diary

Monday and Tuesday I gave over to two long conversations with Arvid Ågren, a Swedish biologist who wants to write a scientific biography of me. As the author of The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution, he knows the subject inside out. Disconcertingly, he seems to have read every word I’ve ever written, and has an almost telepathic familiarity with my entire stock of humorous anecdotes. I wouldn’t put it past him to divine what my mother, who died at 102, would certainly have said: ‘But I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to write a biography of you?’ He’s now going to start looking for a publisher, and she would no

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Starmer has got the culture war all wrong

I’ve decided that I would like President Trump to win the next American presidential election, solely because it will disappoint Hugo Rifkind. I realise that such a statement could only possibly come from a shallow, petty-minded individual and that what should concern all of us is the, uh, stewardship of the free world. But there will be plenty of columnists suffused with gravitas and import to argue those odds one way or the other, leaving me to plough my own rancorous and spiteful furrow. Hugo wrote a very Rifkindy piece for the Times about whether it was necessary, or otherwise, to report the US elections in an honest, truthful and

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Prince Edward has ‘gone on a journey’

Say what you like about Prince Edward, but he has never usually been one for stepping into the limelight – in contrast to his siblings and nephews. Yet, during the course of his two-day official visit to South Africa, the Duke of Edinburgh made some remarks that attracted international media interest. Speaking at the British High Commission in Pretoria on Monday, Edward – commonly acknowledged as the most low-key senior member of the Royal Family – said: ‘I know the world is not in a happy place at the moment. If I can be quite frank, men aren’t doing a very good job at the moment. So therefore I am

Rory Geoghegan

Why is the British Transport Police launching a bursary for British Africans?

Some of Britain’s police chiefs are in a total pickle when it comes to race, not least as a result of them rushing to embrace critical race theory and anti-racist ideology in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the United States in 2020. Whether actually captured, or simply pretending to be, they have committed policing to a political course that risks ending very badly. The latest development has seen a police force agreeing to fund a bursary for a law student, but only if they are ‘British African’. At a time when many of our public institutions are happy for you to identify however you like, something tells me

Tuesday

Ed West Ed West

Britain isn’t a free country

I’m old enough to remember when ‘it’s a free country’ was a phrase people used in conversation. It feels like it was the kind of thing they said regularly, either when someone asked permission to do something or when commenting on some particular eccentricity. Can I sit there? It’s a free country. You want to walk around dressed up as a pirate? Well, it’s a free country.   Perhaps it reflected a self-conscious British sense of themselves as freedom-loving people – which isn’t really true, or at least hasn’t been since 1914 – or maybe it was a Cold War thing. But I don’t think I’ve heard the phrase in at least 20 years,

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The age of outrage has arrived

It’s an outrage! The dictionary definition of ‘outrage’ in this sense is ‘something that is grossly offensive to decency, morality or good taste’, or resentful anger caused by this. The frequency of outrages these days seems to have gone up by multiples. But is that really the case? It often feels these days that there is simply too much mad stuff going on, day in day out. Let’s have a look at the last few weeks. As usual, something crazy happened every couple of hours. Jews were assaulted by a racist mob in Leicester Square, and the police took half an hour to show up, after ten 999 calls. This

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why the Tories should think twice about pre-election tax cuts

Are Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak asking the right question as they approach the spring Budget? For the Chancellor and Prime Minister, the key issue is ‘how can we cut taxes in a way that will get us credit with voters?’ But polling by YouGov for today’s Times suggests voters might want them to ask a different question about improving public services, with 62 per cent saying that the government should prioritise spending more on public services rather than cutting taxes. Hunt won that argument, but seems to have forgotten about it now he is Chancellor The curious thing is that Hunt used to make a similar argument when he

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why is Zelensky echoing Putin’s rhetoric?

Today is Ukraine’s Day of Unity which necessarily had to be marked with an expression of national pride. However, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to issue a decree ‘On the Territories of the Russian Federation Historically Inhabited by Ukrainians’ represented not simply that, but an open political challenge to Moscow, and one which strangely echoed Putin’s rhetoric. The decree begins castigating Russia for oppressing Ukrainians ‘in the lands historically inhabited by them,’ which is defined as the ‘modern Krasnodar, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kursk and Rostov regions’ – a large swathe of south-western Russia. From this, it demands the creation not just of ‘an action plan for preserving the national identity of

Annabel Denham

Why is measles on the rise?

Having endured months of restrictions on our freedoms to deal with Covid-19, we now face a major health threat entirely of our own making: vaccine hesitancy. Measles – a centuries-old contagious disease which can lead to serious complications – is on the rise. Hospitals in Birmingham are dealing with their biggest outbreak in years. Health experts are warning that, unless more children are vaccinated, more admissions should be expected. This should worry, but not surprise us. In some areas and groups in London, coverage of the first MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) dose is as low as 69.5 per cent. Approximately 10 per cent of children in the UK are unprotected from

Nicholas Farrell

Bologna is rebelling against the 30 kph speed limit

Ravenna You’re not supposed to mock the afflicted, I know, but I laughed when I read the news that the left-wing citadel of Bologna has introduced a 30 kph (19 mph) speed limit. Forcing the Italians – a nation of famously crazy drivers who make fabulous sports cars – to drive no faster than cyclists is to deprive them of an essential element of what it means to be Italian. Poor Italians. Is nothing sacred? Not even speed? Probably, thank God, not even globalisation can change the Italian psyche I’ve lived for so many years cheek by jowl with the Italians and their ins and outs that I must confess I

Harry Mount

Starmer is wrong to defend the National Trust

Keir Starmer is drawing up his battle-lines for the next election. First, he came for the public schools, pledging to whack VAT on school fees. Now he’s going for the traditionalist wing of National Trust members.  In a speech today, he accuses the Tories of ‘waging a war’ on charities and civic society. He claims the Conservatives have denigrated the National Trust by accusing it of pursuing a ‘woke’ agenda: ‘In its desperation to cling onto power, at all costs, the Tory party is trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect.’ The National Trust was once a byword for high-minded thought So

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