Society

Wednesday

Iain Macwhirter

Trans activists will regret picking on Joanna Cherry

Another feminist getting no-platformed in Scotland is hardly news. Poets, writers, students, academics, comedians and, of course, film-makers have become inured to being cancelled north of the border if they stray from the dogma that trans women are women. Normally this kind of thing happens in the shadows, without publicity. People just find, like the poet Jenny Lindsay, that their livelihood disappears. Cancellation is the standard operating procedure for the handful of trans activists who seem to have a stranglehold on Scottish cultural life and education institutions. But this time they took on someone willing to fight back.  The SNP MP for Edinburgh Central, Joanna Cherry, refused to go quietly when the Stand Comedy Club, which was

Ben Lazarus Ben Lazarus

The godfather of AI: why I left Google

Ten minutes before I meet Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘godfather of AI’, the New York Times announces he’s leaving Google. After decades working on artificial intelligence, Hinton now believes it could wipe out humanity. ‘It is like aliens have landed on our planet and we haven’t quite realised it yet because they speak very good English,’ he says. He also tells me that he has been unable to sleep for months. ‘It’s conceivable that the genie is already out of the bottle’ Hinton, 75, revolutionised AI not once but twice: first with his work on neural networks, computer architecture that closely resembles the brain’s structure, and then with so-called ‘deep learning’,

Peter Jones

Why Baroness Benjamin deserves her coronation role

Baroness Benjamin has suggested that King Charles’s choice of her to join the coronation procession demonstrates that he is in favour of ‘diversity and inclusion’. What would the ancients have made of that, let alone of ‘equality’ and ‘identity’? ‘Equality’ had little purchase. Politically, male citizens had a vote in democratic Athens and (of sorts) in republican Rome. Otherwise there were human experiences of ‘levelling’ or ‘belonging’ in e.g. the battle-line, at childbirth, at the games, religious festivals and initiations. For the rest, it is important to understand that the ancient world was an unforgiving place and took no prisoners. The ‘normal’ family attempted to survive on the strength of

Richard Chartres

The religious roots of the coronation

It is many years since anyone seriously entertained the doctrine expounded by Shakespeare’s Richard II: ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king. The breath of worldly men cannot depose the deputy elected by the Lord.’ Nevertheless, on Saturday King Charles III will be solemnly anointed in Westminster Abbey in a ceremony whose roots are ancient but whose meaning is fresh. Behind the screen, in a very personal act of commitment, the King accepts his calling from God The Israelites asked for a king so that they could be ‘like all the nations’. Anointed monarchs have a long history but

The Spectator

How heavy is King Charles’s crown?

Uneasy lies the head In a 2018 BBC documentary Elizabeth II commented on the weight of the crown at her coronation, complaining that if you wore it for too long ‘your neck would break off’. What will be the burden on Charles III’s head? – At the moment of the coronation Charles will wear St Edward’s Crown, made for Charles II in 1661. That weighs 2.07kg. Prior to 1911 it weighed 2.6kg – although both Victoria and Edward VII were spared having to wear it. – However, for his departure from Westminster Abbey that crown will be removed and he will wear the Imperial State Crown instead, which weighs 1.06kg.  –

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

On looking without seeing

Guadix is a windy, dusty town on the slopes of the dry side of the massive ridge that is the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia, Spain. These slopes are the rain-shadow badlands of the province of Granada: a place few foreign tourists visit. The other side of the mountain, the Mediterranean side, is called the Alpujarra and seems a world away: verdant, flowery slopes with orchards, pastures and little whitewashed villages clinging to them: a landscape and people made famous by the English travel writer Gerald Brenan, who lived there. Our music was not saying anything to these birds, any more than their chirruping said anything to us But our side

William Moore William Moore

Vials of ammonia, shaky scaffolding and sword fights: memories of Elizabeth II’s coronation

Lady Rosemary Muir was 23 when she received a letter from the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, informing her that she had been chosen as one of the six maids of honour to assist the Mistress of the Robes in the coronation of Elizabeth II. That was in January 1953. From then until the coronation day in June, the maids of honour were the subject of many excited articles. The press dubbed them ‘the Lucky Six… envied by every other woman in the land’.  Envied they certainly were, but luck had little to do with it. Lady Rosemary tells me it was no surprise to her that she was

Yannic Rack

The battle to restore Britain’s hedgerows

‘I don’t know if hedgelaying is a dying art. But there’s a lot of old hedgelayers that are dying,’ says David Whitaker to chuckles from some of his fellow craftsmen. The occasion is the annual hedgelaying championship, organised by the National Hedgelaying Society, of which Whitaker is secretary. In a good year, the event draws around 100 competitors and a few curious spectators to a marquee in a muddy field in Hampshire. Britain’s oldest hedge dates back to the Bronze Age. Thousands of miles of hedgerow were laid in the late 1700s after the Enclosures Act carved up the countryside. There’s a formula for working out how old a hedge

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Is Britain really ‘closed for business’?

Is Britain really ‘closed for business’? That, we’re told, is the view of US ‘Big Tech’ as expressed by Activision Blizzard – the company whose most famous product is the violent videogame Call of Duty – in response to the blocking by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of Activision’s proposed $70 billion merger with Microsoft, which would have given the latter a dominant position in the emergent field of ‘cloud-based gaming’. You don’t need to know exactly what that means to be worried that the world’s digital giants take a dim view of the UK as a marketplace and investment destination. But are they right? Some pundits have

The Spectator

Letters: How to save red squirrels

Fire-fighting Sir: Your editorial raised the persistent problem of predicting major international disasters in a timely enough way to prepare (‘Eclipses and revolutions’, 29 April). The US academic Joseph Nye said that a good model for wars is to identify three types of cause: deep (the logs for a fire), intermediate (the kindling) and immediate (the sparks). The dilemma is that there are often so many crises on the brink of igniting that preparing early for dozens stretches many governments. Struan Macdonald Hayes, Kent Brain drain from Africa Sir: The majority of Sudanese doctors working in Britain will have been trained in Sudan at local government expense (Eclipses and revolutions’,

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

I’m a sucker for Tucker Carlson

I was asked on Tucker Carlson Tonight only once, while in New York about two years ago, and I turned the invitation from America’s most popular cable news commentator down. Did I worry that while discussing my previous Spectator column, I might put my foot in it? The subject of immigration is always a minefield. No, I believed computer modelling of the astonishingly high number of illegal immigrants really living in the US had attracted far too little press, and a sympathetic host would have given these staggering figures a wider airing. Obviously, then, I was instead loath to appear alongside a notoriously racist, far-right, xeno-/Islamo-/homo-/trans-phobic purveyor of deceit and

Nigel Jones

King Charles must learn from Spain’s Juan Carlos’s mistakes

As he basks in the warm glow of respect, and even affection, surrounding his coronation this weekend, King Charles should recall the story of his distant cousin and near namesake ex-king Juan Carlos of Spain as a warning of how speedily a popular monarch can go from hero to zero. The ties between Spain’s Royal Family and our own are close in blood and warm mutual regard. Both families are direct descendants of Queen Victoria, with Spain’s current King Felipe calling our late Queen Elizabeth ‘Aunt Lilibet’; our new monarch reportedly had a private lunch with Felipe’s disgraced dad Juan Carlos only last month. The sad downfall of Juan Carlos

Hardeep Singh

Does Britain have a problem with ‘Sikh extremism’?

Terror threats from Islamist and far-right terrorists are depressingly familiar to Brits, but other faiths are not immune from the plague of extremists who might seek to harm others. A recent report by Colin Bloom, the government’s faith engagement advisor, touched on lesser-known ideologies like ‘Buddhist nationalism’ and ‘Hindu nationalism’. It also raised concerns about ‘Sikh extremism’. But how much of a problem is this particular form of radicalism in Britain? ‘Small pockets of Sikh communities’ in Britain are involved with ‘subversive, sectarian and discriminatory activities,’ according to the report. The numbers here are small. According to the 2021 census, there are 524,000 Sikhs in England and Wales, which equates

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 06 May 2023

‘The more I practise the luckier I get.’ This is the mantra used against those of us who are dumbfounded by the awfulness of picking up endless Yarboroughs at rubber bridge and playing against the only pair in the room to bid a slam in duplicate matches. But what about the other end of the spectrum? This hand was shown to me by Nick Sandqvist and must be a contender for the luckiest hand ever played. It occurred in the last round of the Easter Guardian team’s event, but he was adamant that it made no difference to the end result. They had won the tournament already! What a waste!

Robin Oakley

Kitty’s Light is the horse of the year

John Trotwood Moore, one-time State Librarian of Tennessee, was a racist and defender of the Ku Klux Klan. But in the saying for which he is best remembered he did get one thing right: ‘Wherever man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilisation we will find the hoofprint of the horse alongside it.’ I was reminded of his words because of those used by trainer Christian Williams after his Kitty’s Light had won a famous victory in last Saturday’s bet365 Gold Cup at Sandown Park. Christian is not only an outstanding trainer of staying chasers, he is also the father of a little girl called

Melissa Kite

Why I’ve sacked my estate agent

The estate agent flashed a sarcastic smile and said it wasn’t so much that the market was in a bad place, rather that my property got so much ‘negative feedback’. I stared back at her, fuming. I had popped into the offices of this agency to ask for my key back, which I forgot to do last year when I gave up on them being able to sell my house. This summer, I’ve given it to a friend at a smaller agency, hoping he does a better job than the city slickers at this well-known outfit where they all shout ‘Rah-de-blah-de-rah-de-blah!’ no matter what I say to them. Miss Smarty

Jeremy Clarke

The pros and cons of kissing

Marketa stands on one side of me, Catriona on the other. Marketa is Czech and my carer. Catriona is my new wife. I’m lying on my back in dove grey flannel pyjamas. At seven I’d woken to the most excruciating pain. Where the pain is located exactly I’m not sure. It is among my various lung and upper skeletal tumours, I’m guessing. Shoulders. Shoulder blades. Ribs.Lungs certainly. Once an hour I am permitted to press the morphine button at the end of the cable for pain relief. It goes beep – a jolly noise! After the second go, however, I have no pain relief and I’m counting the minutes to

Taki

Critics are ignoring the best play in New York

New York The concept of creativity and invention can be a doubled-edged sword. It can be fresh, uplifting and original, like the off-Broadway play directed by Michael Mailer that I’ve just seen, or it can be a phoney rip-off of a Shakespeare classic, a terrible modern take on Hamlet, blackness and homosexuality that I have not seen and do not plan to. What makes me laugh is the reviewer at the Bagel Times who gave a good one to the latter, Fat Ham, as objective a judgment as, say, an appraisal of Mao’s Little Red Book would have been in a Beijing daily circa 1964. Favouring the message over the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Does the UN want to defund the French police?

My first instinct was to check the date: was it actually April 1st on Monday? On realising there was no mistake the second reaction was one of wonderment that anyone still takes the United Nations seriously.  The once respected organisation held its Universal Periodic Review in Geneva on Monday, and France didn’t fare well.   As a succession of shamelessly panjandrums slapped down France, its police were once more coming under sustained attack by hordes of anarchists and far-left extremists Beacons of liberty lined up to trash the Republic for what they described as the heavy-handedness of its police in recent weeks. Russia, Iran, Venezuela and China expressed their grave

Tuesday

Joanna Williams

Where was Stella Creasy when other mums were being harassed?

Parliament’s ban on the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok cannot come soon enough. But it’s not just cyber security we need to worry about. Our social media happy MPs clearly need saving from themselves. Matt Hancock might be the parliamentary champion of toe-curling film clips but other MPs are bidding to out-cringe him.  Labour’s Stella Creasy filmed her response this weekend to a critic who had moved from bombarding her office with emails, to reporting her to social services for exposing her children to ‘extreme views’. Creasy was quickly cleared but the whole situation left her, understandably, angry – not least when police told the MP she should ‘expect to be