Society

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters: The horse that brings hope for the future

Conservative approaches Sir: Matthew Parris (‘My idea of a true Conservative’, 17 June) makes a reasonable case for small c conservatism, but he’s wrong about Brexit and he’s wrong about Trussonomics being clearly unconservative.  ‘Brexit come what may’ was the natural small-c reaction to the creation and evolution of an undemocratic EU superstate which (and we must take them at their word) was set upon ‘ever closer union’, the logical end state being a federal Europe and severe limitation of self-determination. No conservative would instinctively prefer foreign governance, even if it appeared at the outset to be benign. Trussonomics proposed short-term borrowing to fund tax cuts in order to recreate

Martin Newland

The moral case for becoming a foster carer

Three months ago I travelled with my wife to Ireland’s west coast for a reunion with our first foster placements, now settled with their new family. The two sisters, then aged five and two, had been removed by police from their home in pyjamas and driven to our house in 2017. I remember trawling around shops the next day, panic-buying clothes and pushchairs while my wife fed them, read to them, bathed them and administered nit treatments. The five-year-old stayed with us for two years. Her younger sister left us after a few months for another temporary foster family. Both now sail, ride horses, play rugby and are about to

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 24 June 2023

I never stop being amazed by the freakishly good memories of top bridge players. Last week, at the European Transnational Championships in Strasbourg, I got into a lift with the Italian international Fabrizio Hugony. Looking at my name tag, he remarked: ‘I’ve played against you before. It was at the Mixed Championships in Belgium about 12 years ago.’ I was flattered – but why had he remembered me? ‘Because you asked a very strange question,’ he replied. ‘The bidding went one club, double, I bid a spade, and you asked if I was showing five spades.’ He remembered that? ‘In England people often have only four after a double,’ I

Melissa Kite

The wit and wisdom of the horse dentist

The horse dentist put down his medieval-looking implements and pinned me to the spot with a look. ‘Those guys,’ he said, reaching into the yawning jaws of the builder boyfriend’s black and white cob to check the back teeth he had just filed, ‘load horses and take them from England to Ireland and from Ireland to England all day, every day, so don’t make a fuss. I know you. You’ll worry about everything and drive them mad. Just let them do their job. They’re professionals. Right, that one’s done.’ And he handed me back Jimmy, who was licking his newly done gnashers. We stood by the field gate in the

Taki

My night with Rod Liddle

‘I was 12 when I first got laid.’ ‘Where was that?’ ‘In Middlesbrough.’ ‘How the hell did you get lucky at 12 in Middlesbrough, when I only managed it at 15 and on my father’s boat off Cannes in 1952?’ ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ This was no tortured confession by some doomed poet or gender-confused feminist, just party banter between the great Rod Liddle – who went Bulwer-Lytton on me – and the poor little Greek boy. The setting: the Old Queen Street garden where The Spectator is located and where we celebrated the sainted editor’s 50th birthday. Before I get to that, though, what is it

Andrew Tettenborn

Humza Yousaf’s troubling plan for an independent Scotland

Even with Nicola Sturgeon politically hors de combat, Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf has made it clear he intends to forge ahead with her plans to hold a second independence referendum. The Scottish government has produced its blueprint for the future constitution that could flow from such an independence vote. Any voter contemplating taking up Humza’s offer and voting Yes in a possible Indyref2 would do well to read this document closely. They could be letting themselves in for a great deal more than they thought. Put simply, the plan is to make the SNP’s soft-left Bruntsfield-style ideology an almost irremovable feature in Scottish public life. A lot will be familiar. The incredibly generous

Tuesday

Winston Marshall

Michael Shellenberger: Exposing the censorship industrial complex

80 min listen

Michael Shellenberger, Twitter Files journalist and founder of Public is in London to discuss the international censorship industrial complex. He explains to Winston how the complex web of government, big tech, intelligence and media collude to suppress speech in the UK, America and beyond. Michael will be continuing the debate on the censorship industrial complex with Russell Brand and Matt Taibbi on Thursday 22nd June at Central Hall, Westminster. Get tickets here: https://www.musicglue.com/good-faith-productions/events/2023-06-22-censorship-industrial-complex-exposed-westminster-central-hall

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

Is this the end of the road for Meghan?

Has there ever been a more brutally effective piece of social satire than the South Park episode that mocked Harry and Meghan?  Since it aired in mid-February, the Duchess of Sussex, previously a seemingly ubiquitous and unstoppable cultural phenomenon, has effectively withdrawn from public life. She’s made just one formal appearance – at an awards show, which ended in the farce of disputed paparazzi car chase claims – and has given precisely no interviews.  The couple’s media empire also seems to be imploding. Spotify has axed their $20 million (£15.6 million) podcast deal, with senior exec Bill Simmons ungallantly labelling the pair ‘fucking grifters’. There are reports, too, that Netflix has grown

Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

Britain ‘ready to assist’ in search for missing submarine

Britain is ‘ready to provide assistance’ to the rescuers searching for Titan, the submarine which lost contact while on an exploratory visit to the Titanic, a spokesman for Rishi Sunak said this afternoon. The rescuers are facing a race against time as the craft runs out of oxygen. The expedition left for the site of the shipwreck – around 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland – on Friday. The dive started on Sunday morning, and the submarine lost contact with the Polar Prince, the surface vessel, an hour and three-quarters after the descent started. It has been missing ever since. British adventurer Hamish Harding is one of those thought to be

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The stupidity of the Oscars’ diversity quotas

Is anyone actually watching the Oscars anymore? Until ‘The Incident’ between Messrs Smith and Rock last year the direction of travel was clear. Between 2014 and 2020 the televised Academy Awards lost almost half their viewers, the number falling from 43 to 23 million. This year, in March, they were at 18 million with punters only tuning in perhaps to see some bitch-slapping between Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep. As the importance of cinema has dwindled, the po-faced self‑importance of the film industry has grown The first Oscars were presented in front of 270 people with tickets costing five dollars and a ceremony which ran for 15 minutes; now it’s

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Is Macron having a Meloni makeover?

Emmanuel Macron never does anything by chance, so why did he allow himself to be filmed downing a beer in one on Saturday night? The clip, which has gone viral, has angered puritanical progressives. Green MP Sandrine Rousseau has branded Macron’s behaviour ‘toxic masculinity’.  The president of the French Republic slaked his thirst just before midnight in the dressing room of the Toulouse rugby team in the Stade de France. Toulouse had beaten La Rochelle to win the French rugby championship, an event at which Macron had been introduced to the players before kick-off. He ducked out of a similar invitation in April at the final of the French football

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Harry and Meghan may still have a bright podcasting future

After Spotify sacked/let go/‘mutually agreed to part ways’ with, in the words of one of its executives, those ‘f-ing grifters’ Harry and Meghan, there have much discussion about where it all went wrong for the podcasting pair. The general consensus is that the Sussexes may have overestimated public interest in anything they have to say beyond self-pitying tittle-tattle. Their recent statement that they’re not even going to do that any more makes you wonder what else they have stocked up in their ideas cupboard, and why the world would want to pay it their attention. The duff duo haven’t even been paid the full $20 million (£16 million) they signed

Monday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Are mortgage rates the next crisis?

The average two-year fixed mortgage now sits at 6 per cent, according to financial data group Moneyfacts – just below the 6.65 per cent reached in December last year, after the fallout from Liz Truss’s mini-Budget. Five-year fixed rates aren’t too far behind, at 5.7 per cent. For many of the 2.4 million homeowners whose mortgages are up for renewal between now and the end of next year, this is, at best, cause for alarm. At worst, it’s an alert to a crisis. Later this week, we’ll get last month’s inflation data – and the next rate update from the Bank of England. Threadneedle Street’s dilemma is only getting worse. Between

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Why Japan doesn’t do Pride

Want to avoid Pride month? Bit tired of the, almost literally, in your face, carnival of uninhibited sexual freedom we see on our streets throughout June? Then come to Japan. It’s not that Pride doesn’t happen here at all, just that the Japanese for various cultural and historic reasons, don’t make a song and dance – or a borderline street cabaret – out of it. Japan’s version ‘Rainbow Pride’ is held in April and lasts just two days. It was back on this year for the first time since 2019 and was apparently reasonably well-attended. I say ‘apparently’ because I saw no sign of it, nor watched or read a

Jason Pack and Guy Fiennes

Russia’s sexual health crisis just got militarised

As Ukraine pushes forward its long-anticipated counteroffensive, Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu seems more concerned with reeling in his institutional rivals, not least the wildcard Wagner group. But internecine institutional tensions are not the only affliction plaguing Russian occupation forces. As temperatures rise and the Ukrainians press the frontline, infectious diseases remain another challenge for Russian forces. In Wagner’s assault on Bakhmut, the self-proclaimed ‘most powerful army in the world’ made a slow, eight-month advance and suffered soaring casualties, of which 90 per cent were reportedly prisoner recruits. One in five of the 50,000 Wagner prisoner recruits who made up the bulk of their assault on Bakhmut were HIV positive – and a staggering 80 per cent

Debbie Hayton

Rishi Sunak is no transphobe

Does a woman have a penis? Of course not. Until recently, that basic biological fact was accepted by almost everyone. Perhaps it still is but, with the transgender thought police waiting in the wings, it is a truth that few politicians are willing to articulate. After a leaked recording emerged – allegedly from a meeting of the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs – we can perhaps be clearer about Rishi Sunak’s views. Referring to Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, the Prime Minister pointed out that, ‘You may have noticed Ed Davey has been very busy…trying to convince everybody that women clearly had penises’. Sunak added: ‘You all know, I’m a

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The idiotic campaign against Elizabeth Gilbert

At the end of the 1920s, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues appeared in English as All Quiet On The Western Front. For its readership in this country a devastating, grinding war against an enemy they had been encouraged to think of as bestial and inhuman huns was in recent memory. Here was a book that told how the war had been for those huns in the opposing trenches; that showed it wasn’t all that different for them at all. Nobody, as far as I know, even as our cities were filled with broken, disfigured, disabled and traumatised veterans, attempted to suppress Remarque’s book on the grounds that

Sunday

Colin Sutton

Levi Bellfield must never be allowed to marry – and I should know

There is a rare outbreak of unanimity on social media. Save a few lawyers who – correctly – point out that it is not currently against the law, nobody thinks there is a moral case to allow Levi Bellfield to marry in prison. For many I am sure it is simple. He is serving four whole-life orders for murder and attempted murder and thus to him everyday privileges are forfeit. As he deprived his victims of them. It is part of his punishment. It might be surprising that the man who led the team that condemned him to those sentences supports their stance yet disagrees with their reasoning – but

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

In defence of Howard Donald

The mob has claimed another scalp. This time it’s Howard Donald’s. The Take That star has been found guilty of likecrimes. That is, he liked some ‘problematic’ tweets, including a tweet that said – brace yourselves – ‘Only women have periods’. For this, for giving his approval to a statement of biological fact, he’s been damned as a vile bigot and dumped from July’s Nottingham Pride Festival. Next time someone tells you cancel culture is a myth, point them to the unpersoning of Howard Donald. For here we have a good bloke, a veteran of the boyband era, being publicly shamed not even for anything he said but simply for

Francis Pike

Britain’s war in Malaya

On 17 June 1948, seventy-five years ago this weekend, the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee declared war on the ethnic Chinese Malayan Communist party (MCP). Except he did not call it a war; he called it an ‘Emergency’. It seems that the British plantation and trading companies in Malaya, such as Sime Darby, Guthrie, Harrisons & Crossfield, London Tin and Dunlop, demanded that the word ‘war’ should not be used because it would make their businesses uninsurable. By contrast the Chinese Malayan insurgents called ‘the Emergency’ the Anti-British National Liberation War. The Malayan War, which lasted for 12 years, might better be called the ‘Forgotten War’. Of all the Cold