Society

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

The feebleness of ‘transitive property’

‘If they cancel you,’ said my husband, ‘will I be cancelled too?’ He may well ask. But I’m not sure how I’d tell if I had been cancelled. I don’t make platform appearances, so it is not so easy to deny me a platform. A popular way of doing people down is by means of something that Renée DiResta in the Guardian called the Transitive Property of Bad People, ‘which connects people and institutions in a daisy chain of guilt by association’. I think the metaphor of a transitive property derives from American elementary education. The property appears in statements such as: if A is bigger than B, and B

Dan Hitchens

The assisted suicide bill should not survive

Until about six months ago, it would have been hard to find a more inoffensive politician than the Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater. A well-liked, upbeat, down-to-earth Yorkshirewoman, she entered politics because of a personal tragedy, the murder of her sister, the MP Jo Cox, in 2016. When asked on a Spectator podcast what was the worst piece of advice she had ever received, Leadbeater half-joked: ‘Have you thought about being an MP?’ Visibly a normal, friendly person plunked down in SW1, she won many admirers and attracted little controversy. Then in September Leadbeater came top of the private members’ ballot and chose to take up the cause of assisted suicide.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: British Steel seized, army sent to Birmingham and slim told to stay home in Beijing

Home Parliament was recalled from its Easter recess to sit on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands War of 1982 to pass a bill to take control of British Steel, which amounts to no more than the works at Scunthorpe owned by the Chinese company Jingye since 2020. Scunthorpe, which employs 2,700 directly and thousands indirectly, is the last plant in Britain capable of making virgin steel. The bill, passing through the Commons and Lords, received the Royal Assent on the same day. The race against time was to supply the blast furnaces with coal before they were ruined by going cold; supplies from the United States

Fergus Butler-Gallie

Spare us from performative piety

Lent did not, I confess, start well. Cheltenham fell in its first week, and the Gold Cup is hardly the place for the rigours of Lenten discipline to begin. Some might say it is hardly the place for a clergyman at all. Peter Hitchens once commented on my clerical collar – stiff, crisp, linen – and said that if he saw a man wearing such a get-up at a racecourse he would assume he was an illegal bookmaker in disguise. Still, I recall that one of the most successful owner-breeders of all time was a clergyman. The vicar of Ashby de la Launde, the Revd J.W. King, won the Oaks,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

The population of the United Kingdom was increased this week by the arrival of two Albanian lesbians who have been given the right to remain here by an deputy Upper Tribunal judge called Rebecca Chapman. The women insisted that they would face persecution in Albania for their sexual preferences. This is despite the fact that Albania decriminalised homosexuality 30 years ago and in 2010 adopted a law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.  Rebecca was not impressed, however, pronouncing Albania to be a ‘patriarchal, conservative society in which homophobic attitudes still exist, particularly in rural areas’. (Those of you who have just read Rebecca’s description of

Katy Balls and Michael Gove

‘We’re going to a more radical place’: Wes Streeting on his plans for the NHS

A copy of a leading article from The Spectator is stuck to the wall of Wes Streeting’s office in the Department of Health. ‘Is Wes Streeting the Hamlet of the Health Service?’ we asked in October, warning against the perils of inaction. ‘We were so riled by it we stuck it there to hold ourselves to account,’ Streeting explains. ‘We’re going further than your prescription, though. We thought it was insufficiently radical.’ The Health Secretary has certainly been busy. Over the past few months, he has unveiled a range of reforms, including abolishing NHS England. His Blairite zeal annoys some in Labour. He languishes in 21st place in LabourList’s cabinet

Peter Jones

How Roman emperors handled hair loss

Donald Trump’s obsessive ‘awhairness’ makes one wonder: why is it so important to him? The topic was of some interest in Rome. The emperor Domitian wrote a treatise on baldness. So too did Cleopatra, who offered the following remedy: ‘For bald patches, powder red sulphuret of arsenic and take it up with oak gum, as much as it will bear. Put on a rag and apply, having soaped the place well first. I have mixed the above with a foam of nitre, and it worked well.’ Pompey had himself depicted in statuary wearing a hairstyle associated with Alexander the Great, with a lock of hair brushed back from the forehead.

Luke McShane

Chess Masters

Good, but why now? Did they only just notice? Those were my thoughts when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. I’m similarly pleased and bemused by the new BBC series Chess Masters: The Endgame. I recall evenings after school more than 30 years ago, watching the Kasparov-Short world championship match in London on TV. So hurrah for a new prime-time scheduling slot! But millions of people play chess. Did we really have to wait this long? The real issue must be that finding a format to make chess look good on TV is hard. Partly that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; with so few attempts, it’s impossible to

Luke McShane

No. 846

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Sam Loyd, Detroit Free Press, 1877. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 22 April. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal addressand allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Rb3! wins, as 1…Qxb3 2 Qd4+ leads to mate, or 1…Qf6 2 Qxc2 wins the rook. Last week’s winner John Shipley, Tyn Y Gongl, Anglesey

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Comrades

Comp. 3395 yielded many fine entries in which Animal Farm became a satire on office politics. Deserving of a mention: David Silverman for his White House version featuring a ‘prize wild boar, one E. Long-Tusk’ and ‘two American XL Bullies, Don and Shady’; and Sue Pickard’s scenario in which two workers, Pinko and Porky, ‘inspired by a motivational speaker, Major Boar’, wreak havoc. Also William Linfoot, J.C.H. Mounsey and Nicholas Lee. The £25 vouchers go to those below. Napoleon had opted to WFH that morning, drafting a presentation for a forthcoming mandatory Inclusion and Wellbeing workshop. Clover, a part–timer on account of caring responsibilities she wasn’t prepared to specify outside

Fieldfare

2699: Summer Dresses II

Unclued lights, singly or correctly paired, are of a kind.  One light does double duty. Across 1    Son becomes aware of cutter (6) 5    One who digests fish first (6) 10    Ancient Briton’s edged axe (4) 11    I don’t approve of expert? It’s possible (10) 15    Deck sport when turning round river (5) 17    County flags appear on these (6) 20    Humiliated and embarrassed to lose husband (6) 22    First section cut out of thin trousers (5) 23    Like a system to identify individual Brit oddly resorting to crime (9) 28    Once preying, almost going mad (5) 30    For drink, shrub (6) 32    A dry Martini essentially repelled saint (6)

Wednesday

Noor Qurashi

Why are student debaters being asked for their pronouns?

When the UK’s biggest school debate competition told us to declare our gender pronouns, I knew my team had lost the contest before it had even begun. Hundreds of children are told to do this every year.  Things were already uncomfortable. When I took part in regional rounds for this competition in 2018, run by the prestigious Oxford Union, there was only one other pair of state school students in the room. We weren’t as polished, and didn’t sound as impressive. It’s not easy at that age when you’ve had no proper training and you’ve come from somewhere that doesn’t really teach you public speaking.  After being asked to declare his pronouns, in

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why did we need the Supreme Court to tell us what a woman is?

How did it come to this? How did we arrive at a situation where it fell to a court of law to tell us what a woman is? That’s my overriding emotion today. I’m delighted the Supreme Court has ruled that a woman is legally defined as a person with female biological characteristics. But I’m gobsmacked that we apparently needed five judges to tell us something our species has known since we first came down from the trees. What sweet relief the judges made the right decision. But the garlands should go to For Women Scotland The ruling of the Supreme Court is fantastically sensible. It unambiguously states that the

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The Supreme Court ruling is a victory for women

The Supreme Court ruling on the definition of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act is a victory for women, proper statutory interpretation and the reality-based community. It started with the Scottish government trying to take something away from women. The Gender Representation on Public Boards Act, passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2018, required 50 per cent of non-executive appointments to public boards to be women. But the act defined ‘woman’ to include ‘a person who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment’ provided that person was ‘living as a woman’ and intended to undergo ‘a process… of becoming female’. In theory, this could have meant that a public board could

Kristina Murkett

There’s an obvious reason pre-school children are falling behind

Something is rotten in the state of British schools. According to primary school teachers, one in four Reception students are not toilet trained, more than a third cannot dress themselves, and half cannot sit still. Children are missing a range of developmental milestones, increasingly demonstrating poor language skills, delays in basic motor functions, and a lack of core strength (there are stories of perfectly able-bodied children not knowing how to use stairs or hold a pencil). Now a government-backed website, Starting Reception, has been created by a collaboration of early-years and education organisations to help define ‘school-readiness’. The idea is to outline key skills to parents that children should practise

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Aimee Lou Wood should stop moaning about her teeth

Back in the twentieth century, there was a trend for beautiful female film stars to compare themselves to comical or unattractive animals. Michelle Pfeiffer insisted that she looked like a duck; Uma Thurman claimed to resemble a hammer-head shark. Not just actresses; there was a song by Pink, in which the then 23-year-old, size-ten blonde babe with the snub nose and big eyes beat herself up for not being conventionally pretty like Britney Spears. Most excruciating of all was Nigella Lawson’s reference to her – look away now – ‘sticky-out tummy’. It’s hard to imagine a more condescending attempt by a sexy woman to cuddle up to the fatso-demographic, for

Graham Watts

Are plus-size ballerinas the future?

Iain Mackay, a former ballet dancer who is now artistic director of the Royal Ballet School, told the Times in a recent interview that ‘bigger ballerinas… are the future of the art form,’ and that ballet ‘has moved away from the “slim” female fixture.’ It’s essential that we move away from ballet students being body shamed by their teachers, as illustrated by the 2023 Panorama investigation, The Dark Side of Ballet Schools. A similar scandal emerged when it was alleged that children at Vienna State Opera’s ballet academy were told to smoke to suppress their appetite. It’s not just size that destroys the dreams of many aspiring ballet dancers. Any number

Tuesday

Nigel Jones

How Mario Vargas Llosa was inspired by Thatcher

Most writers – like the vast majority of actors, artists and other luminaries of our culture – belong to the political left, but the death aged 89 of the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa reminds us that this is not always the case. Most unusually for a Latin American author, Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, was not only a proud Thatcherite conservative, but himself came within an ace of winning his troubled country’s presidency after temporarily laying down his pen and entering the political arena. But like his great Colombian rival in literature, the Marxist novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (who Vargas Llosa once

Chas Newkey-Burden

In defence of rats

Reports of rats in Birmingham that are ‘bigger than cats’ are now making international headlines. The New York Times, NBC News and CNN have all weighed in on the city’s rodent problem, as the strike action by bin workers rolls on. Rat panic seems to be setting in. An MP said the rodents are ‘dancing in the streets’ of Birmingham, the Telegraph reported that a man’s Mercedes was ‘completely written off’ by rats and there have been fears about ‘nuclear rats’ overrunning the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor in Somerset. ‘You see them just sat there, looking at you,’ a source at the plant told the Observer. Meanwhile, animal rights