Society

Tuesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The era of big state spending is here to stay

Lockdown ended, the economy reopened – and public sector borrowing went up. Provisional figures for 2022/23 released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning show that the government borrowed £139.2 billion. This is an increase of £18.1 billion on the previous year, when the economy was still being disrupted by Covid. The figure was made much worse by figures for March this year, when the government borrowed £21.5 billion – £16.3 billion more than in March 2022.  A huge surge in borrowing during the pandemic was to be expected. The government was, after all, paying the wages of 9 million people at one stage through the furlough scheme.

Nigel Jones

Britain’s bloody history in Sudan

A 72 hour truce between rival military factions has been brokered in Sudan’s civil war by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. But whether this one holds, or falls apart like the previous ones, the history of one of Africa’s largest countries is a troubled one. It is also not the first time that an emergency evacuation of British citizens has caused a British political storm.  In 1884, just as today, a British prime minister was under intense pressure to rescue British citizens from savage fighting in Sudan’s capital Khartoum. So violent was the criticism of the ‘dithering’ in Downing Street then, that it almost destroyed the career of the grand old

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Jolyon Maugham’s opening sentence might be the worst of all time

In the first sentence of his book, Jolyon Maugham – the anti-Brexit KC best known for clubbing a fox to death – achieves a mean feat. In 22 words, he conveys his trademark self-pity, self-aggrandisement and capacity for tying himself into pompous knots: ‘The life I have is hard, but I got to choose it, and the road that brought me here I did not,’ Maugham writes in Bringing Down Goliath. It certainly acts as a tantaliser. If this is only the first sentence, what other jewels are contained in the remaining 318 pages? After we’ve picked ourselves up from the floor, it’s worth unpacking – or trying to unpack

John Armstrong

Climate activism must not be allowed to undermine climate science

Student activist Edred Whittingham baffled the snooker world last week by jumping onto the green baize at the Snooker World Championships in Sheffield and detonating a package of orange chalk across the table in a bid to end global warming. A few days earlier, the German government had baffled scientists by shutting down their three remaining nuclear power plants; this despite a despairing open letter from scientists, including two Nobel Laureates, explaining the plants’ potential to reduce Germany’s carbon footprint by up to 30 million tons of C02 per year. As these stories show, there is no shortage of good intentions to save the planet, but there remains scope for

Monday

Andrew Tettenborn

Giving anonymity to paedophiles is a threat to our justice system

Substantial constraints on the freedom of the press tend to accumulate from seemingly small restrictions. Events last week in a court in Antrim in Northern Ireland demonstrate this neatly. A paedophile was caught sending suggestive emails to undercover police posing as prepubescent girls, and went down for 16 months. Who was he? We will never know. Why have human rights led to this boxing in of free speech in favour of the frankly undeserving? Why? The answer is that in court he threatened suicide unless given anonymity. The court gave in to his demand. An injunction now bars any disclosure of who he is for his lifetime, and anyone breaking it,

Theo Davies-Lewis

The backlash to ‘renaming’ the Brecon Beacons is a gift to nationalists

‘As tedious as a tired horse…worse than a smoky house’ was how Shakespeare’s Hotspur described Wales’s national hero, Owain Glyndŵr. Perhaps, as the late Jan Morris wrote of these words for The Spectator, it could be a timeless characteristic of all Welshmen. The Welsh can be defensive, melancholic and (whisper it quietly) prone to self-pity, particularly when it comes to relations with England. Having the English next door, medieval conquerors turned modern ignorant neighbours, will always transfix Welsh imagination and provoke tension. Yet how futile Anglo-Welsh relations have become that the modern-day battlefield of two nations with a rich, shared history, has been entangled into the culture war, with the ‘renaming’

John McTernan

It’s time to forgive Diane Abbott

Diane Abbott is a giant figure in the modern Labour party. As the first black woman ever to be elected to the House of Commons, and the longest serving black MP, she is an inspiration to black and brown communities – especially women – across the country. Abbott also wrote a crass and offensive letter to the Observer, in which she unfortunately, and utterly unsuccessfully, sought to distinguish racism from prejudice – in the process deeply offending the Jewish, Irish, and Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) communities. For a life-long campaigner against racism, this was an especially egregious error. It appears it is now impossible to accept a sincere apology

Sunday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Will Diane Abbott now face the same fate as Corbyn?

It’s the fate of Labour MP Diane Abbott rather than former deputy prime minister Dominic Raab that is dominating the news this afternoon. Although the Sunday papers are filled with details of the series of events that led Raab to tender his resignation following the report into allegations of bullying against him, it’s a letter from the former shadow home secretary – and key Jeremy Corbyn ally – sent in to the Observer that is now making waves. As Steerpike documents, Abbott said in response to a comment piece from last week’s paper suggesting ‘Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from racism’, that prejudice is not ‘interchangeable’ with racism.

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Diane Abbott’s surreal U-turn

It’s sometimes said that there’s a tweet from the surrealist Twitter user @dril to cover everything. So it has proved with Diane Abbott, whose screeching U-turn on a letter to today’s Observer immediately put me in mind of this 2017 classic: ‘issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. You do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them.’’ That captures the comical extent of Ms Abbott’s course correction. The letter as published took issue with the writer Tomiwa Owolade for a piece in which he’d argued, under the headline ‘Racism In Britain Is Not A Black And White Issue’, that Irish, Jewish and

Patrick Porter

Why China might attack Taiwan

China may well attack Taiwan. According to the CIA, President Xi Jinping has instructed his armed forces to be able to strike by 2027. Nothing is certain, and there are no signs of mobilisation for an imminent attack. But beyond that, Beijing’s behaviour is consistent with Xi’s orders. It builds up its assault forces. It strengthens its nuclear arsenal. It steps up its military drills. It increasingly molests Taiwan across the board. And it makes its economy more resilient to sanctions.   We can’t know Beijing’s intent for sure. We do know it covets reunification with Taiwan as the centrepiece of its declared project to restore full Chinese nationhood and create

Vivek Y. Kelkar

Pakistan has reached an inflection point

The holy festival of Eid-ul-Fitr has dawned in Pakistan, marking the end of Ramadan. Celebrations were unusually muted. The month of Ramadan has been harrowing for a large swathe of Pakistan’s populace. All through the month, through the day-long fasts, crowds thronged outside the free food distribution centres across the country, waiting for bags of flour. Sometimes they waited days. Fights were commonplace. Often, the very young or the elderly were injured or even killed in the stampedes. There are far too many of these cases to recount. Food inflation is at a record high of 47 per cent; overall inflation hovered around the 35 per cent mark through March and April. Earlier this month the country’s central bank raised interest rates to 21 per

Nicholas Farrell

Should Italy’s killer bear be sentenced to death?

The female bear that mauled to death a male jogger in the Italian Alps on 5th April was captured this week. Twenty-six-year-old Andrea Papi’s ravaged corpse was naked when found. His shirt and shorts lay many yards away. The killer bear, known as JJ4, is a 17-year-old mother of three cubs and the off-spring of two of the ten brown bears brought from Slovenia to the Trentino region of north east Italy in 1999-2000 under an EU rewilding scheme called Life Ursus. JJ4 was identified as the killer from a DNA match. Two weeks later forestry police captured her after following her tracks in the snow and setting up a

Simon Hunt

The EU must tread carefully in its AI crackdown

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surged in popularity in recent months. ChatGPT alone has swelled to more than 100 million users in a matter of weeks, capturing the imagination of the world for whom the technology had previously been consigned to the realm of science fiction. Scores of companies, from software businesses to manufacturers, are racing to find fresh ways to build its functionality into their operations.  But amidst the excitement, there is also a worry: are we going too far, too fast? Twitter’s owner Elon Musk warned this week that AI could lead to ‘civilisation destruction’. Regulators, alarmed at this explosion in activity, are scrambling to react. They have a

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Has Germany truly come to terms with its Nazi past?

Germany is often lauded for the way it confronts its own past. The Holocaust, the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children, has a central place in collective memory as well as in the memorial landscape of the capital Berlin, where a 200,000 sq ft site is dedicated to it. But campaigners and historians have long argued that the Nazis’ murder of an estimated 275,000 people suffering from mental illness and disabilities has received far less public attention. Now one of the last physical traces of this crime is to be destroyed, causing a new row over how modern Germany should deal with its past. At the centre

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

An appeal to academics

One of Britain’s standout characteristics is the number of world-class universities: we have several top-50 institutions and the Eurozone has none. The brainpower – academics and their students – is a massive national asset. But one that’s not really reflected in our public debate. Whereas American academics are shaping their debate, and often ours, British academics are seldom heard from. This in part a defect in the funding system that incentivises academics to have ‘impact’ in academic papers but not real-world debate (as opposed to the US, whose universities have far closer links to real-world companies and their research divisions).  In the UK, the national debate about the great social,

Emma Webb

Art is eating itself

In his curious little book about Flying Saucers, Carl Jung took an interesting detour into the psychology of modern art.  His contemporaries, he said, had ‘taken as their subject the disintegration of forms’. Their pictures, ‘abstractly detached from meaning and feeling alike, are distinguished by their “meaninglessness” as much as their deliberate aloofness from the spectator’. Artists ‘have immersed themselves,’ wrote Jung, ‘in the destructive element and have created a new conception of beauty, one that delights in the alienation of meaning and of feeling. Everything consists of debris, unorganised fragments, holes, distortions, overlappings, infantilisms and crudities which outdo the clumsiest attempts of primitive art and belie the traditional idea of skill’. ‘It is the beauty of

Saturday

Patrick West

A split within the radical green movement was inevitable

Ever since Monty Python created their internecine, bickering and ridiculous groups of freedom fighters – the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front – for their 1979 film The Life of Brian, it’s always been easy and tempting to mock and deride the fissiparous nature of ideologues and tin-pot revolutionaries. Those who believe in the purity of a cause tend to have a semi-religious mindset – and consequently one semi-divorced from reality – which brooks no heresy from orthodoxy. Thus extreme, quasi-cult movements are always prone to split into factions. And so it goes with the radical green movement, which at its worst excesses does resemble a bizarre cult: witness

Terry Barnes

RIP Barry Humphries

It was not just Barry Humphries who died on Saturday. It was that towering skewerer of pomposity and humbug, and gate-crasher of Royal boxes, Dame Edna Everage. It was Australia’s roving cultural attaché and Australian Minister for the Yartz, Sir Les Patterson. It was pathetic Melbourne suburban pensioner, Sandy Stone. It was colonial hellraiser Barry McKenzie. It was a host of other characters, who burst forth from Humphries’s determination to be different in a world that worshipped conformity, and his witheringly sharp eye for the absurdities of the human condition.  Like another hugely-talented man of many characters, Peter Sellers, Humphries kept the real him from most of the wider world. But Dame Edna, Sir Les, Barry McKenzie and all the rest were still

Barry Humphries

Why does no one dress for dinner at Claridge’s any more?

Barry Humphries has died at the age of 89. This was his last diary for The Spectator in our 2022 Christmas issue. F.Scott Fitzgerald declared in an excellent late story that ‘the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things’. It is certainly what I am striving to do. I have far too much stuff so I’ve decided a little culling is needed. Some weeding out imperative, deaccessions inevitable. I’ve started with books; I’ll end up with people and finish with me. I kneel on the floor of my book room with a large cardboard box at my side. Do I really need all those

Alice C Hughes

Covid’s origins and a disturbing Nature study

Ever since the world was forced into lockdown in March 2020, the question of where and how Covid-19 appeared has captivated scientists and the wider public.  Tracing the source of the virus could be invaluable in preventing future pandemics, yet the quest to find Covid’s origins has been deeply politicised, which in turn has altered the course of research, collaboration and dialogue. Sadly, as a recent publication by Chinese scientists in Nature shows, we are still a long way from getting to the bottom of what happened in Wuhan in 2020.  The problems with finding the origins of the virus began almost as soon as the potential significance of Covid was realised. Soon after the