Society

Tuesday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Has government borrowing really been brought under control?

To what extent have the public finances really been brought under control? This morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics reveals that public sector net borrowing reached £16.7 billion in February. This is more than double the figure from February 2022 of £7.1 billion, and also well above the consensus estimate of around £11 billion.    It is the highest February borrowing figure since records began, primarily driven upward by the Energy Price Guarantee, which continues to see the government cap the unit price of energy and subsidise the rest. Last February, Russia was only starting its illegal invasion of Ukraine; now the public sector net borrowing figure reflect all that’s

Danny Shaw

The Met police is in a dire state

For the past 12 months, the Metropolitan Police has been in the organisational equivalent of a body scanner. Every vital organ of this 194-year-old beast has been examined in detail by Baroness Louise Casey and her review team enabling them to understand the Met in a way that no one has done before. The results, from top to toe, are alarming – and demand emergency surgery.  Scotland Yard commissioned the report after one its officers, Wayne Couzens, was jailed for life for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021. The backdrop also includes a string of other shocking scandals that has contributed to plunging levels of

James Heale James Heale

Five things we learned from the Casey review into the Met Police

Today Louise Casey has published her report into the Metropolitan police – and it makes for damning reading. The review was commissioned in the aftermath of the rape, kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by serving Met PC Wayne Couzens in March 2021. Baroness Casey was appointed by the Met to lead an independent probe of its culture and standards of behaviour. She has today concluded that it can no longer be trusted to police itself because of ‘systemic and fundamental’ issues. Below are five key takeaways from Casey’s review. Women abandoned by the Met The Met has continued to throw the protection of women ‘to the side’ even after

Monday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

In praise of the dashcam citizens policing our roads

Jeremy Bentham, thou shouldst be alive and doing a ton through the Mickleham Bends at this hour. Bentham’s great contribution to carceral theory, as most readers will know, was the panopticon. He imagined a prison where the cells were arranged in a rotunda so a guard in the middle could watch every prisoner without having to clop round from cell to cell. What was so clever about the idea, and why it fired Michel Foucault’s imagination, was not that it saved shoe-leather. It was that, because the prisoners didn’t know whether they were being watched or not at any given time, they would be forced to assume that they were and behave accordingly.  Now,

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

It’s no surprise the pandemic boom in cycling is over

In modern society, we live with a conundrum: there’s no need to endure physical discomfort of any kind, but unless you embrace it via exercise, it comes for you in the form of chronic illness. Good exercise can be very painful, however. In the case of the sport of cycling, agonisingly and unnecessarily so. Put it this way, the news today didn’t surprise me. Sales of bicycles have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years, apparently, as the pandemic boom in cycling has turned to bust. Or to put it another way, as tens of thousands of people come to their senses. I speak, of course, as a cyclist

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Credit Suisse’s takeover delivers a shock to bond investors

If the emergency takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS was supposed to calm markets, it is not looking that way this morning. Markets are sharply down in Asia, and the FTSE fell by 1.5 per cent on opening this morning. Banks were the biggest fallers, losing up to 7 per cent of their value. There is a nasty realisation that the contagion from the banking crisis of the past week could have a lot further to spread. This is a nasty shock to investors who thought that bond funds offered much greater security The centre of this morning’s panic are things known as Additional Tier – or AT1 – bonds,

James Innes-Smith

The trials and triumphs of Jacqueline Gold

By all accounts, Jacqueline Gold, the executive chair of Ann Summers who has died aged 62, was a devoted family woman. This may come as a surprise to those who associate ‘the queen of sex’ purely with ‘willy warmers’ and frilly knickers.  Business-minded Gold managed to transform what had been a male-dominated, backstreet cottage industry into a glossy, female-friendly high street brand. Gone were the ‘dirty mac brigade’, those sticky plastic door curtains and the even stickier carpets. To the casual passerby, Gold’s jollily lit Ann Summers stores seemed almost respectable sitting alongside other high street brands.  These days the old purple polyester bras and skimpy knickers come with more outlandish stimuli, such

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The last thing we need is more TV adaptations of Dickens

Allow me to introduce you to a fun game you can play in your own parlour. You take it in turns for someone to shout out the title of a pre-21st century literary classic. The other player responds by giving the blurb of a 21st century television adaptation. It might go, for example; ‘Middlemarch!’ ’ A searing, never-more-relevant exposé of the rural chemsex scene starring Sophie Okonedo’. Or possibly; ‘Mapp and Lucia!’ ‘Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Izzard are locked in combat with the county lines gangs of the Sussex coast’. Or even: ‘Jane Eyre!’ ‘Lesley Manville and Cush Jumbo star in this accessible tale of the devastating mental health impacts of Tik-Tok addiction’.  Nothing sums

Saturday

Matthew Lynn

What can save Credit Suisse now?

It would be enough to buy Tesco twice over. Or Barclays, with almost enough change left over to buy Lloyds as well. Even by the standards of the financial markets 50 billion Swiss francs (£45 billion) is a lot of money. And yet, as it turns out, it is not enough to save Credit Suisse. The Swiss government is searching around increasingly desperately for a way to fix the embattled bank, including this weekend a merger with its traditional rival UBS. But in the end it now looks inevitable that it will have no choice but to take it over and wind it down in the most orderly way possible.

Mary Harrington

Make Sex Wild Again

The notorious Infowars host Alex Jones once opined that he didn’t like the government ‘putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay’. CNBC called this a ‘disturbing and ridiculous conspiracy theory’, and Jones is noted for wild and sometimes actionable claims. But if we read ‘gay’ in the colloquial sense, as offensive shorthand for ‘feminised male’, Jones’s assertion contains a glimmer of truth. Chemicals really are going into the water that so disrupt the endocrine systems of small aquatic creatures, including frogs, that males sometimes undergo sex reversal or adopt homosexual behaviour. It’s just that the synthetic estradiol that damages fish and amphibians isn’t being added to

Matt Ridley

Did Covid really originate in Wuhan’s seafood market?

There is new evidence pointing to the origin of Covid being in the seafood market in Wuhan. That, at least, is the substance of a breathless piece published in the Atlantic. Specifically, Katherine Wu, the journalist who wrote the piece, had evidence suggesting that ‘raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019’. Notice: ‘could have’, that old fallback of hype and spin. Wu went on to claim that ‘it’s some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists

Ross Clark Ross Clark

A morally simplistic kids’ film: Extrapolations reviewed

We are all, of course, pretty well doomed. We know that because Al Gore told us so in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But just in case we didn’t get the message, the producer of that film, Scott Z Burns, has come up with a series of dystopian mini-dramas, Extrapolations, which are supposed to give us a window into the future. The series, the first three episodes of which have just dropped on Apple TV, is the latest in a genre which has given us The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up. The good news is that we have at least 47 years left, because 2070 is the date

Anna Arutunyan

The ‘sham subculture’ sparking panic in the Kremlin

Their two countries may be at war, but Russian and Ukrainian police have a common and apparently formidable enemy. That is, judging by their efforts to infiltrate groups of 13- to 17-year-old kids sporting long black hair and hoodies emblazoned with a picture of a spider on the back. The so-called PMC Ryodan – a fan club dedicated to the Japanese anime series Hunter x Hunter, featuring a criminal gang – may be many things, but a private military company it is not. On 22 February these fans gathered at a Moscow mall and were confronted by a rival group who picked a fight with them, offended by their weird

David Abulafia

Was Leonardo da Vinci’s mother a slave?

There is great excitement in Italy, which has spilled over into the British press: Carlo Vecce, a professor from Naples, has discovered documents in the archives of Florence that appear to indicate that Caterina, the mother of Leonardo da Vinci, was a baptised slave who had been brought all the way to Tuscany from the Black Sea. She was not, as has often been assumed, a local woman of modest origins. Leonardo was born in April 1452, and a few months later a domestic slave of Leonardo’s father, also named Caterina, was given her freedom. The documents do not take up a great amount of space, so he has filled

Friday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Is Abu Dhabi’s multi-faith ‘Abrahamic Family House’ a beacon of hope or a creepy PR exercise?

19 min listen

The Abrahamic Family House is the name for three giant concrete cubes – a church, a mosque and a synagogue – that have just officially opened their doors in Abu Dhabi. The project is the fruit of a controversial agreement signed there in 2019 by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, that disturbed many Christians with its statement that the existence of separate religions is God’s will. But it’s a spectacular coup for the government of the United Arab Emirates and will no doubt reassure expats that there’s freedom of religion in the UAE. In fact, I wonder how many of them are even aware that ‘apostasy’ –

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Can the UK economy outperform Russia?

First the good news. Unlike the IMF, which predicted in January that the UK economy would have a worse 2023 than even Russia, the OECD’s latest forecast has Britain outperforming Russia. Now the bad news: the OECD still predicts the UK to perform worse than any European country other than Russia.  Forecasts aside, the actual data for the UK economy is a slightly improving story Its latest bulletin, published this morning, sees Britain shrinking by 0.2 per cent in 2023, compared with growth of 0.3 per cent for Germany, 0.7 per cent for France and 0.8 per cent for the Euro area as a whole. The Russian economy, by the way,

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

The case against school uniform

On a normal morning in Winchester, the streets are crowded with sullen teenagers mooching in sleepy phalanxes to school, scruffy in their school uniforms, a hormonal march of the penguins. My three teenagers are usually among them. Today, however, the city was treated to a different spectacle: hoards of adolescents in hoodies. That’s right, it’s a non-school uniform day, on account of charity. They were supposed to wear bright colours, but – have you noticed? – no teenager dares wear bright colours these days. So uncool. They were supposed to bring 50p for Red Nose Day, but this is 2023 and nobody carries cash. So off they went to join their

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why Macron doesn’t fear the Parisian street protests

France is on the brink of another revolution! The proles are swarming to the barricades and it’s only a matter of time before President Macron is dragged from the Élysée palace.  That is the gist of some of the more excitable reporting about what happened yesterday in France. It was certainly a dramatic day after the government forced through its pension reform bill that will increase the age of retirement from 62 to 64. It did so on the orders of Macron, deploying a controversial clause in the constitution – article 49.3 – which legalises a bill without the need for a parliamentary vote.   Where were the opposition MPs in

Andrew Tettenborn

Justin Welby’s gay marriage troubles could be about to get worse

After the hash the Church of England has made of the issue of same-sex marriage, a group of MPs led by long-standing churchman Ben Bradshaw has hatched a plan to pull the Anglican chestnuts out of the fire. His scheme is undoubtedly well-meaning: unfortunately, it is more likely to push them further in, to be reduced to ashes. The current church fudge, prepared by the bishops after years of politely pious wrangling and approved by Synod last month, is easy enough to criticise. The teaching that marriage proper is between one man and one woman remains: the church will thus will have no part in marrying same-sex couples. However, it

Thursday

Joanna Williams

The trouble with sex education

Drawing penises and making vulvas out of Play-Doh might not be the reply most parents expect when they pose the question, ‘What did you get up to at school today?’ But with even the youngest children now encountering explicit content and bizarre teaching methods in mandatory sex education classes, it is an answer more might come to hear. Masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, fisting, rough sex, gender queer, polyamory. When the school curriculum can be confused with the dropdown menu of a pornography website, something has gone wrong. But it is not just highly sexualised content that is concerning parents, they are worried about ideologically-driven and scientifically-inaccurate lessons in gender