Society

Wednesday

Hardeep Singh

Does Britain have a problem with ‘Sikh extremism’?

Terror threats from Islamist and far-right terrorists are depressingly familiar to Brits, but other faiths are not immune from the plague of extremists who might seek to harm others. A recent report by Colin Bloom, the government’s faith engagement advisor, touched on lesser-known ideologies like ‘Buddhist nationalism’ and ‘Hindu nationalism’. It also raised concerns about ‘Sikh extremism’. But how much of a problem is this particular form of radicalism in Britain? ‘Small pockets of Sikh communities’ in Britain are involved with ‘subversive, sectarian and discriminatory activities,’ according to the report. The numbers here are small. According to the 2021 census, there are 524,000 Sikhs in England and Wales, which equates

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 06 May 2023

‘The more I practise the luckier I get.’ This is the mantra used against those of us who are dumbfounded by the awfulness of picking up endless Yarboroughs at rubber bridge and playing against the only pair in the room to bid a slam in duplicate matches. But what about the other end of the spectrum? This hand was shown to me by Nick Sandqvist and must be a contender for the luckiest hand ever played. It occurred in the last round of the Easter Guardian team’s event, but he was adamant that it made no difference to the end result. They had won the tournament already! What a waste!

Robin Oakley

Kitty’s Light is the horse of the year

John Trotwood Moore, one-time State Librarian of Tennessee, was a racist and defender of the Ku Klux Klan. But in the saying for which he is best remembered he did get one thing right: ‘Wherever man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilisation we will find the hoofprint of the horse alongside it.’ I was reminded of his words because of those used by trainer Christian Williams after his Kitty’s Light had won a famous victory in last Saturday’s bet365 Gold Cup at Sandown Park. Christian is not only an outstanding trainer of staying chasers, he is also the father of a little girl called

Melissa Kite

Why I’ve sacked my estate agent

The estate agent flashed a sarcastic smile and said it wasn’t so much that the market was in a bad place, rather that my property got so much ‘negative feedback’. I stared back at her, fuming. I had popped into the offices of this agency to ask for my key back, which I forgot to do last year when I gave up on them being able to sell my house. This summer, I’ve given it to a friend at a smaller agency, hoping he does a better job than the city slickers at this well-known outfit where they all shout ‘Rah-de-blah-de-rah-de-blah!’ no matter what I say to them. Miss Smarty

Jeremy Clarke

The pros and cons of kissing

Marketa stands on one side of me, Catriona on the other. Marketa is Czech and my carer. Catriona is my new wife. I’m lying on my back in dove grey flannel pyjamas. At seven I’d woken to the most excruciating pain. Where the pain is located exactly I’m not sure. It is among my various lung and upper skeletal tumours, I’m guessing. Shoulders. Shoulder blades. Ribs.Lungs certainly. Once an hour I am permitted to press the morphine button at the end of the cable for pain relief. It goes beep – a jolly noise! After the second go, however, I have no pain relief and I’m counting the minutes to

Taki

Critics are ignoring the best play in New York

New York The concept of creativity and invention can be a doubled-edged sword. It can be fresh, uplifting and original, like the off-Broadway play directed by Michael Mailer that I’ve just seen, or it can be a phoney rip-off of a Shakespeare classic, a terrible modern take on Hamlet, blackness and homosexuality that I have not seen and do not plan to. What makes me laugh is the reviewer at the Bagel Times who gave a good one to the latter, Fat Ham, as objective a judgment as, say, an appraisal of Mao’s Little Red Book would have been in a Beijing daily circa 1964. Favouring the message over the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Does the UN want to defund the French police?

My first instinct was to check the date: was it actually April 1st on Monday? On realising there was no mistake the second reaction was one of wonderment that anyone still takes the United Nations seriously.  The once respected organisation held its Universal Periodic Review in Geneva on Monday, and France didn’t fare well.   As a succession of shamelessly panjandrums slapped down France, its police were once more coming under sustained attack by hordes of anarchists and far-left extremists Beacons of liberty lined up to trash the Republic for what they described as the heavy-handedness of its police in recent weeks. Russia, Iran, Venezuela and China expressed their grave

Tuesday

Joanna Williams

Where was Stella Creasy when other mums were being harassed?

Parliament’s ban on the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok cannot come soon enough. But it’s not just cyber security we need to worry about. Our social media happy MPs clearly need saving from themselves. Matt Hancock might be the parliamentary champion of toe-curling film clips but other MPs are bidding to out-cringe him.  Labour’s Stella Creasy filmed her response this weekend to a critic who had moved from bombarding her office with emails, to reporting her to social services for exposing her children to ‘extreme views’. Creasy was quickly cleared but the whole situation left her, understandably, angry – not least when police told the MP she should ‘expect to be

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Ed Miliband is wrong about BP’s profits

Are BP’s profits of $5 billion in the first quarter of this year really the ‘unearned, unexpected windfalls of war’, as Ed Miliband asserted this morning? The idea that any oil company’s profits are unearned must come as news to the geologists and engineers who are employed in the tricky business of exploring and drilling for oil. You might claim that oil traders sometimes make unearned profits, but surely not the oil companies which extract the stuff from the ground – a business which involves large amounts of capital and vast numbers of hours of human effort. BP certainly can’t be accused of profiting from Covid. In 2020 it made a thumping

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The muddle of the King’s coronation oath

There’s been an interesting discussion about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s addition to the coronation service, but has anyone actually tried to parse it?  It goes as follows: ‘Your Majesty, the Church established by law, whose settlement you will swear to maintain, is committed to the true profession of the Gospel, and, in so doing, will seek to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely. The coronation oath has stood for centuries and is enshrined in law. Are you willing to take the oath?’ The King: ‘I am willing.’ Wouldn’t it be clearer to ask the King to swear directly that he will protect

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Monarchy and celebrities should not mix

This weekend’s coronation will be an historic moment, a milestone in the mass memory. Just think how many dreary British films will be set against the backdrop of the coronation. (At least it will make a change from things being set against the backdrop of the miners’ strike – a mate of mine invented a game where you take turns adding that to the synopses of other famous films, e.g. ‘Jack Nicholson is possessed by the spirit of a murderous caretaker, set against the poignant backdrop of the miners’ strike’.)  But there is already a sense of a rather odd, half-in half-out, uncertain tone to the affair. This is meant to be a spectacle of

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

In defence of Martin Rowson

Being a cartoonist is a high-risk job nowadays. Your job is to satirise and caricature, to exaggerate bodily features. Every week, we do this at The Spectator in our cover art drawn by the peerless Morten Morland. Kim Jong Un is rather short: Morten makes him minuscule. Donald Trump has small hands and feet; Morten shrinks them even further. If someone has a prominent feature, then you exaggerate the feature. It’s the way cartooning works. If the subject has slightly big ears, you make them massive – as we have for the King in our coming coronation cover. It’s comic, teasing and, yes, sometimes brutal. But if you do this

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

This coronation is making me a republican again

I was never a monarchist. One of my earliest memories is of being a bolshy little girl refusing to stand up for the national anthem played (as was the custom in places of public performance back in the twentieth century) after a showing of ‘Born Free’ at Bristol Gaumont in 1966. Still howling at the travails of Elsa the Lion, I resisted my mothers pleas to get to my feet. I’d like to think that even at the tender age of seven I was already a keen meritocrat and a loather of nepotism – but I think it more likely that I was already an attention-seeking diva. Imagine my surprise when a

Ross Clark Ross Clark

When does a banking wobble become a crisis?

Can a banking crisis really be going this well? After a week of panic withdrawals and a crashing share price, the First Republic Bank in the US will be taken over nearly in its entirety by J P Morgan Chase, in a shotgun marriage facilitated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). No depositors will lose money, and most of the bank’s functions will continue uninterrupted – just as they did in the case of HSBC’s takeover of the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank last month.     We have now had four major banking collapses in the space of six weeks, with remarkably little spillover into the economy at large

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Snapchat is playing God with our children’s wellbeing

My kids have a new friend. If you have teenagers, chances are yours do, too. And it is a friend that, by its own admission, may offer ‘biased, incorrect, harmful, or misleading content’. In other words, not a friend at all. The first I heard of this being was when I logged onto Snapchat, a generally mystifying app that I, as a grown man, use solely to contact my children, who use it as their main tool of communication. Flashing on the screen was an ‘add request’ from a green-faced avatar called ‘My AI’. Unlike other approaches, I was unable to delete it. The weird pseudo-lifeform remains at the very

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

How the gender debate shaped the new face of moralism

Disruptions of feminist meetings by trans rights activists have become commonplace in recent years. Tactics include pressuring venues, blocking entrances, occupying meeting rooms, and heckling speakers. We have quickly become accustomed to this behaviour and even indulgent of its logic, not least the attempt to analogise attacks on lawful, peaceful assembly to earlier no-platforming strategies against fascists and others committed to destroying democracy.  This error has been normalised thanks to changes in so-called progressive political culture, which is not yet mainstream but enjoys institutional dominance. Specifically, progressivism has given up on tolerance, once the battle cry of liberals but now regarded as naive, outmoded in our age of hate, and

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Is Wrexham’s Hollywood fairytale heading for an unhappy ending? 

Wrexham’s Hollywood dream seems almost too good to be true. The club spent years in the doldrums of the football league, its lack of success on the pitch matched by financial troubles off it. In 2004, the club plunged into the relegation zone after it was placed into administration. A few years later, in 2008, the side even dropped out of the league altogether. But then, in 2020, two handsome saviours arrived – and now the club’s troubles appear to be over. There’s something uncomfortable about two rich Hollywood guys larping around with British working-class culture Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, who made their fame and fortune starring in films such

Lisa McKenzie

What Keir Starmer doesn’t understand about the Red Wall

The polls are tightening but Labour remains the odds-on favourite to triumph in the next general election. Keir Starmer’s party enjoys a 15-point lead in the polls over the Tories. But those who think the election is in the bag for Labour, should take a visit to the Red Wall. Voters here are disappointed by the failed promises of the Tories. But they are equally scornful of a Labour party they think has much in common with those in power. The jaded feelings about the Conservatives are easy to understand: the Tories look tired and have run out of ideas after 13 years in power. But the lack of enthusiasm

Sunday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Can Britain become the Saudi Arabia of carbon capture?

Boris Johnson wanted to make Britain ‘the Saudi Arabia of wind’. But Grant Shapps is keen to send Britain’s green agenda in a new direction. Speaking at The Spectator’s Energy Summit on 26 April, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net-Zero announced the government’s ambitions for Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage – CCUS – where carbon dioxide is sucked out of the air with the aid of solvents and either put to use or buried deep in the ground where – hopefully – it will remain locked up forever after. The technology does not merely offer the chance to cut future emissions but also to remove past emissions from the

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Blairite ‘nepo babies’ are the worst of the lot

When the singer Lily Allen found herself flak-catching recently, she was quick to point out she was the OK kind of nepo-baby, because: ‘The nepo-babies y’all should be worrying about are the ones working for legal firms, the ones working for banks, and the ones working in politics, if we’re talking about real world consequences and robbing people of opportunity’. But Allen misses the point. People feel cross about the showbiz nepo babies – those who have made it thanks to their parents’ fame – because being an actor, model or TV presenter seems far cushier than being a lawyer or a politician. In those jobs, you have to at