Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Are heatwaves becoming more common?

Grand unions The BMA – or British Medical Association – called a five-day strike of junior doctors (which it now calls resident doctors). Some other grandly named trade unions: — Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (or Aslef) — Confederation of British Surgery — First Division Association (senior civil servants) — Royal College of Nursing — Royal College of Midwives — Society of Authors — Society of Radiographers Heat up Are heatwaves becoming more commonplace across Britain? Average number of days per year in which each county experiences a temperature in excess of 32°C (90°F): 1931-1960 0.17 1961-1990 0.25 1991-2020 0.40 2015-2024 0.91 (Note that the latter period is

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Down with the middle class

I suppose this magazine is probably not the best forum to launch a movement to sweep away the British middle class, much along the lines of Pol Pot’s adventure in Kampuchea in the late 1970s, but one can only play with the cards one has been dealt. The more one reads the newspapers, the more inescapable becomes the conclusion that these are the people who are responsible for almost all that is bad, verging on wicked, in our society. Not the lower-middle class, incidentally (the petit bourgeoisie so despised by Marx they were denied even agency), but the comfortable tranche above them. The middle-middle. The professions, by and large. And,

The Spectator

The Afghan asylum leak cover-up saved lives

The United Kingdom’s immigration system is broken. Tens of thousands have entered the country who should not, and the bureaucracy which processes asylum cases is a creaking wreck. Those who do deserve a safe welcome are left in legal limbo for months, if not years. And yet the Home Office, which is responsible for this chaos, is not even the department in government with the most inefficient and unaccountable bureaucracy. That hard-fought distinction belongs to the Ministry of Defence, which combines profligacy in procurement with an inability to give armed forces families homes that meet even the most basic standards of decency. So when we learned this week that ministers

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Inflation up, hosepipes off and grants for electric cars

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, agreed with President Emmanuel Macron of France that Britain could return perhaps 50 asylum seekers a week to France and accept in their place the same number of applicants through a regulated system. To celebrate, 573 people arrived that day in England in small boats, bringing the total for the week ending 14 July to 1,387. Moygashel Bonfire Committee in Co. Tyrone defended the placing of an effigy of a small boat with 12 migrants on a bonfire to usher in 12 July. Britain had, it was revealed, offered asylum to thousands of Afghan soldiers and their families caught by the accidental publication

Charles Moore Charles Moore

What I’ll miss about Norman Tebbit

This column comes to you from Auckland Castle, former palace and hunting lodge of the Prince Bishops of Durham. We, the Rectory Society, are here by kind permission of its saviour, Jonathan Ruffer, celebrating our 20th anniversary. Jonathan rescued the castle not from the heathen but from the Church of England. The last Anglican bishop to inhabit it was Justin Welby, in his brief year at Durham before being translated to Canterbury, but it had been run down for many years before that. Bishop Auckland is in one of the poorest parts of England but it did not occur to the Church authorities to use the heritage of this astonishing

Wednesday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

What’s happening in southern Syria – and why Israel is involved

Over the last 24 hours, southern Syria has seen a sharp escalation in violence involving Syrian government forces, local Druze militias, and Israeli airpower. The developments centre on the city of As-Suwayda and the surrounding region, home to much of Syria’s Druze population, and have drawn renewed attention to the complex relationship between the Druze community, the Syrian regime, and Israel. Prospects for normalising relations between Israel and Syria have significantly worsened The Syrian army has begun heavily shelling areas in and around As-Suwayda. Israeli aircraft launched strikes against regime positions in Suwayda and Daraa, and reportedly targeted a military convoy belonging to Abu Amsha, a Turkish-backed militia commander. Then,

Eliot Wilson

Are we sure the Afghan data debacle won’t happen again?

‘Afghanistan’ was the heading of Defence Secretary John Healey’s statement to the House of Commons on Tuesday – a word that hardly does justice to a three-year saga involving a catastrophic security breach and loss of data by the Ministry of Defence, a superinjunction and billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. Ministers and civil servants cannot be allowed to make policy and spend taxpayers’ money without any kind of oversight. That is not how a democracy works The bare bones of the story are these. In February 2022, the details of nearly 20,000 Afghans who had applied to come to the UK after the Taliban had seized power, as well

Alexander Larman

MasterChef must die

As Oscar Wilde didn’t quite put it, for one MasterChef presenter to depart because of a scandal may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness. After Gregg Wallace received his P45 from the long-running BBC cookery show, his co-presenter John Torode has also been given the boot, having allegedly made a racist remark during filming in 2018 – a claim Torode denies. It is clear that all is not well behind the stove. Wallace and Torde’s antics have made MasterChef a joke Wallace and Torde’s antics have made MasterChef a joke. The stories about Wallace that have dominated the headlines over the last week have long

Matthew Lynn

Cutting bank holidays for French workers is a bad idea

Banning the baguette, perhaps? Or making it compulsory to eat a sandwich at your desk at lunchtime? If you think hard enough, it is possible to imagine reform that would create more anger in France. Even so, prime minister Francois Bayrou’s plan to scrap two public holidays is right up there. Bayrou wants to reduce France’s 11 public holidays in a bid to kick-start France’s economy. Bayrou said Easter Monday had ‘no religious significance’, and the whole nation had to work and produce more. He said that bank holidays had turned the month of May into a gruyère – a Swiss cheese full of holes. He said that bank holidays had turned

David Shipley

The ‘morons’ who chopped down the Sycamore Gap tree don’t deserve prison

Our trees – oak and beech, soft and ancient, sycamores, whose seeds spin and tumble away every autumn – are one of the most beautiful things about England. I love them all – and have nothing but contempt for someone who needlessly destroys a tree which has taken decades, or centuries, to grow and might live for decades, or centuries, more. Despite this, I am deeply concerned by the way our justice system has treated Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, the two men from Cumbria who hacked down the famous Sycamore Gap tree in September 2023. At Newcastle Crown Court yesterday, the pair were sentenced to four years and three

Andrew Tettenborn

The flaw in the CofE’s £150 million victims’ fund

To much fanfare, the Church of England this week instituted a plan, funded to the tune of some £150 million and overseen by a well-respected City law firm, to compensate the victims of abuse carried out by church officials. So far, so good. But when we are talking big money like this, eligibility needs to be carefully circumscribed, with tough boundaries set. Unfortunately, one doubts whether the new Abuse Redress Measure, which set up the scheme, does this. However well-intended, it actually risks a worryingly unpredictable and at times arbitrary use of church funds. If you don’t like this, feel free to leave: but you shouldn’t be able to sue

Tuesday

The Spectator

Coffee House Shots Live: Are the Tories toast?

Watch Spectator editor Michael Gove, political editor Tim Shipman and assistant editor Isabel Hardman as they discuss where the Tories go from here, in a livestream exclusively for Spectator subscribers. The strange death of Tory England has been predicted before. But never has the ‘natural party of government’ faced a greater challenge to its survival. The Conservatives are facing attacks on all fronts from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK. Kemi Badenoch’s six-month anniversary as leader was marked by the loss of nearly 700 councillors – and testing elections await her next year in Scotland and Wales. She has promised change with her long-awaited policy commissions, ahead of a make-or-break party conference in October. But can she turn

Hugh Thomson

We’ve missed an important clue about The Salt Path fiasco

When the truth of Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path was called into question, many commentators jumped in with both feet; as Sam Leith astutely pointed out in The Spectator, there is nothing the English like so much as a good disappointment. ‘So, we twisted our story.’ It ties in with the phenomenon of confabulation Winn continues to contest the allegations which have cast doubt over the truth of the 2018 memoir. She also issued a statement talking of ‘the physical and spiritual journey Moth (her husband) and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey’.

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

What liberalism’s critics get wrong

Perhaps we are living in the early sixteenth century. Think of the ideology of the West as a sort of religion. It needs a reformation, a purging, a back to basics movement. In a sense this is well underway: for many years now, countless thinkers have attacked the flaws and complacency of the dominant Western ideology. Yet a positive vision has not really been articulated. We need something resembling the Protestant reformation. It did not chuck out the dominant religious tradition, it came up with a new account of its inner logic. To many thinkers, liberalism is a flawed ideology that must be comprehensively ditched To many thinkers, liberalism is

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The BBC Gaza documentary report is a cover-up

The BBC’s long-awaited editorial review of its documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was published today. It reads not like a rigorous investigation into serious journalistic failures, but like a desperate institutional whitewash. The report bends over backwards to defend the indefensible, trying to sanitise a catastrophic editorial misjudgment as little more than ‘a significant oversight by the Production Company.’ At the heart of the scandal lies the BBC’s failure to disclose that the documentary’s narrator, a Palestinian boy named Abdullah Al-Yazouri, is the son of Ayman Al-Yazouri, a senior official in the Hamas-run government in Gaza. This, the report acknowledges, was ‘wrong’ and constituted a breach of guideline 3.3.17 on

Monday

Alexander Larman

King Charles and Harry won’t be reconciling any time soon

The news that appeared in the Sunday newspapers was intriguing, to say the least. A meeting has taken place at (appropriately enough) the Royal Over-Seas League club between Meredith Maines, the latest in Prince Harry’s apparently endless line of California-based press officers, Liam Maguire, who has that similarly thankless task in this country, and Tobyn Andrae, who acts as the King’s communications secretary. Few will be convinced that this is the beginning of a renewed bond between father and son A well-briefed source told the Mail on Sunday, not sparing the clichés, that ‘there’s a long road ahead, but a channel of communication is now open for the first time in years’. Stressing

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Banning disposable vapes was a waste of time

When we’re debating the introduction of a new law – ban this, ban that, crack down on the other – most of the energy in the public conversation goes into the question of whether this, that, or the other is something that deserves to be cracked down on. It seems to be after the event, usually, and with the sound and fury at last subsided, that we discover whether the law in question will achieve its stated purpose.  A corker of a recent example, I think, was the Blair government’s foxhunting ban. It sucked in hundreds of hours of parliamentary time. It generated thousands of headlines. It brought hundreds of

Patrick West

How political ideology corrupted science

Science is no longer regarded or respected as an objective pursuit, one in which the principle of impartiality is sought with due diligence. This is the inference we can make from comments made by Ella Al-Shamahi, presenter of the new BBC science series, Human. ‘We do have to be a little honest,’ she says, ‘to many, it seems like left-leaning atheists have a monopoly on science.’ Science as presented to the public has taken a decidedly left-wing turn in recent years, and in many cases has been contaminated by hyper-liberal ideology Her remarks, reported in the Sunday Times, echo those made earlier this month by the Wellcome Trust chief executive,

Sunday

David Shipley

The UK should not have to ration water

The UK’s steady decline continued today with reports that water companies are looking to introduce ‘surge pricing’ in order to ration demand. Trials are being introduced by 15 water companies across the country this summer, with customers either paying more for water as they use more, or charged more at certain times of year.  Higher prices, the water companies say, will ‘reduce discretionary water usage’. What this actually means is making every shower or load of laundry more expensive in the summer months. In a wet, temperate climate like ours there is absolutely no reason we should have to ration water This shouldn’t be necessary, of course. It rains a

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Recovering the Sacred: Why young Christians are returning to church

Something mysterious is happening in churches across Britain: a growing number of young Christians are showing up. Millennial men, in particular, appear to be turning back to Christianity: there has been a four to five-fold increase since 2018 in 18-to-24-year-old males attending church. What’s going on? Three hundred Spectator subscribers gathered in the beautiful surroundings of St Bartholomew the Great, the oldest parish church in the City of London – and one which has seen for itself this surge in young Christians worshipping – to find out why. Michael Gove, Editor of The Spectator, was joined by Damian Thompson, presenter of the Holy Smoke podcast, and the Revd. Marcus Walker, Rector of St Barts. The Provost