Society Archives

Friday

1 Sep 2023

Ukrainian pupils face an impossible dilemma

Today, almost five million Ukrainian pupils have gone to school – in person or remotely. Most didn’t have festive assemblies with flowers, songs and first graders reciting poems by heart, as they would have done before the war. The first of September doesn’t feel like a day to celebrate anymore. Today, every third child in Ukraine stayed at home – schools that could not build bomb shelters or are in the 60-mile danger zone from the frontline have not been allowed to reopen. These precautions are in place as gatherings of Ukrainians, even children, can attract Russian missiles and drones. Lockdown demonstrated, starkly, the detrimental effects of ‘home learning’. Screens

Kristina Murkett

The Tories’ dreadful handling of the school concrete crisis

Pupils are due to head back to school over the coming days, but now it seems that some of them might not. Yesterday, the government told schools to prepare evacuation plans for buildings made with RAAC concrete. This morning, schools were instructed to close these buildings altogether. This has caused immense disruption to at least 156 schools who now have to arrange alternative provision a mere couple of days, or in some cases, hours, before their students were due to crowd their corridors. To add insult to injury, schools will have to pay for these new measures themselves, and some parents have already been warned that disruption may last until 2025.

Kate Andrews

GDP revisions show UK economy almost 2% larger than thought

It’s not often that we see a GDP revision as startling as the one published today. In its Blue Book for 2023 – which includes updated methods for a range of calculations – the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has upgraded the size of the economy in the final quarter of 2021 by 1.7 per cent. This means that by the time the Omicron variant hit, the UK economy was actually 0.6 per cent above its pre-Covid level – not 1.2 per cent below, as previously stated. This is a staggering difference. It was thought as recently as this summer that GDP still had not returned to its pre-pandemic levels.

Steerpike

The Manchester Evening News’s shameful treatment of a hotel employee

What is the purpose of a local newspaper? Time was, it was to stand up for local people against the tyranny of corrupt councils, daft bureaucracies and badly-behaved businesses. It appears though that the Manchester Evening News has expanded its remit lately: to include tattling on service workers for not toeing the line on identity politics. In a piece yesterday – originally headlined ‘Alleged “transphobic” conversation heard at hotel hosting Pride accreditation’ – the MEN reported that a burlesque performer was ‘shocked’ to hear a ‘transphobic’ conversation when having a coffee at the Malmaison Hotel in central Manchester last Friday. Dev Mistry, a 30-year-old who was staying in the hotel for Pride weekend,

Robin Ashenden

What Brits don’t understand about life in Russia

When I tell people in England I’ve just returned from several years abroad and they find out the country was Russia, it is a real conversation stopper. Their minds short-circuit, they seem to gulp in front of you. What question do they ask next? Do they mention the war? Talk about Tolstoy? ‘Ah… Interesting,’ one woman said to me finally, as though looking at someone’s awful etchings and wanting to be polite. ‘That must have been…difficult for you,’ said another. How can I get across to them that, before February last year, it might have been ‘interesting’ but wasn’t difficult at all? It’s depressing when a country you have warm memories

Kate Andrews

Talk of a housing ‘crash’ isn’t quite what it seems

House prices dropped more than was expected this month, falling 5.3 per cent compared to August last year. The value of the average home in Britain has, on average, fallen by £14,600. This marks the biggest annual decline on record since the financial (and housing) crash of 2008/9. So, is a housing crash imminent? Could we be seeing one right now? There are a few reasons to be cautious about the data. Nationwide’s metrics are based on mortgage approvals (cash purchases are not included), which have dropped significantly – by about 20 per cent this year, compared to 2019. Higher interest rates have meant that fewer people want to sell right now, and fewer

Jake Wallis Simons

Why Iranians don’t hate Israel

One is an oppressive regime that guns down its own people, promotes a radical Islamist theology and hangs gay people from cranes. The other is a liberal democracy that protects the rights of minorities, upholds the freedoms of speech and assembly, and grants equality to women and gay people. Yet when weightlifters from the two countries shook hands after a tournament, it was the oppressive regime that reacted with fury. Courage is readily found among Iranian sportspeople, as it is found among the Iranian people themselves I speak, of course, of Iran and Israel. Such is the intensity of the Israelophobia at the heart of the Islamic republic that when

Julian Jessop

Is printing too much money the real cause of inflation?

Every month, the Bank of England publishes new data on the flows of money and credit around the UK economy. Most commentators focus on the ‘credit’ part – particularly the amount of mortgage and credit card borrowing. In contrast, the ‘money’ part rarely gets a mention. This is understandable. After all, good luck explaining what ‘M4ex’ is down the Dog and Duck. (If you must know, it is essentially the notes, coins, sterling deposits, and short-dated bonds held by UK households and non-financial companies). But the failure to discuss ‘money’ is worrying. Even the Bank of England acknowledges that money growth is an ‘important indicator of developments in the economy’. If anything, inflation

Debbie Hayton

Danielle McGahey should not be allowed to play women’s cricket

Danielle McGahey is set to become the first transgender cricketer to play an official Twenty20 international. The 29-year old Australian-born opening batsman has been named in the Canadian women’s squad that will take on Brazil, Argentina and the USA next week in Los Angeles. The ICC Women’s T20 World Cup Americas Region Qualifier is hardly the Ashes, but at stake is a possible place in the 2024 Women’s T20 World Cup in Bangladesh. McGahey moved to Canada in 2020 and, it seems, promptly transitioned. Is there something in the Canadian water? But joking aside, Justin Trudeau’s Canada has, it seems, garnered a reputation for yielding to transgender ideology. Now, a

Thursday

31 Aug 2023

Brendan O’Neill

The sinister online mobbing of Róisín Murphy

In the past they would put a witches’ bridle on women who yapped too much. Any woman judged to be a gossip or a hysteric or just too darn opinionated risked having this iron muzzle attached to her head to keep her babbling tongue in place. That’d shut her up. Today, more subtle methods of tongue-clamping are used on outspoken women. Who needs metal contraptions when women can be Twittershamed into silence? Public humiliation and the threat of social ostracism have replaced muzzling as the preferred method for taming shrews. Cancel culture grows fatter and more crazed with every retraction it extracts Just ask Róisín Murphy. The great Irish songstress,

Andrew Tettenborn

What’s the point of forcing murderers like Lucy Letby into the dock?

We all recoiled when Lucy Letby, a nurse of all things, was convicted of killing seven babies in cold blood. But this murderess had one more card up her sleeve. When called to court for the last time to receive the inevitable sentence – not only life, but in her case whole-life – she casually declined to appear. By doing so, Letby added insult to injury, constraining the grieving parents of her victims to watch the judge address an eerily empty dock. Under the present law she was arguably within her rights. But not for much longer. The government, with it seems the full backing of Labour, has promised to change things. In

Kristian Niemietz

Growing the NHS workforce isn’t enough to fix its problems

Earlier this summer, NHS England published its long-term workforce plan. It has the backing of all major political parties and outside of health policy circles it did not attract much attention at first. But now, as its full implications (especially in fiscal terms) are becoming obvious, that is changing. A new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has modelled what this plan, if fully implemented, would entail. The NHS currently employs 1.5 million people, or about 6 per cent of the total workforce and a little under 40 per cent of the public sector. Under the health service’s workforce plan, that number will rise to 2.3 million by

Julie Burchill

Why musicians can’t stand politicians liking their songs

I was amused to hear that Eminem has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy – who ‘rapped’ in his youth under the name ‘Da Vek’ – warning him not to use the song ‘Lose Yourself’ again. Ramaswamy sang it onstage at the Iowa State Fair whilst on the campaign trail two weeks ago. Mr Em did allow Joe Biden to use ‘Lose Yourself’ in his 2020 presidential campaign for a television commercial though, and even shared it online with the caption: ‘One opportunity… #Vote.’ Bit of an unfortunate choice there – if any politician doesn’t need encouragement to lose himself, it’s the befuddled, bemused and

Wednesday

30 Aug 2023

Theo Hobson

The time is ripe for a liberal revival of the Church of England

Things are looking up for the Church of England. Its painful era of disunity is behind it, or soon will be. A major revival is on the cards. For the first time in about 40 years it is possible to imagine a church that is united enough on gender and sexuality, and in tune with the wider culture I am being ironic, you are probably thinking. For this is the poor old C of E we’re talking about, which lurches from crisis to crisis. No, I am not being ironic. We are so used to negative stories and predictions about our national church that good news is hard to process.

Alexander Larman

Heart of Invictus shows Prince Harry at his best

After a year that would have exhausted any normal human being – with the past 12 months including, but not limited to, the death of his grandmother, the coronation of his father, the publication of a much-ridiculed memoir, several court cases and a succession of increasingly embarrassing tell-all interviews – Prince Harry could hardly be blamed for wanting to take the rest of 2023 a bit easier. The man who emerges from Heart of Invictus is a good deal more likeable and accessible than the arrogant, petulant figure in his last Netflix show Certainly, his relative absence from the recent spotlight suggests that he agrees with the rest of the

The Spectator

Would Richard Wagner have approved of the Wagner Group?

Wagnerian exile Would Richard Wagner have approved of the Wagner Group? While he is believed to have harboured anti-Semitic views and his music later became an inspiration for Adolf Hitler, the young Wagner was a left-wing activist. In 1849, in spite of serving with the Saxon court in Dresden, he joined an uprising against Prussian rule. He is believed to have been involved in making and distributing grenades and to have acted as a lookout. Several of his associates were killed or arrested and sentenced to death after the uprising failed, but Wagner fled to Switzerland. His exile had a happier outcome than that of Yevgeny Prigozhin, and he was

Charles Moore

How do you solve a problem like Rod Liddle?

‘We must never hide anything,’ declared the director of the British Museum, Hartwig Fischer, three years ago, when criticised for disrespecting its greatest founding genius, Sir Hans Sloane, because, through marriage, he had profited from slave labour. Sloane’s Rysbrack bust was now to be presented, he said, ‘in the exploitative context of the British Empire’. So it would take a heart of stone not to laugh now that Dr Fischer has been forced to resign for failing to raise the alarm – even with his chairman, George Osborne – that hundreds of objects have disappeared from the museum’s collections through a long-standing inside job. He disparaged the exterior expert who

Rod Liddle

It shouldn’t be a crime to sniff a goshawk

I notice that the naturalist Chris Packham has been reported to the police for the ‘crime’ of sniffing a goshawk. I had not known that this was an offence – if I had known, I would not do it quite so often, or at worst, made sure nobody was watching me as I approached the birds, tumescent, in my anorak. Goshawks are diurnal, so night-time does offer the opportunity for a good sniff when they are asleep in their nests. The problem is they are also quite rare, largely due to persecution from gamekeepers and, no matter how you dress it up, snorting the scent of a more widespread raptor,

Tristram Hunt

How Damien Hirst ruined Devon

There are few better locations to resist la rentrée than the wilds of Exmoor. The late August heather and gorse. The hidden coves. The bracken and this year’s superb crop of blackberries. Then the rain. So much rain (though of course the reliably incompetent South West Water still has a hosepipe ban in place). The only blot on the landscape remains Damien Hirst’s ill-conceived 65ft statue of ‘Verity’ – a flayed pregnant woman, with her innards on show, standing on a pile of books and holding a sword – which dominates Ilfracombe’s harbour. It exemplifies the worst of public-private art, lacking any meaningful connection to the history or culture of

Ian Thomson

Thankfully, Tony Blair was nowhere near my Sicilian holiday

Sicily is far removed from the gracious suavities of Tuscany. With the souk-like atmosphere of its markets and obscure exuberance of life in the old Cosa Nostra towns, the Mediterranean island is halfway to Muslim Tunisia. The British Tuscanites who descend on the hills around Florence during the summer holidays as part of their ‘Toujours Tuscany’ dream – Tony Blair, Sting, David Cameron – are thankfully nowhere in evidence. In our post-Godfather world no history of Sicily would be complete without mention of the Mafia. The word is said to derive from the Arabic mahyas, meaning ‘aggressive boasting’: for almost three centuries until the Norman Conquest of 1061, Sicily was an