Society

Tuesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What does the IMF want from the UK economy?

Just what is a UK government supposed to do to keep the IMF happy? This morning it has issued a bulletin predicting that the UK will be the only major economy to shrink in 2023 – by 0.6 per cent – and blaming it on ‘tighter fiscal and monetary policies’. This represents an even-bleaker outlook than the IMF foresaw in October, when it pencilled in growth of just 0.3 per cent. Yet this is the same IMF which last September condemned Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget for slashing taxes, saying 'given elevated inflation pressure in many countries, including the UK, we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture, as

Monday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Nicola Sturgeon will regret her ‘basket of deplorables’ moment

Nicola Sturgeon has for many years been hailed, particularly by commentators south of the border, as the consummate political leader – someone who effortlessly dominates the Scottish political scene. In doing so, it’s said, she repeatedly shows up the public-school boys in the Westminster government for the bluffers that they are.  That unearned reputation is starting to slip, now that Sturgeon’s dogged pursuit of radical transgender policies, via her now-blocked gender bill, has blown up in her face. The public outcry over the case of ‘Isla Bryson’ – the male rapist briefly held in a women’s prison – has shown that the SNP has lost the room and the moral

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Can the UK secure its precarious energy supply?

32 min listen

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the insecurity of the UK’s energy supply. We may not have been reliant on Russian gas like our European neighbours, but that didn’t mean we avoided higher energy bills. The government had to seriously consider how the UK would cope with a blackout. Britain’s experience this winter has prompted a discussion about how we can safeguard our energy supply and avoid another precarious winter. On this podcast, Cindy Yu, The Spectator’s assistant editor, is joined by Laura Sandys, a former Tory MP who also chaired the government’s Energy Data Taskforce; James Murray, an environmental journalist who founded the website BusinessGreen; and Greg Jackson, the founder and

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Nicola Sturgeon and the vindication of the Terfs

Scottish prison service rules allowing male-born transgender offenders to be housed in women’s prisons have been suspended and are now under ‘urgent review’. The women who raised concerns about this issue for several years have thus been vindicated; their persistence and determination in raising those concerns should be noted and acclaimed.  The Scottish development follows cases that have grimly caught the public eye across the UK. Last week’s conviction of the double rapist known as Isla Bryson was followed by reports that the violent sex offender ‘Tiffany Scott’ (born Andrew Burns) was heading for a female jail – solely because he says he identifies as female.  These miserable stories –

Terry Barnes

Why Australia can’t forgive Novak Djokovic

So, Novak Djokovic has won the Australian Open tennis tournament – again. Djokovic was never seriously challenged at any stage, beating Stefanos Tsitsipas in straight sets in the final. In winning his 22nd Grand Slam title, drawing level with Spanish maestro Rafael Nadal, Djokovic also had his revenge on Australia – and Australians. Australia is, of course, the country that deported him for being unvaccinated in 2022. As recently as last month, polls indicated that just one in three Australians wanted Djokovic to come back this year. This clearly motivated the Serbian star: he wanted to prove his detractors wrong and, in his eyes, he did. Djokovic hinted at his

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Sam Smith and the embarrassing terribleness of LGBTQIA+ culture

Pop music – and specifically pop music stardom – has an incredible power to transform people into things they are not. The pop sphere enjoyed by my generation as teens transmogrified Morrissey into a sex symbol, Neil Tennant into an intellectual and Simon Le Bon into a surrealist poet.  More recently, pop’s alchemical potency has made Ed Sheeran someone people like to look at and Adele someone people want to hear from describing her emotional upsets at great length. But there are limits, and the singer Sam Smith has done us a favour by smashing into them.  For fear of seeming out of touch, people will now applaud anything In his

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Can Sunak’s crisis plan save the NHS?

Rishi Sunak’s problems aren’t confined to his party. The NHS is in trouble and one of the Prime Minister’s five new year pledges was to get its record waiting list – 7.2 million in NHS England alone – down, ensuring patients get faster access to care. The problem with this promise is that the waiting list is expected to grow even bigger this year. What number it ultimately reaches depends on how many people turn up at an NHS hospital, having held back doing so during the pandemic years. With this variable out of the government’s control (and indeed, we want these people to come forward and seek treatment), it

Alexander Larman

How King Charles can solve his Prince Harry coronation conundrum

Most men in their seventies, if they had to attend an arduous public event, would hope that their younger son’s presence would be the last thing they had to worry about. They might assume their offspring would be on hand to attend to their ageing parent; to offer comfort and support when required, and to discreetly deal with any difficulties that arose during the course of the day. That their child would be the greatest cause of the angst they might feel about the ceremony is not, in virtually every imaginable case, a woe that most people could ever consider. For King Charles, alas, what’s going on with Prince Harry

Debbie Hayton

Eddie Redmayne’s transgender confusion

Eddie Redmayne is clearly still troubled by his portrayal of the transsexual Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl. Eight years after Redmayne’s acclaimed performance, it is the one film the actor seems nervous talking about. Now, Redmayne has distanced himself again from that role – and suggested he will no longer take parts that could go to trans actors. ‘No one wants to be limited by their gender or sexuality but, historically, these communities haven’t had a seat at the table. Until there’s a levelling, there are certain parts I wouldn’t play,’ he said in an interview with the Guardian. This isn’t the first time Redmayne has put on sack

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Who thought the Prince Andrew sex bath picture was a good idea?

How big does a bath need to be for ‘sex frolicking’ to be a possibility? That’s not, if you’d asked anyone six months ago, the question on which the reputational future of the monarchy might be in part held to depend – and yet here we are. A bizarre photograph has been released by the brother of Ghislaine Maxwell in an attempt to discredit Virgina Roberts Guiffre’s claims of abuse. The photograph made the front page of the Daily Telegraph, no less. It showed two people, described in the accompanying story as ‘acquaintances’ of Ghislaine Maxwell, sitting facing each-other, fully clothed, in the bathtub of Maxwell’s old home. Each of these people had

James May

Cycle wars: why 20mph is plenty for motorists

I live in Hammersmith, in west London, which is an area where people seem particularly fond of just running out into the street without looking – which is their prerogative because they are people not machines. 20mph is plenty fast enough and 30mph does feel too fast. And, to be honest, if you could go around somewhere like London, or Manchester, or Birmingham, at a constant 20mph, you’d be absolutely delighted. I do a lot of cycling around London and we can become over obsessed with things like rules, street furniture, signage, traffic lights and so on. They’ve been doing this with a bike lane near me; it’s not particularly

Sunday

Kara Kennedy

A chav’s guide to chavs

People who aren’t chavs think that chavs are offended by the word. I’m a chav and I can tell you with authority that we’re not. Trust me, I have a ghastly Welsh accent, filler in my lips and a penchant for Burberry nova check. Until recently I never even thought calling someone a chav was an insult. I use the term all the time as a compliment, of sorts.   A clip of Kim Kardashian wearing the chav make-up look of yesteryear went viral on social media this month. Taking part in the ‘M to the B challenge’, a TikTok craze that has been going since 2020, Kardashian threw on an

William Cook

Dresden’s Rumpelstiltskin and the strange tale of European porcelain

Strolling along Dresden’s Brühlsche Terrasse, an elegant promenade above the River Elbe known as ‘the balcony of Europe’, the wartime destruction of Germany’s most beautiful city seems like the echo of a bygone age. Since reunification, the reconstruction of its baroque Altstadt has been meticulous – the panorama Canaletto painted has been painstakingly restored. Reduced to ruins in February 1945, Dresden can once more be called ‘the Florence on the Elbe.’ Much ink has been spilt over the rights or wrongs of the Allied bombardment of my father’s birthplace (he was born here in 1942 and survived the bombing as a small boy), obscuring the far more interesting story of

Alice Sullivan

What the Census reveals about trans people in Britain

‘Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?’. Brits were asked that question for the first time in the 2021 Census: 93.5 per cent said ‘yes’, 0.5 per cent said ‘no’ and the remaining six per cent did not respond. This means that, of those who answered, 0.58 per cent said their gender identity did not match their natal sex. In a debate where tensions are running high on both sides of the Scots border, this data is sorely needed – and is worth digging into. The gender identity question confirms the rise in trans identities among youth. Among 16-24 year olds, one per

Chris Miller

Morris Chang: the microchip mogul caught between Biden and Xi

At the centre of the world’s tech sector sits a Taiwanese chip tycoon most people have never heard of. Morris Chang is the founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s biggest chipmaker. He became rich and powerful by making chips the rest of the world can’t live without. And as the world’s semiconductor industry is being reshaped by Chinese and US efforts to control the future of chip technology, Chang finds himself courted by the world’s most powerful governments but also under pressure amid an escalating geopolitical clash. The tale of Morris Chang is not only a story of visionary entrepreneurialism and technical brilliance Though TSMC is far from

John Armstrong

World Athletics’ trans policy isn’t scientific

This week it was revealed in the Telegraph that World Athletics is engaged in a confidential consultation with national governing bodies over the question of whether transwomen should be allowed to compete in the female category.   World Athletics’ current rules allow males to compete in the female category if their legal sex is female and they have held their serum testosterone levels below 5 nMol/l for 12 months. Their ‘preferred option’ in the consultation is to change the acceptable testosterone level to 2.5 nMol/l for 24 months.  All this talk of nanomoles and serum testosterone is a dramatic misdirection Lord Coe, president of World Athletics, announced in November that athletics will ‘follow the science’ –

Zareer Masani

How the British saved India’s classical history

In India, a generation has been brought up on the academic Edward Said’s unhistorical prejudices towards the British and what he called the ‘colonial gaze’. In his eyes, British Orientalists were guilty of what is now termed ‘cultural appropriation’.  To his followers it therefore may come as a surprise to learn that it was British Orientalists who in fact rediscovered India’s classical history and heritage and made it available to the rest of the world.  Sir William Jones, a brilliant polymath, contributed more than any other individual to India’s national renaissance. Alongside his day job as a judge in Calcutta, Jones mastered Sanskrit, translated Indian classics and used it to

Saturday

Gordon Caldwell

The NHS is drowning in paperwork

The NHS is in a state of crisis, with increasingly long delays for ambulances and emergency care. Often people believe that hospital delays and bottlenecks are caused entirely by the difficulty of discharging patients to social care. But there is another factor which is just as much of a problem, and which should be far easier to fix: the masses of unnecessary paperwork doctors and nurses have to fill out every day.   In many hospitals as many as 30 pages of nursing documents have to be filled out every time a patient is admitted to hospital In the picture above, I once laid next to all the forms nurses had to

Alexander Larman

Bathtime pictures won’t save Prince Andrew

As the furore about Prince Harry and Spare finally shows some signs of dying down – the book’s second week sales dropped 82 per cent, albeit with a wildly impressive 82,538 copies sold – it is time, once again, for his uncle to take centre stage. It seems as if the beleaguered and not-so-grand Duke of York has been involved in one scandal after another recently, and this week has been no exception. Firstly, it has been made clear by King Charles that his disgraced brother can have no further official dealings with Buckingham Palace. His offices in the building have been closed down and he has now been informed that

Natasha Feroze

Matthew Parris, Lionel Shriver and Gus Carter

24 min listen

On this week’s episode, Matthew Parris wonders what ‘winning’ in Ukraine really means (00:52), Lionel Shriver says she’s fighting her own war against words (08:43), and Gus Carter wonders whether it’s a good idea to reintroduce Bison into Britain (18:28).