Society

Sunday

Edward Howell

Is Kim Jong Un’s daughter being lined up to lead?

The photograph shows a happy family. After a 35-day public absence, the corpulent Kim Jong Un has been pictured this week with his wife Ri Sol Ju, and sitting between them their daughter, Kim Ju Ae, as they dine in the presence of North Korean military officers weighed down with medals.  Is Kim Jong Un’s daughter being lined up to take over North Korea? The photograph has only heightened speculation that the stage is now being set for her to be leader, as the fourth generation of Kim to rule the country. This week North Korean state media gave Kim Ju Ae the honorific of ‘respected’ when writing about the event, an adjective

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

We are living through a golden age of misogyny

I hope I’ll be forgiven for not dropping my dog-eared copy of The Female Eunuch in sheer molten awe upon reading in the Times that ‘Courses for teachers on how to tackle Andrew Tate’s views are selling out as schools try to persuade teenage boys to shun so-called toxic masculinity.’ One teacher said, ‘Andrew Tate is just a personification of this rampant masculinity that’s existed in schools and been tolerated for years – boys harass and abuse peers and teachers and male teachers haven’t done enough to combat this. Schools have racism and homophobia policies but hardly any have sexism policies; it’s become naturalised.’   Better late than never, but it’s no good schoolteachers getting their

Gabriel Gavin Gabriel Gavin

Turkey’s earthquake and the growing anger towards Erdogan

Istanbul, Turkey It’s Monday morning and Sam is late to work. The cafe he owns in a quiet residential area of Istanbul is already busy with émigré Russian IT workers tapping away at their laptops and small groups of locals scrolling through the news on their phones in silence. ‘This earthquake,’ he says, walking around the counter and burying his face in his hands. ‘My best friend from back home is trapped under the rubble.’ Sam is from a city near Gaziantep in the south of the country where, just hours earlier, a colossal 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck, destroying around 6,000 buildings across ten separate regions and leaving tens of

Saturday

Kara Kennedy

We need to talk about Madonna’s face

You’ll forgive Madonna for taking a few days to respond to the concern over her latest facelift. After all, the singer was transmitting the message all the way from Mars with the rest of the shiny-faced extra-terrestrials. While presenting the best pop duo award to Sam Smith and Kim Petras for their hit ‘Unholy’, Madonna took to the Grammys stage in what can only be described as Jigsaw cosplay, with alarmingly puffy, stretched-out skin that looked as if it could fling off at any moment. When people online showed concern and sadness for what is clearly the 64-year-old’s desperate attempt to cling to her youth, she claimed that she was

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Napoleon III’s remains will not be returned to France

Do not take too seriously the demand of Roger Karoutchi, a Républicain who rejoices in the title of deputy speaker of the French Senate, that the mortal remains of Napoleon III, the last Emperor of France, be repatriated from Farnborough, in Hampshire, where they have lain in an immense sarcophagus since 1879, to Metropolitan France itself. ‘He is the only reigning sovereign who is buried abroad,’ Karoutchi complains. This business of moving Napoleon comes up from time to time, but there is no chance of it happening. The body, which is guarded by fierce Benedictine monks who have never forgotten or forgiven the murder of the Carmelite nuns beheaded by French

Ed West Ed West

Where is the moral outrage about Britain’s grooming gangs?

Tabloid journalism begins with W.T. Stead, who as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s brought news and scandal to the newly literate masses, transforming public culture and politics with it. The son of a Congregationalist preacher, Stead grew up in a strict religious household in Northumberland, in a home where theatre was ‘the Devil’s chapel’ and novels ‘the Devil’s Bible’. Taught to read by his father, the newsman’s nonconformism would inform his campaigns after he moved from the Northern Echo to the Gazette in London. The case of Rotherham remains the most shocking, not just for the scale of the abuse but the institutional response Stead was most of all famous for the

Daniel Thorpe

Thousands may still be trapped under the rubble in Turkey

Five days after Monday’s massive earthquakes, the combined death toll in Turkey and Syria has passed 20,000. Local aid workers say around one-third of the casualties are in the Hatay province. The regional capital, Antakya, built on the ancient city of Antioch, is a popular tourist destination famous for its cuisine and cosmopolitan multi-ethnic atmosphere. Many of the mosques, churches, and synagogues in the city’s picturesque old town were also destroyed. On the third morning after the earthquake, a thick layer of smoke settled in the valley where Antakya lies – a residue from the fires the survivors built to keep warm during the freezing night. On the fourth day, many

Robert Tombs

Did the Suffragettes really win women the vote?

I suppose most people regard the Suffragettes as the exemplary vindication of the right to carry out illegal direct action in a righteous cause. Speaking in support of Extinction Rebellion, Helen Pankhurst, a descendant of the Suffragette leader, said that both movements were equally ‘socially marginalised, made fun of, considered to be extremists, and legally silenced, and yet they stand up for justice in the way the Suffragettes did.’ Rather than pushing on a slowly opening door, they preferred to throw a brick through the window The Suffragette campaign was the first deliberately violent English political campaign since the 1840s, and this is part of its myth. Thankfully no one

Ian Williams Ian Williams

The vast scale of Beijing’s high-tech balloon programme

There will no doubt be some tense moments in the boardrooms of western technology companies over the coming days after the revelation that the Chinese spy balloon shot down after traversing the United States had western-made components with English-language writing on them. The finding was reportedly contained in intelligence briefings to US lawmakers and will almost certainly lead to still greater scrutiny of the sale to China of advanced ‘dual-use’ technology. China’s continuing claims that the balloon was an innocent weather balloon blown off-course are looking increasingly absurd Investigators are continuing their efforts to recover the wreckage of the balloon and its payload of surveillance kit from shallow waters off

Friday

Charles Lister

Who cares about Syria’s earthquake victims?

At 4 a.m. on Monday, when the earthquake hit, most of the 4.5 million people living in northwestern Syria were asleep. Thousands of buildings collapsed, burying their residents alive. The majority of those living in this small corner of Syria had already been displaced from their homes in other parts of the country by the civil war. The northwest is the final stronghold of Syria’s opposition and is the main target of president Bashar al-Assad’s grim campaign to retake full control of the country. Before the earthquake, some two thirds of the area’s basic infrastructure ­– public housing, water and sanitation, hospitals and medical clinics, roadways and power generation –

Damian O'Brien

The terror of Turkey’s earthquake: a survivor’s account

Before Monday’s earthquake, the old town of Antakya, known historically as Antioch, had been a wonderfully preserved labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets on a gentle hill rising from the river. Beautiful houses with peaceful courtyards had been turned into restaurants and hotels, where people sipped tea and smoked under the shade of trees. I had spent a couple of days in Idleb, northwest Syria, where I oversee operations as the country director for the HALO Trust, the landmine clearance organisation, and had decided to spend the weekend in Antakya before leaving for Gaziantep on the Turkish/Syrian border. That whimsical decision to stay in Antakya, and the choice to get up in the middle of the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Will Britain ever learn the lessons from the Prevent debacle?

The reaction in some quarters to William Shawcross’s review of Prevent, the UK’s counter-extremism programme, has been predictable. The Muslim Council of Britain, Amnesty International, the Guardian and Cage have all criticised the report and the author, with Amnesty launching a particularly unpleasant ad hominem attack on Shawcross, describing him as ‘bigoted’.  None of the above consider that Shawcross was the right man to lead the report because of a remark he made a decade ago stating that Europe’s relationship with Islam ‘is among the greatest, most terrifying problems of our time’.  Shawcross was speaking after the Madrid and London bombings of 2004 and 2005 that claimed 245 lives, and

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Suella Braverman rows back on the ‘stop the Channel boats’ pledge

The whole point about making five key pledges, as Rishi Sunak did at the start of the year, is to give the average voter a consistent message. The idea is that such pledges, which should have been judiciously drawn-up based upon extensive opinion research, are hammered home again and again until the typical person far away from the Westminster Village has digested them. What is Sunak’s administration for? Surely everyone knows that: to halve inflation this year, grow the economy, make sure our national debt is falling, cut NHS waiting and stop the boats. Braverman declined to confirm that the PM’s pledge means the boats will be stopped in their

James Johnson

Voters agree with Lee Anderson about cracking down on crime

Lee Anderson, the recently-appointed Tory party deputy chairman, has sparked a political row with his comments on capital punishment. ‘Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed. 100 per cent success rate,’ he said in an interview with The Spectator. Rishi Sunak says he disagrees, and is not in favour of the death penalty. But what do most people think? Voters’ views on some issues, like Brexit, range widely and change over time. But attitudes towards crime, and what to do with criminals, appear to be far deeper-rooted. You can never be too tough on crime, is the verdict of many voters. Last week, J.L. Partners asked British adults

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Sandi Toksvig should stop picking on the Church of England

The breaking news is that Sandi Toksvig has demanded a meeting with God, over a friendly cup of tea. The BBC broadcaster has grown impatient with his vacillating human intermediaries and wants to explain to him what should happen in the religion that he allegedly launched. Love should come first, she plans to tell him. If he can’t reorganise his religion around this simple principle, he no longer deserves to be taken seriously as a modern deity. The gay vicars that I know are sanguine Toksvig is presumably unimpressed by the latest news from the Church of England’s Synod. As expected, bishops have got approval for their compromise: no to

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Britain avoids recession – for now

Britain has avoided recession – for now. This morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveals that there was no overall GDP growth between October and December last year. The UK has swerved the technical definition of recession – two consecutive quarters of negative growth – in the least glamorous way possible. It is not a story of growth, but a story of stagnation, that has kept the dreaded label of ‘recession’ at bay. The government will be relieved by the figures this morning: the fiscal tightening that Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt felt they had to do last year to calm market jitters and get the public

Thursday

Julie Bindel

Emma Pattison and the painful truth about ‘femicide’

Emma Pattison and her seven-year-old daughter Lettie were almost certainly killed by her husband George Pattison. As so often happens with cases of family annihilation, George Pattison escaped any criminal sanctions by shooting himself. Emma, who was 45, called a close relative last Saturday, hours before she and her daughter died, sounding ‘distressed’. We also know that a firearm, licenced to Pattison, was recovered at the scene. Police say they are treating the killings as a ‘homicide investigation’ and are not looking for anyone else in connection. Emma had been working as a head teacher at Epsom College, in Surrey, for only five months when she died. She was the

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Is the NHS on the road to recovery?

Has the NHS turned a corner? The winter crisis may be over, with pressure on the health service beginning to ease, but the pace of improvement is glacial. The latest performance figures for NHS England, published this morning, point to small improvements: waiting lists have flattened off and remain at 7.2 million; 12 hour waits for A&E finally fell; and ambulance response times have improved too. The figures come a day after modelling by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on waiting lists suggested they will at most flatline this year before eventually beginning to fall. Under a worst-case scenario, waiting lists would keep climbing and pass 9.2 million people waiting

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

The problem with a gender-neutral God

The Church of England will soon launch a commission on the question of gendered language in relation to God. Is this big news? It depends what the commission proposes. Even if it proposes big changes, the synod would have to vote them through. And a two-thirds majority, voting in favour of removing the word ‘father’ from the Lord’s Prayer, seems unlikely. But that’s what some reports are suggesting, whether through clumsiness or a mischievous glee at the prospect of further Anglican division. According to the Guardian, ‘The Church of England is considering whether to stop referring to God as “he”, after priests asked to be allowed to use gender-neutral terms instead…It

William Finlator

When will university lecturers realise that striking isn’t working?

University lecture halls are empty once again this morning – and students left to fend for themselves as they prepare for their summer exams. Yes, it’s another strike day on campus: the University and College Union (UCU) has announced 18 days of walkouts across February and March in a row over pay, working conditions and pensions. ‘We would not be calling this action if there was another way,’ insists the UCU. But is that really true? As a student at the University of St Andrews, I’m set to miss dozens of hours of teaching over the next two months: 18 days without lectures, seminars and tutorials; 18 days without the