Society Archives

Sunday

23 Apr 2023

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

Nicholas Farrell

Should Italy’s killer bear be sentenced to death?

The female bear that mauled to death a male jogger in the Italian Alps on 5th April was captured this week. Twenty-six-year-old Andrea Papi’s ravaged corpse was naked when found. His shirt and shorts lay many yards away. The killer bear, known as JJ4, is a 17-year-old mother of three cubs and the off-spring of two of the ten brown bears brought from Slovenia to the Trentino region of north east Italy in 1999-2000 under an EU rewilding scheme called Life Ursus. JJ4 was identified as the killer from a DNA match. Two weeks later forestry police captured her after following her tracks in the snow and setting up a

Simon Hunt

The EU must tread carefully in its AI crackdown

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surged in popularity in recent months. ChatGPT alone has swelled to more than 100 million users in a matter of weeks, capturing the imagination of the world for whom the technology had previously been consigned to the realm of science fiction. Scores of companies, from software businesses to manufacturers, are racing to find fresh ways to build its functionality into their operations. But amidst the excitement, there is also a worry: are we going too far, too fast? Twitter’s owner Elon Musk warned this week that AI could lead to ‘civilisation destruction’. Regulators, alarmed at this explosion in activity, are scrambling to react. They have a

Katja Hoyer

Has Germany truly come to terms with its Nazi past?

Germany is often lauded for the way it confronts its own past. The Holocaust, the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children, has a central place in collective memory as well as in the memorial landscape of the capital Berlin, where a 200,000 sq ft site is dedicated to it. But campaigners and historians have long argued that the Nazis’ murder of an estimated 275,000 people suffering from mental illness and disabilities has received far less public attention. Now one of the last physical traces of this crime is to be destroyed, causing a new row over how modern Germany should deal with its past. At the centre

Fraser Nelson

An appeal to academics

One of Britain’s standout characteristics is the number of world-class universities: we have several top-50 institutions and the Eurozone has none. The brainpower – academics and their students – is a massive national asset. But one that’s not really reflected in our public debate. Whereas American academics are shaping their debate, and often ours, British academics are seldom heard from. This in part a defect in the funding system that incentivises academics to have ‘impact’ in academic papers but not real-world debate (as opposed to the US, whose universities have far closer links to real-world companies and their research divisions). In the UK, the national debate about the great social,

Emma Webb

Art is eating itself

In his curious little book about Flying Saucers, Carl Jung took an interesting detour into the psychology of modern art. His contemporaries, he said, had ‘taken as their subject the disintegration of forms’. Their pictures, ‘abstractly detached from meaning and feeling alike, are distinguished by their “meaninglessness” as much as their deliberate aloofness from the spectator’. Artists ‘have immersed themselves,’ wrote Jung, ‘in the destructive element and have created a new conception of beauty, one that delights in the alienation of meaning and of feeling. Everything consists of debris, unorganised fragments, holes, distortions, overlappings, infantilisms and crudities which outdo the clumsiest attempts of primitive art and belie the traditional idea of skill’. ‘It is the beauty of

Saturday

22 Apr 2023

Patrick West

A split within the radical green movement was inevitable

Ever since Monty Python created their internecine, bickering and ridiculous groups of freedom fighters – the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front – for their 1979 film The Life of Brian, it’s always been easy and tempting to mock and deride the fissiparous nature of ideologues and tin-pot revolutionaries. Those who believe in the purity of a cause tend to have a semi-religious mindset – and consequently one semi-divorced from reality – which brooks no heresy from orthodoxy. Thus extreme, quasi-cult movements are always prone to split into factions. And so it goes with the radical green movement, which at its worst excesses does resemble a bizarre cult: witness

Terry Barnes

RIP Barry Humphries

It was not just Barry Humphries who died on Saturday. It was that towering skewerer of pomposity and humbug, and gate-crasher of Royal boxes, Dame Edna Everage. It was Australia’s roving cultural attaché and Australian Minister for the Yartz, Sir Les Patterson. It was pathetic Melbourne suburban pensioner, Sandy Stone. It was colonial hellraiser Barry McKenzie. It was a host of other characters, who burst forth from Humphries’s determination to be different in a world that worshipped conformity, and his witheringly sharp eye for the absurdities of the human condition. Like another hugely-talented man of many characters, Peter Sellers, Humphries kept the real him from most of the wider world. But Dame Edna, Sir Les, Barry McKenzie and all the rest were still

Barry Humphries

Why does no one dress for dinner at Claridge’s any more?

Barry Humphries has died at the age of 89. This was his last diary for The Spectator in our 2022 Christmas issue. F.Scott Fitzgerald declared in an excellent late story that ‘the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things’. It is certainly what I am striving to do. I have far too much stuff so I’ve decided a little culling is needed. Some weeding out imperative, deaccessions inevitable. I’ve started with books; I’ll end up with people and finish with me. I kneel on the floor of my book room with a large cardboard box at my side. Do I really need all those

Alice C Hughes

Covid’s origins and a disturbing Nature study

Ever since the world was forced into lockdown in March 2020, the question of where and how Covid-19 appeared has captivated scientists and the wider public. Tracing the source of the virus could be invaluable in preventing future pandemics, yet the quest to find Covid’s origins has been deeply politicised, which in turn has altered the course of research, collaboration and dialogue. Sadly, as a recent publication by Chinese scientists in Nature shows, we are still a long way from getting to the bottom of what happened in Wuhan in 2020. The problems with finding the origins of the virus began almost as soon as the potential significance of Covid was realised. Soon after the

Kevin Dahlgren

Fentanyl is wreaking havoc in America

I stepped through a hole in the chainlink fence surrounding Portland’s O’Bryant Square and saw four people nodded out and three smoking fentanyl. The man who had supplied them was standing nearby; he gave me a nod and continued with his business. Fentanyl is fifty times stronger than heroin and ruthlessly addictive Built in 1973, the park is mostly brick and concrete with its dominant feature a bronze fountain in the shape of Portland’s iconic rose. It was permanently closed and fenced off in 2018. The city blamed ‘structural issues’, but the real reason for closing the park was that it has long been a well-known place to use drugs.

Gavin Mortimer

Macron has left Marseille at the mercy of violent drug gangs

Five months and counting until France hosts the Rugby World Cup. For England supporters, the tournament kicks off at the stylish Stade Vélodrome in Marseille against Argentina on 9 September, one of six fixtures hosted by the Mediterranean city. Scotland take on South Africa the day after the England game, and two of the tournament’s quarter-finals will also be in Marseille, as they were in 2007 when France last hosted the World Cup. That year was a peaceful one by Marseille’s standards, with only seven murders attributed to gangland wars. There was a new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who had campaigned on a ‘tough on crime’ ticket, and that, plus the hosting

Samuel Rubinstein

The trouble with The Rest is Politics podcast

You have probably already heard of The Rest is Politics, which consistently tops the podcast charts. You have certainly already heard of its two hosts, and have a flavour of their temperaments as well as their political views. Alastair Campbell may once have been lost in the shadow of Malcolm Tucker, but every week on the podcast his real self fights its way through. He finds his perfect foil (so we are told) in his co-host, the awkward nerd Rory Stewart. The Rest is Politics is a strange name. What does it mean? It isn’t a phrase. The pieces begin to fall together once you realise that the company behind

Friday

21 Apr 2023

Ross Clark

Newsnight stoops to a new low in its climate protest coverage

Has the BBC been invaded by a cabal of Extinction Rebellion protesters who have tied up the Director General in his swivel chair? I ask because of a remarkable interview on Newsnight which marks a new low in the objectivity of the BBC’s climate coverage. The flagship BBC Two news programme last night covered the threatened disruption of the London Marathon by Just Stop Oil protesters. Given that activists from another organisation did indeed carry out leaked plans to disrupt the Grand National – which delayed the start of the race – it is a threat to be taken very seriously. It was entirely proper that the subject be covered, and that the

Brendan O’Neill

Is Dominic Raab really a ‘bully’?

Who is the real victim in the Dominic Raab bullying saga? I know the story is that he was a monster in his various departments, allegedly barking instructions and wagging a finger at his stressed-out minions. But the anti-Raab revolt smacks far more of bullying to me. Civil servants clubbing together to drum an exacting minister out of his job? It definitely has a whiff of Mean Girls to it. Raab has resigned as deputy prime minister following the findings of an investigation into his alleged bullying. In his resignation letter he says the investigation dismissed all but two of the accusations against him. The findings are ‘flawed’, he says.

Ross Clark

Don’t blame the rain for the drop in high street shopping

Did retail sales really fall in March because of the wet weather? This is the excuse being trotted out by the ONS and many others this morning. Or is it really more a case of February’s surprise rise in sales being too good to be true, and the economy not being as perky as we have fooled ourselves into believing? Sales volumes have been recorded by the ONS as plunging 0.9 per cent in March, nearly cancelling out the rise of 1.1 per cent in February (which itself was revised down from 1.2 per cent). Sales volumes are still up a modest 0.6 per cent over the past three months,

Thursday

20 Apr 2023

Raquel Rosario Sánchez

Keir Starmer’s gender muddle is a disaster for the Labour party

How committed is Keir Starmer to protecting women’s rights? Earlier this month, the Labour leader dismissed the sex and gender identity debate as trivial and irrelevant to the next election, only to backtrack following an intervention by the Prime Minister. In an LBC interview earlier this month, Starmer stated: ‘I do sometimes just wonder why on earth we spend so much of our time discussing something which isn’t a feature of the dinner table or the kitchen table or the café table or the bar.’ The day before, a Sunday Times interview published statements he made on a train journey to Plymouth the previous Friday in which he tried to court women voters concerned

Mark Jones

The birthday party that paved the way for Hitler to win power

Ten days before Adolf Hitler died, the Führer turned 56. Just after midnight on 20 April 1945 his personal assistants gathered outside his room to offer him their congratulations. Hours later the political leadership of the Third Reich did likewise. Men responsible for mass death, including Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring and Albert Speer, stood inline like schoolboys to shake their Führer’s hand and wish him a happy birthday. Once they had done so, they rushed to leave Berlin. Only the closest circle, those who would stay in the bunker until the very end remained. That night, after Hitler had gone to bed, they drank champagne and danced in the ruins

Ross Clark

Michael O’Leary’s Brexit jibe is a step too far

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary never has exactly been the master of tact, but will his latest outburst make his customers finally ask themselves: do they really want to travel in his planes? Speaking at a Bloomberg event he asserted that Britain will one day rejoin the single market because ‘in the next five to ten years, quite a number of the Brexiteers will die, as the average age of them is about over 70’. What O’Leary forgets is that people’s attitudes tend to change with age Let’s leave aside, for a moment, whether it is wise to talk about your customers in this way; O’Leary’s remarks are wrong-headed. It is right