Society

Wednesday

David Shipley

Why Britain’s prisons will only get more violent

Prison and probation staffing is approaching dangerously low levels’ said the Ministry of Justice in a document they published by mistake this week. It’s hardly surprising to those of us who know about our failing prison system. In June, the Justice Select Committee published the results of a detailed survey of prison staff showing that half of frontline staff don’t feel safe at work. Frontline staff are ‘band 3-5’; the officers, senior officers and custodial managers who spend their days working with prisoners. Their responses make grim reading. Over 80 per cent said morale was poor in their prison. More than 60 per cent of those officers said their mental health wasn’t

Katy Balls Katy Balls

My morning spin class with Rishi Sunak

It was 7.31 a.m. and I was late for my Notting Hill spin class. That meant the lights weren’t on when I entered the studio and scrambled to find my bike. Bleary-eyed, I noticed a man waving at me as I approached Bike 49. It was Rishi Sunak, on the bike next to mine. ‘I promise I booked this one,’ I said, so he didn’t think I was stalking him. The instructor started to shout motivational phrases at us and blast out Britney Spears and Dua Lipa. For the next 45 minutes, Rishi and I sweated it out side-by-side. This week an LA TikToker had a similarly surreal experience when

Dot Wordsworth

How the Chancellor of the Exchequer created cancel culture

I used to worry on holiday about not having cancelled the milk, which would grow into a phalanx of doorstep bottles semaphoring an opportunity to burglars. Now whole classes of society are ostracised or cancelled for disagreeing with the declared ‘values’ of companies.  Sir Robert Goodwill, the chairman of the environment committee, told the Daily Telegraph last week that banks are trying to ‘cancel the countryside’ by closing the accounts of shooting businesses. Hunts had found the same thing. It’s funny that cancel culture and the Chancellor of the Exchequer share the same origin, linguistically. They go back to the latticework barriers marking off the judge’s space in an ancient

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how can I make my untidy twin look better? 

Q. I have a public profile and have always looked after my personal presentation, but my identical twin has never bothered with hers. She wouldn’t dream of covering up the broken veins on her cheeks and her hair is quite grey and frizzy. Now I’m getting married and worry that my sister’s appearance could cause some of the clients I’ve invited to rethink my ‘relevance’. What should I do, Mary? – Name and address withheld A. Explain to your twin that after you had paid for a hair and make-up artist for the wedding, you came under pressure from a colleague whose hair and make-up-artist daughter could get urgently needed publicity

Toby Young Toby Young

Am I allowed to make fun of women’s football? 

I’m loath to write about the current Fifa World Cup because criticising women’s football is textbook ‘misogyny’ – at least, that’s what Sadiq Khan thinks. The centrepiece of his recent ‘Have a word’ campaign is a video of young men discussing the women’s Euros, with viewers encouraged to press a button saying ‘Maaate’ when a line is crossed. The idea is to nip such behaviour in the bud before it escalates into violence. One particularly noxious youth describes the Euros as a ‘joke’, clearly marking him out as a potential rapist. She made a complete horlicks of her spot-kick, firing the ball over the crossbar But is that really evidence

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Just stop HS2!

I have two suggestions for HS2. Either stop it or make it stop. The spiralling cost and delays are reason enough to rethink the project, never mind the changes to patterns of rail use since 2021. Any economic case based on pre–pandemic projections needs to be revisited. So one option would be to stop the project completely. But what if the project goes ahead in a reduced form to save face? Well, in this case, the need for speed is questionable. The value of speed to passengers is far from linear. For instance, cutting a journey time from four hours to two, as the TGV did between Paris and Lyon, is

Matt Ridley

Science fiction: the crisis in research

The president of Stanford University, the neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, has announced his resignation following an investigation into allegations of fraud and fabrication in three of his lab’s scientific papers, including one cited as the most important result on Alzheimer’s disease in 20 years. The report exonerated him of committing the fraud but found he had failed to correct the errors once they were brought to his attention.  The pandemic provided a glimpse of how far scientists will go to bend conclusions to a preferred narrative The vast majority of scientists are honest, but recent years have seen many cases of scientific misconduct come to the surface, implying there is a

Douglas Murray

Hell is the Ulez hotline

‘Only boring people get bored’ is what we were all told as children. What we were not warned about was that boring things can also make you boring. Boringness is infectious. Or so I have come to believe. Due to the backlash against the extension of Ulez, the Mayor has come up with a fresh brilliant idea Thanks to my own low tolerance for boring things, I didn’t race to find out about the Ulez scheme. These soul-destroying acronyms often arrive at the peripheries of my vision, where I hope they will remain. Yet they make their remorseless push forward. So this week, with boring inevitability, I had to call

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The hypocrisy of Nigel Farage’s supporters

Much heartened by the barrage of criticism I’ve been receiving from both Spectator and Times readers, I’m returning to the subject of Coutts’s customer selection. I’ve learned over the years how to spot the emergence of a herd opinion, not just by the volume of shouts but also by how members of the herd begin copying and repeating – often word for word – each others’ phrases; and what we now call ‘memes’ take shape. My experience is that when public sentiment begins to attract these characteristics, it is almost always wrong. I never forget the advice of my late grandfather, Squadron Leader Leonard Littler: ‘Whenever I hear of a

The Spectator

Letters: ‘supercops’ won’t save us from rising crime

Crime stoppers Sir: If the Tories’ reputation on crime lies in the hands of these innovative supercops, then it will be sadly doomed, no matter how enterprising they may be (‘Rise of the supercops’, 5 August). Whether we like to believe it or dismiss it as woolly liberalism, the police and courts have a limited impact upon crime. The reality is that crime is driven by powerful social and economic forces, not the effectiveness of the local constabulary. In a liberal democracy, leaving the police to deal with any complex social problem, particularly one as diverse and intractable as crime, is fraught with danger. The police do have an important

David Baddiel

The vibrancy of the Edinburgh Festival

I’m doing a show in Edinburgh for the first time in a long while. It’s fun, although I feel I’m basically wearing a scent called Elder Statesman (I’m hoping it smells more of ancient leather and authority than incontinence). I get stopped in the street a lot, including by some people who have not mistaken me for Ben Elton. One of the two shows I’m doing, at Assembly Studios at lunchtime, is a Q&A based around the themes in my books Jews Don’t Count and The God Desire. The idea comes from doing loads of literary festivals, where I tend to get interviewed by a luminary for 50 minutes and then there

The Spectator

Is the rest of the world still working from home?

Scout’s honour Thousands of teenagers were evacuated from the World Scout Jamboree in South Korea as flooding, a heatwave and then the threat of a typhoon affected the event. What exactly is a ‘jamboree’? – Lord Baden-Powell adopted the word for the first gathering of scouts at Kensington Olympia in 1920. But the word itself can be traced back to the mid-19th-century American West, when it was used for a drunken revel – presumably not what Baden-Powell nor subsequent heads of the scouting movement would encourage. – The first documentary evidence for use of the word is in the report of a murder trial in the New York Herald in

Andrew Kenny

Beware South Africa’s rising star

Cape Town ‘Shoot to kill! Kill the Boer, the farmer! Kill the Boer, the farmer! Brrrr! Pah! Pah!’ These were the words chanted in fine voice by Julius Malema to a rapturous crowd of 100,000 at South Africa’s biggest stadium in Johannesburg on Saturday 29 July. Malema was celebrating the tenth birthday of the EFF, the political party he founded and leads. EFF stands for Economic Freedom Fighters. It is dedicated to fighting economic slavery. It declares itself Leninist–Marxist, wants to seize private property (as Malema’s hero Robert Mugabe did in Zimbabwe), plans to nationalise the banks and the mines and enforce total state control. The EFF is the fastest-growing political

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The truth about ‘gender-affirming care’

‘My breasts were taken away from me (and) the tissue was incinerated.’ Every word of destransitioner Chloe Cole’s testimony to the US Congress was harrowing. But it was her calm, frank description of a doctor’s destruction of her breasts when she was just 15 years old that haunts the mind. Such a sinister violation of the bodily integrity of a teenage girl should rankle the conscience of modern America. ‘Before I was able to legally drive’, she said, they ‘amputated’ my breasts. They were ‘perfectly healthy’, she told a panel of shocked politicians, but still they were cut off and burned, like trash: ‘I had a huge part of my

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 12 August 2023

All bridge players who fancy their chances on the international circuit have been deprived of major events since lockdown, until this year. And now, frankly, we’re being inundated: Iceland in late January, the Lederer in February, Camrose in March, the World Bridge Tour in Sopot mid-May, the Open European Championships in Strasbourg in June, the Spingold in Chicago in July, the recent Chairman’s Cup in Sweden. And coming up, the World Transnationals in Marrakech which I’m skipping because, guess what, I’m knackered! Some were played online but that doesn’t carry the same prestige, and prestige is everything in the sporting world. This instructive hand was played by my friend Waseem

Melissa Kite

Will I have to forcibly flood my house to sell it?

‘Come on, let’s get a move on with filling in all the forms and we could have this done and dusted in three weeks!’ the estate agent bellowed at me down the phone. ‘Are you perhaps confusing the sale of my house with your Tesco delivery?’ I said. But in spite of myself, I took on board what the agent was saying, and I believed it was possible that in three weeks’ time I would be moving house. Nine weeks later, I wonder why I did that. Perhaps it was because a terrible disorientation seems to descend when one is going through the moving business. The impending upheaval and ever

Taki

In praise of minding your own business

Athens With energy bordering on the demonic, I strut around an ancient stadium trying to make up for the debauchery of the past two weeks in Patmos. Alexandra has flown back to Gstaad and I’m staying with my oldest friend, Aliki Goulandris, whose magnificent country house north of the capital brings back very pleasant memories. Just saying her name, which is Alice in English, makes me think of my youth and my two tiny children who both grew up in this house. It was the golden age: Davis Cup, karate championships, polo in Paris, sailing the Nefertiti and Bushido, Lolly and JT and Alexandra swimming in the pool, and parties

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

You don’t need to ‘Queer’ the Mary Rose

I have an idea for the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth. My idea is for a Mary Rose Ultimate Experience – a funfair ride which replicates the experience of those 500 young boys and men as they sank with the great Tudor warship. There’ll be no need for expensive visuals because it would have been dark down there below deck and I’m hoping the passengers on my ride will be flung violently from side to side because first aboard will be the director and trustees of the museum and there they will have to stay until they promise never again to publish anything remotely like the piece that has just

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Why aren’t we more afraid of China?

Electric cars made in China could be turned off remotely, immobilising them instantly and crippling the West. That terrifying prospect was highlighted by Professor Jim Saker, president of the Institute of the Motor Industry. ‘The car manufacturer may be in Shanghai and could stop 100,000 to 300,000 cars across Europe thus paralysing a country,’ Saker warned. Yet few people seem bothered. Nor was there much reaction to Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith’s claim on LBC this week that Beijing may have used a hidden device in Rishi Sunak’s car to track the PM’s movements. If this allegation involved another country it would likely have lead the headlines for days. But, because