Society

Friday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Shrinking GDP shows how stagnant the economy has become

The UK economy shrank by 0.3 per cent in March, as ongoing strike action continued to take its toll. But the fall wasn’t enough to push the UK into recession territory, as the Office for National Statistics announced this morning that the economy grew by 0.1 per cent in the first three months of the year. This was thanks to stronger-than-expected growth in January (which was then followed by zero growth in February). Do today’s updates paint an optimistic or pessimistic picture for the UK economy? While the risk of entering formal recession has been dodged once again, today’s news highlights just how stagnant the UK economy has become. We are years on from

Thursday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why are the Tories so afraid to tackle housing reform?

If there ever were a couple of policies the government desperately needs to give it a chance of being re-elected next year it is rental reform and leasehold. Both in their own way would make life a good deal less miserable for the younger voters who have drifted away from the party in recent years.  How depressing then that Rishi Sunak seems to have gone cold on them. It nastily exposes the Conservatives’ Achilles’ heel: its tendency to drop good and popular proposals in the face of staunch lobbying by those with vested interested. By failing to fulfil its promise to abolish leasehold, the government is showing itself to be

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Adjoa Andoh and the racialisation of society

Here’s an interesting exercise. Next time you read a diatribe about white people, in your mind change the word ‘white’ to ‘black’. You’ll be horrified by the results, I guarantee it. All those op-eds in the liberal media attacking ‘white women’ for ‘weaponising’ their tears are transformed into flagrantly racist screeds. So a Guardian headline from 2018 would become: ‘How black women use strategic tears to silence other women.’ Imagine if a newspaper actually published something like that? Are sweeping racial generalisations okay when talking about white people? Why? Robin DiAngelo’s life work would become the interrogation of ‘black fragility’. ‘All black people have absorbed hateful ideology’, the alternative-universe Ms

Nigel Jones

What’s eating John Major?

Eighty-year old Sir John Major does not appear to be enjoying a peaceful retirement. Judging by his frequent tetchy interventions in public life, the former prime minister is far from a happy bunny. Sir John’s latest outburst was not on his usual hobby horses of the iniquities of Boris Johnson or the horrors of Brexit, but came in a speech – delivered to the liberal Prison Reform Trust at the Old Bailey of all places – that will give comfort to the criminal community. For Major is worried that we are locking up too many people for minor offences. On this topic – as on so many others – Major is

Sasha Lensky

Russians live in fear of Putin’s dreaded draft

On 9 May, Russia’s wet squib this year of a Victory Day, president Putin addressed his beleaguered troops in Ukraine directly. ‘There is nothing more important now than your combat effort,’ he said. ‘The security of the country rests on you today, the future of our statehood and our people depend on you.’ Readers of The Spectator may be interested to learn of the Russian state’s efforts to augment this crucial ‘defensive’ force. One day last week in provincial Russia, I was awoken at 3 a.m. by the ping of a new email from Gosuslugi, a state portal that facilitates public services (e.g. getting a passport or even checking your

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A themed restaurant done right: The Alice, Oxford, reviewed

The Alice lives in a ground-floor room of the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, which venerates the fantastical and the savage, as Oxford does. The savage lives in the Randolph’s dedicated crime museum with cocktails: the (Inspector) Morse Bar. The Alice is named for two women: Alice Liddell, the daughter of the ecclesiastical dean of Christchurch College – the grandest and most unfinished Oxford college – who posed for photographs for Lewis Carroll, became Alice of Wonderland and later invented a ladyship (an act as English as anything that ever happened here). I wonder what hungover students make of it, because it is very bright The first, of course, is more

Toby Young Toby Young

Carmageddon: the electric vehicle boondoggle

A couple of years ago I thought seriously about buying an electric car. Not a hybrid, but the full monty. There was one in particular I liked the look of and I even contacted a dealership to ask whether they’d accept my diesel-powered VW Touran in part-exchange. The answer was yes, but it was still eye-wateringly expensive. Was it worth it? I tried to persuade myself it would be, given the savings on fuel costs, the waiving of the congestion charge, etc. Boy, am I glad I dodged that bullet. Scarcely a day passes without a new horror story about electric vehicles in the press. Over the past week alone,

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The parallels between Anna Kournikova and Emma Raducanu

Who can turn lying on a hospital gurney into a photo op? Emma Raducanu can, of course – beaming as she showed off her bandaged wrist and arm, in a photo of such quality it didn’t look like it was snapped by a passing nurse’s iPhone. It left me with a renewed sense of foreboding about Raducanu’s future in tennis. The tennis prodigy, who won the US Open two years ago, is super–talented and a wonderful athlete, but her 10,000 hours of practice must be receding into the background. That is the amount of time, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book Outliers, that in the upper realms of excellence marks

Sophia Money-Coutts

Why British women are turning to Danish sperm donors

‘Hello, my current occupation is police officer,’ says Dex in a thick Danish accent. ‘It seems very adventurous and exciting to do, and to make a difference for the people I meet out in the world.’ Dex is just over 13 stone, around six feet tall, has very fair skin and blue eyes. His favourite animal is the dog. Dex is also a Danish sperm donor, and I’m listening to the beginning of an 11-minute voice-recording on his profile. On the website of the European Sperm Bank, which bills itself as ‘Europe’s leading sperm bank’ and is based in Copenhagen, there are hundreds of profiles like Dex’s available to British

Wednesday

Rory Geoghegan

No, John Major: Britain doesn’t lock up too many prisoners

While most of the country thinks we should be cracking down on crime, former prime minister Sir John Major has been busy telling the world this week that in the UK we lock up too many prisoners. In a speech at the Old Bailey for the Prison Reform Trust, Major has made the case for reducing the UK’s prison population, arguing that we should have more non-custodial sentences instead, especially for ‘non-violent’ offences.   You really have to wonder what planet he is living on. Only this year a teenage girl who was raped was forced to watch her attacker walk free from court after being sentenced to unpaid work. In Brighton, a

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

What the BBC gets wrong about Israel

If you get your news on the Middle East from the BBC, every so often Israel appears to go mad and begins lustily bombing Palestinian civilians. No rhyme or reason. Jerusalem is simply pummelling Gaza for the hell of it.  This impression is often created by the BBC’s approach to reporting on Israel and terrorism. The story invariably begins when Israel responds to attacks, with those original attacks deemed insufficiently newsworthy until then or reported as a retaliation to some provocation. Then, once Israel engages, the inciting incidents are quietly smuggled into the coverage but framed as just another round in the cycle of violence. Thus self-defence is cast as

Douglas Murray

Daniel Penny and the problem with have-a-go heroes

I have always liked the phrase ‘have-a-go hero’. It sums up a certain type of person who can emerge from nowhere and coat their name with honour. One thinks, for instance, of John Smeaton, the baggage handler who was having a fag outside Glasgow airport in 2007 when two jihadis tried to blow the place up. After a couple of explosions, Smeaton, Alex McIlveen and others ran to find out what was up and, finding one of the terrorists on fire, proceeded to kick the guy in the nuts. Indeed, so hard did McIlveen kick the guy that he himself tore a tendon. But Smeaton, McIlveen and others rightly became

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Coronation protests, new powers for pharmacists and Labour gains ground

Home The day after the coronation, 20,000 attended a concert in Windsor Castle, including the King and Queen. ‘As my grandmother said when she was crowned, coronations are a declaration of our hopes for the future,’ said the Prince of Wales in a speech to the crowd. ‘And I know she’s up there, fondly keeping an eye on us. She would be a proud mother.’ His brother, the Duke of Sussex, had witnessed the coronation from the third row, and left for his family in America immediately after. On television, 20.4 million had seen the King crowned. The Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, 13 to ‘prevent a breach of the

Doc

2604: Snap

The unclued lights (one hyphened and one pair) are of a kind.         Across    4    Swollen state of tailless bird’s head (9) 10    Evil mix of love and malice (10) 14    Cox for Hereford, perhaps? (5) 16    Henry and John’s outcry (6) 22    Cow strays from foaming watercourse, maybe marked with X (8) 23    False topaz from urban area by river without divided youth hostel (7) 24    Nostradamus, say, translated Erse (4) 25    Like a couple dating, wasting time (4) 27    Insubstantial tune arranged round America (7) 34    Moans at this bridge (5) 35    Keeps quiet, it seems, having approval to act (3-2) 37    Lots of wives hurry to

Jon Day

In defence of rats

I n the ranks of unloved animals, rats are  surely king – so reviled that other pest species are often referred to as variations of the rat archetype: pigeons are ‘rats with wings’, grey squirrels are ‘tree rats’. There was also a recent flurry of stories about Britain facing an ‘invasion’ of ‘300 million monstrous super-rats capable of gnawing on steel and chewing through concrete’. Yet how reliable were these stories? The 300 million figure is from Steven Belmain, a Greenwich University professor, who was simply giving his estimate of the rat population. (Probably an underestimate, he says, but there has never been a proper survey.) Nor is there any

Lucy Vickery

Spectator Competition Winners: haiku book reviews

In Competition No. 3298, you were invited to provide a book review in three haiku. When I saw that the unofficial poet laureate of Twitter Brian Bilston had tweeted some haiku book reviews, I thought I’d challenge you to do something along the same lines. The traditional Japanese haiku is a snapshot of a moment in time rendered in 17 syllables in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables (though these rules have not always been slavishly observed by western poets). Or, as the incomparable Stanley J. Sharpless put it: This is a haiku. Five syllables, then seven. Then five more. Got it? Some entries incorporated references to

The Spectator

Why the economic war against Russia has failed

There was much mirth in the West this week when Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day parade through Red Square included just one tank, itself a relic from a museum. The inference was that Russia has lost so much military kit in Ukraine that it is a shadow of the military superpower the Soviet Union used to be. Russia has certainly borne heavy losses (although any country conducting a foreign war would presumably have its military hardware on active duty rather than on ceremonial parade). But we should avoid being smug. The truth is that the war is not going well for the West either – at least in one respect. When

The Spectator

Which countries have scored ‘nul points’ the most times?

Machine learning Who came up with the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’? – The term was coined by US computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955, arising from a summer school held at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. The blurb for the project declared: ‘the study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.’ However, McCarthy seems to have had a slightly loose concept of what constitutes AI. He once had a debate with a colleague in which he asserted that even a thermostat could

Luke McShane

No. 751

Moehring-Kaikamdzozov, Elekes Memorial, Zamardi 1978. White avoided perpetual check and won the game. Which move did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 15 May. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Ne4!, e.g. 1…Rxf3 2 Nxf3# or 1…Nf5 2 Qh1#, or 1…Ne2 2 Qf6#, or 1…Nxe4 2 Qf4# Last week’s winner John Payne, Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire