Society

Wednesday

Melissa Kite

The vegans have landed in West Cork

After a day’s house-hunting in West Cork, I texted the builder boyfriend to say that we were too late. The vegans had landed. This was my second trip to view farms in Ireland and I fell even more in love with the rugged, sometimes desolate landscape punctuated by friendly market towns with bunting strung across the streets. Unfortunately, so had everyone else. Two agents had confirmed that my nearest neighbours might be a pair of unwashed British hobbit people  The London lefties have made it to the Emerald Isle. Having laid waste to Devon, Cornwall and Wales with their llamas and yurts and mental ideas about everything rural from farming

Jeremy Clarke

My morphine machine has broken

Monday morning. In comes Frank. Frank is a carer in his late fifties. He comes daily to wash me. Still half asleep, I sit upright in my mechanical cradle forking in Greek yoghurt, strawberries and granola and looking out of the window. Up here on the cliff, it’s another clear, blue, busy day ahead for our feathery nest builders, egg rearers and chick scoffers. Although he was a bit brutal with his caring to begin with, Funky Frank has become gentler over time In his spare time Frank plays bass, he says. Of all the styles he likes funk best, he says. His style is a busy, intricate one. He’ll

Taki

New York’s killer cyclists

New York The most likely place to be injured, or even killed, in the Bagel is the sidewalk, any sidewalk, where bikes and scooters have free rein to mow down the old, the infirm, and those unable to perform life-saving, matador-like avoidance moves. Yep, marauding bikers use the sidewalks of New York to beat the traffic and intimidate people, and have managed to impose their illegal presence there as a beleaguered police force turn a blind eye. It all started under the last mayor of the Bagel, one so bad that I dare not mention his name in the elegant pages of The Speccie. And it continues – but even

John Mac Ghlionn

The narcissism of Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists have an insatiable appetite for mayhem. Protesters from the environmental group are slowing down traffic in London today, conducting a ‘go slow’ march through Parliament Square. This isn’t the first time, of course, that they’ve caused disruption. Cast your minds back to July last year, when five members of JSO glued themselves to the Last Supper painting in London’s Royal Academy. A few days before this rather odd demonstration, campaigners entered the National Gallery in central London and proceeded to glue themselves to the frame of John Constable’s the Hay Wain. Earlier this month, a JSO protester disrupted the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield by jumping

Jawad Iqbal

Why are so many Indian migrants crossing the Channel?

Indians now make up the second-biggest cohort of Channel migrants: 675 Indians arrived in small boats in the first three months of this year, according to Home Office figures. This amounts to almost a fifth of the total 3,793 crossings made in the first quarter of this year. The number represents a stark rise: only 683 Indians made the journey in the whole of last year. Albanians, yes, Afghans and Iraqis possibly – but the revelation that so many from India are making the dangerous crossing to England has taken many by surprise. The Indian government insists that the growth in emigration is linked to a rise in Sikhs fleeing

Tuesday

Winston Marshall

Peter Boghossian: how the Academy got woke and why the ‘New Atheists’ are to blame

67 min listen

Winston speaks to former Portland State University professor turned international philosopher, Peter Boghossian. Peter was a prominent new atheist author and expert on the Socratic method when he resigned his position at Portland over the percolation of ‘woke’ ideology into the university. In his resignation letter he described how the institution had become a ‘dogma factory’ which had ‘weaponized diversity, equity and inclusion’. Peter and Winston discuss progressive domination of the Academy, how woke spreads, DEI vs free speech, how to have constructive conversations and whether the new atheists led to woke culture.

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Diane Abbott and the trouble with the ‘hierarchy of racism’

The radical left have a new favourite phrase: ‘hierarchy of racism’. This is when one form of racism is treated more seriously than another. Such racial favouritism infuriates online leftists. It is anathema to the noble cause of anti-racism to elevate one ethnic group’s suffering over another’s, they cry. All racism is bad, they’re forever reminding us. But here’s the thing: they only ever use that phrase ‘hierarchy of racism’ when it’s anti-Semitism that is being talked about. I guarantee that every time you hear a Corbynista or some other virtual radical bemoan the treatment of certain kinds of racism as more concerning than others, it’s because anti-Jewish hatred is

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why should gardeners learn to love weeds?

Dirt, is, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously put it, ‘matter out of place’. For her, ‘there is no such thing as absolute dirt’ and ‘no single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit’. It is a label for ‘all events which blur, smudge, contradict or otherwise confuse accepted classifications’.   This is a long way of getting round to saying that the Royal Horticultural Society is now encouraging us to embrace weeds. Four of the dozen show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show are to include them. Indeed Sheila Das, the garden manager at RHS Wisley, is anxious that we

Joanna Williams

Labour’s ‘lessons for boys’ plan is a sinister sideshow

What are schools for? The answer used to be obvious: school was where children went to learn how to read, write and count, while the lucky ones picked up some history, algebra, chemistry and literature along the way. But not any more. Nowadays, academic subjects have become a sideshow to the main event: changing children’s attitudes and values. Whether it is relationships and sex education classes that teach children there are 73 genders, citizenship lessons that preach the importance of fair trade, or personal, social and health education workshops on white privilege, today’s schools seem more concerned with coercing children into accepting a particular set of beliefs than they are

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The era of big state spending is here to stay

Lockdown ended, the economy reopened – and public sector borrowing went up. Provisional figures for 2022/23 released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning show that the government borrowed £139.2 billion. This is an increase of £18.1 billion on the previous year, when the economy was still being disrupted by Covid. The figure was made much worse by figures for March this year, when the government borrowed £21.5 billion – £16.3 billion more than in March 2022.  A huge surge in borrowing during the pandemic was to be expected. The government was, after all, paying the wages of 9 million people at one stage through the furlough scheme.

Nigel Jones

Britain’s bloody history in Sudan

A 72 hour truce between rival military factions has been brokered in Sudan’s civil war by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. But whether this one holds, or falls apart like the previous ones, the history of one of Africa’s largest countries is a troubled one. It is also not the first time that an emergency evacuation of British citizens has caused a British political storm.  In 1884, just as today, a British prime minister was under intense pressure to rescue British citizens from savage fighting in Sudan’s capital Khartoum. So violent was the criticism of the ‘dithering’ in Downing Street then, that it almost destroyed the career of the grand old

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Jolyon Maugham’s opening sentence might be the worst of all time

In the first sentence of his book, Jolyon Maugham – the anti-Brexit KC best known for clubbing a fox to death – achieves a mean feat. In 22 words, he conveys his trademark self-pity, self-aggrandisement and capacity for tying himself into pompous knots: ‘The life I have is hard, but I got to choose it, and the road that brought me here I did not,’ Maugham writes in Bringing Down Goliath. It certainly acts as a tantaliser. If this is only the first sentence, what other jewels are contained in the remaining 318 pages? After we’ve picked ourselves up from the floor, it’s worth unpacking – or trying to unpack

John Armstrong

Climate activism must not be allowed to undermine climate science

Student activist Edred Whittingham baffled the snooker world last week by jumping onto the green baize at the Snooker World Championships in Sheffield and detonating a package of orange chalk across the table in a bid to end global warming. A few days earlier, the German government had baffled scientists by shutting down their three remaining nuclear power plants; this despite a despairing open letter from scientists, including two Nobel Laureates, explaining the plants’ potential to reduce Germany’s carbon footprint by up to 30 million tons of C02 per year. As these stories show, there is no shortage of good intentions to save the planet, but there remains scope for

Monday

Andrew Tettenborn

Giving anonymity to paedophiles is a threat to our justice system

Substantial constraints on the freedom of the press tend to accumulate from seemingly small restrictions. Events last week in a court in Antrim in Northern Ireland demonstrate this neatly. A paedophile was caught sending suggestive emails to undercover police posing as prepubescent girls, and went down for 16 months. Who was he? We will never know. Why have human rights led to this boxing in of free speech in favour of the frankly undeserving? Why? The answer is that in court he threatened suicide unless given anonymity. The court gave in to his demand. An injunction now bars any disclosure of who he is for his lifetime, and anyone breaking it,

Theo Davies-Lewis

The backlash to ‘renaming’ the Brecon Beacons is a gift to nationalists

‘As tedious as a tired horse…worse than a smoky house’ was how Shakespeare’s Hotspur described Wales’s national hero, Owain Glyndŵr. Perhaps, as the late Jan Morris wrote of these words for The Spectator, it could be a timeless characteristic of all Welshmen. The Welsh can be defensive, melancholic and (whisper it quietly) prone to self-pity, particularly when it comes to relations with England. Having the English next door, medieval conquerors turned modern ignorant neighbours, will always transfix Welsh imagination and provoke tension. Yet how futile Anglo-Welsh relations have become that the modern-day battlefield of two nations with a rich, shared history, has been entangled into the culture war, with the ‘renaming’

John McTernan

It’s time to forgive Diane Abbott

Diane Abbott is a giant figure in the modern Labour party. As the first black woman ever to be elected to the House of Commons, and the longest serving black MP, she is an inspiration to black and brown communities – especially women – across the country. Abbott also wrote a crass and offensive letter to the Observer, in which she unfortunately, and utterly unsuccessfully, sought to distinguish racism from prejudice – in the process deeply offending the Jewish, Irish, and Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) communities. For a life-long campaigner against racism, this was an especially egregious error. It appears it is now impossible to accept a sincere apology

Sunday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Will Diane Abbott now face the same fate as Corbyn?

It’s the fate of Labour MP Diane Abbott rather than former deputy prime minister Dominic Raab that is dominating the news this afternoon. Although the Sunday papers are filled with details of the series of events that led Raab to tender his resignation following the report into allegations of bullying against him, it’s a letter from the former shadow home secretary – and key Jeremy Corbyn ally – sent in to the Observer that is now making waves. As Steerpike documents, Abbott said in response to a comment piece from last week’s paper suggesting ‘Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from racism’, that prejudice is not ‘interchangeable’ with racism.

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Diane Abbott’s surreal U-turn

It’s sometimes said that there’s a tweet from the surrealist Twitter user @dril to cover everything. So it has proved with Diane Abbott, whose screeching U-turn on a letter to today’s Observer immediately put me in mind of this 2017 classic: ‘issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. You do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them.’’ That captures the comical extent of Ms Abbott’s course correction. The letter as published took issue with the writer Tomiwa Owolade for a piece in which he’d argued, under the headline ‘Racism In Britain Is Not A Black And White Issue’, that Irish, Jewish and

Patrick Porter

Why China might attack Taiwan

China may well attack Taiwan. According to the CIA, President Xi Jinping has instructed his armed forces to be able to strike by 2027. Nothing is certain, and there are no signs of mobilisation for an imminent attack. But beyond that, Beijing’s behaviour is consistent with Xi’s orders. It builds up its assault forces. It strengthens its nuclear arsenal. It steps up its military drills. It increasingly molests Taiwan across the board. And it makes its economy more resilient to sanctions.   We can’t know Beijing’s intent for sure. We do know it covets reunification with Taiwan as the centrepiece of its declared project to restore full Chinese nationhood and create

Vivek Y. Kelkar

Pakistan has reached an inflection point

The holy festival of Eid-ul-Fitr has dawned in Pakistan, marking the end of Ramadan. Celebrations were unusually muted. The month of Ramadan has been harrowing for a large swathe of Pakistan’s populace. All through the month, through the day-long fasts, crowds thronged outside the free food distribution centres across the country, waiting for bags of flour. Sometimes they waited days. Fights were commonplace. Often, the very young or the elderly were injured or even killed in the stampedes. There are far too many of these cases to recount. Food inflation is at a record high of 47 per cent; overall inflation hovered around the 35 per cent mark through March and April. Earlier this month the country’s central bank raised interest rates to 21 per