Society

Wednesday

Simon Stevens

How the junior doctors’ strike could have been avoided

Easter and Passover coincided this year, so we’ve been in America visiting my in-laws. Four years ago, in the spirit of the holiday of liberation and exodus, we had all travelled to the Ukrainian village outside Lviv from which my father-in-law’s family emigrated. In just a few short generations during the 20th century, people there found themselves labouring under the Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Nazi and Soviet yokes. The disastrous human consequences are laid bare in Bernard Wasserstein’s poignant new history, A Small Town in Ukraine. Now Russian missiles intermittently rain down, partly enabled by sanctions busting and dirty money. When President Zelensky addressed the British parliament a couple of months ago,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I shed a tear for the SNP

For people who take politics seriously and very earnestly, such as myself, the present debacle within the Scottish National party is surely a time of great sadness and disappointment, rather than of jumping up in the air, screaming ‘Ha ha ha, suck it up, you malevolent ginger dwarf!’ and breaking open the champers. Gloating in such a manner is odious and juvenile and so I simply shook my head sadly and even shed a tear when I heard that the party’s treasurer, Colin Beattie, had been arrested. In fact I spent most of the day beneath a shroud of tears, having learned that the mega campervan parked outside Peter Murrell’s

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

How to lose sales and alienate people

In some quarters, American enterprise is alive and well. Established in 1929 to promote consumer protection, the conservative non-profit Consumers’ Research is launching the free service ‘Woke Alerts’, which texts subscribers news of companies ‘putting progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers’. Using iconography reminiscent of adverts for those high-frequency plug-ins that ward off mice, the parent website urges shoppers tired of corporations latching onto fashionable left-wing causes to dramatise their displeasure through product boycotts. The idea is a bit goofy. Yet the app could appeal to a far more than niche market. Only 8 per cent of the US public self-identifies as far left. That leaves a

The Spectator

Letters: The reincarnation of Anne Boleyn 

Pension point Sir: I have just read Kate Andrews’s article on junior doctors’ pay (‘Sick pay’, 15 April). While not wishing to get drawn into the rights or wrongs of their strike action, may I point out that in respect of the NHS pension scheme, for the sake of balance, the employee’s pension contribution also needs to be taken into account? The employer may well pay a 20 per cent contribution, but a junior doctor on a salary of either £29,000 or £37,000 (both figures quoted in the article) will pay 9.8 per cent of salary with a consequent reduction in take-home pay. John Etherington Wilsden, West Yorkshire Coach trip

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The problem with St Paul

On Easter Saturday, I wrote for the Times about the victimhood of Christ, describing this as a regrettable foundation for a world religion. In online posts beneath my column came hundreds of comments from Christians protesting that I’d misunderstood the Crucifixion’s meaning, which was (they said) the ultimate victory. Triumphantly, Jesus redeemed our sins. Or ‘atoned’ for them. Along with atonement and redemption, expressions like ‘ransomed’, ‘forgiven’, ‘pardoned’, ‘paid for’, ‘healed’ and ‘washed away’ recurred, as well as ‘sacrifice’ – Jesus’s blood-sacrifice to expiate the world’s sins: a kind of reparation. The notion of release – from slavery, debt or imprisonment – suffuses these responses. In the context of human

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 22 April 2023

I have played the Easter Guardian in one event or another for the past 20 years. It is the perfect Easter tournament and everybody has fun, particularly in the mixed pairs. I wasn’t interested in finding a slightly more exotic alternative; the Royal National Hotel in Russell Square was where I most wanted to be. This year was different. I went on a mini-break to Italy (no card playing of any sort) but I kept a sharp eye on the EBU’s results page, and felt a pang of envy. After all how can sun, sea and food compete? The Swiss Teams was won by team ‘SUSHI’ (Shashou – Sandqvist, Bucknell

Melissa Kite

My proof that God exists

We had planted a cluster of daffodils on the spaniel’s grave, but after a few days the weather battered them down. Sadly, the little yellow flowers began to curl up and wither in the force of the wind and hail that was pelting the small wooded copse where we laid Cydney to rest. I chose daffodils because her official name was Byrecoc Cinnamon Jonquil. I went to the farm shop and bought a large pot of the variety sometimes called narcissus, sometimes jonquil, a lovely old-fashioned name. For two days they bloomed on the spot, and then they faltered. But on the fourth day when I visited, I realised, walking

Jeremy Clarke

What I’d give for a glass of water

It took five firemen or pompiers to lift me out of bed, carry me down three narrow flights of stairs and down a rocky path, then to shove me into the back of their van. When I cried out in pain the sweating firemen joked that I was a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Henceforward they humorously addressed me as sheikh. It had to be pompiers because my legs don’t work. The educated guess is that a tumour is pressing against my spine, gradually paralysing me from the toes up. The old legs feel amputated: just colourless slabs of cold meat. ‘Can I perhaps have a glass of water?’

Taki

America is no longer the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave

New York The fact that a sailor on leave cannot whistle at a pretty girl’s legs is scientific proof that America is beyond help and finished for good. That also goes for hard hats, who along with sailors were among the whistlers back in the good old days before woke ruined men, women and the country in general. Already radical activists have destroyed the notion of womanhood as well as that of biology by using words such as ‘cis’ and expressions like ‘gender assigned at birth’. All women athletes want is to compete against one another. Is it too much to ask? The castrating atmosphere that prevails over here does

Stephen L. Miller

The end of the Fox-Dominion circus

Now that Dominion Voting Systems has settled for $787.5 million (£633 million) – less than half the $1.6 billion (£1.3 billion) they were asking for in damages from Fox News – the circus must pack up and move elsewhere.  There’s nothing the media likes to cover more than itself, and there is no media target juicier than Fox News. Fox was suckered into the vacuum left by Donald Trump that Joe Biden’s presidency was never going to fill. The media needed a villain and Fox, led by Tucker Carlson, scratches that itch for them.   Fox News did itself no favours by slingshotting back and forth from being the first network to accurately call

Tuesday

David Abulafia

Why is Netflix pretending that Cleopatra was black?

‘I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’ So asserts a trailer for a new Netflix ‘docuseries’ looking at the lives of powerful women in history. Alas for the speaker, an American of African descent, her grandmother’s idea of historical truth was highly subjective. It was built on an absurd generalisation about all Africans being black, and the regrettable assumption that skin colour is an important criterion for judging people’s merits. No one denies the awful legacy of slavery among African Americans, and the wish to find female African heroines is understandable – but it is also vital to

Andrew Tettenborn

The EU is alienating eastern Europe

For most of its 66 years of existence, a vital part of the EU’s mission has been the inexorable expansion of its power to tell member states what to do. It now has to grasp though that in future it will need to backtrack. Unless Brussels morphs pretty quickly from a centralised technocracy dispatching orders to its vassals, into an organisation based on broad consensus between elected governments, it is likely to find itself side-lined or even facing a continental schism. If you were looking for the most inept way to run an organisation like the EU, this comes close The latest illustration of this arises from a sudden glut

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Why is Just Stop Oil targeting the snooker?

Just Stop Oil has finally hit the fossil-fuel barons where it hurts: the World Snooker Championship. Last night, play was disrupted when one JSO activist climbed on to a snooker table and covered it in orange powder paint, leading the match between Robert Milkins and Joe Perry to be suspended. Another activist tried – and failed – to glue herself to the other table. Both have been arrested. Meanwhile, enraged snooker fans everywhere are trying to work out what on Earth their sport has got to do with climate change. We could speculate. The tournament is sponsored by online used-car dealer Cazoo, which is perhaps particularly complicit in the defilement of

Debbie Hayton

Has the single sex trans school conundrum finally been resolved?

For too long, some teachers and schools have been making it up as they go along when presented with the challenge of accommodating transgender-identified children. Either that or they have contracted out their thinking to Stonewall or other third-party providers. The promised guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) cannot come soon enough. The latest snippet that has emerged will reassure single-sex schools that they can indeed remain single-sex. The rules around such schools have always allowed for some discretion. A boys’ school, for example, might admit a girl into the sixth form if the local girls’ school doesn’t offer her desired combination of A-Level subjects. But nobody would be under any

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Angela Rayner is the odd one out in Starmer’s top team

Who are Labour? Focus groups regularly report a lack of familiarity on the part of voters with His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, even with their leader. ‘Don’t know’ looms quite loudly on Keir Starmer’s focus word cloud, though dwarfed by ‘Boring’. Despite this – maybe because of it – Labour are still a good stretch ahead in the polls. A recent slight crumbliness in that lead has sparked Labour to produce attack ads which use a formulation I hadn’t seen since reading the walls at my primary school, i.e. – ‘Do you think people should wash under their arms? Janet Figgis doesn’t’ – but even these flavourful communications are all

Robin Ashenden

The Internet Archive’s troubles are bad news for book lovers

The Internet Archive (archive.org), a San Francisco-based virtual lending library, is one of the quiet wonders of the modern world. A digital collection of seven million books and nearly 15 million audio-recordings, it was ambitiously intended by its founder Brewster Kahle – a member of the internet ‘Hall of Fame’ – to be a kind of online ‘Library of Alexandria’. The IA loans out its titles free of charge, the main beneficiaries being those who can’t get to a real ‘brick and mortar’ library – the housebound, those living far from cities, or people in need of rare books their own local library doesn’t stock and can’t get hold of quickly

Monday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

What will happen to interest rates once they peak?

As the battle of the economic forecasts rages on, it’s useful to note that (right now, anyway), the predictions aren’t all that different. The more optimistic scenarios, like the one published by EY ITEM Club today, suggest the UK will see minuscule growth this year but avoid technical recession. The pessimistic scenarios, like the IMF’s latest forecast, are being revised upwards but still show the UK economy experiencing a short and shallow contraction.  The good and bad scenarios are, therefore, both largely within the margin of error –  and all are pretty lousy at that (albeit better than previously expected). Regardless of which proves right, this is shaping up to

Matthew Lynn

London’s stock market risks sinking into irrelevance

The chip maker ARM decided against listing its shares in London, despite plenty of arm twisting from the government. The building materials group CRH decided last month that New York was a better place for its equity to be traded, leaving the FTSE for good. The mining giant BHP has moved its listing from London to Sydney, while another materials group, Ferguson, switched from London to New York last year. And now hotel group IHG may make the same journey.  At these rates, no one will need the Prime Minister’s new plan to boost numeracy to count the number of companies still listed on the London market. The fingers of

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Grenfell survivors can’t copyright their tragedy

Some survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, it was reported yesterday, have taken grave exception to some new dramatisations of the disaster. It seems to me that historical events belong to history: and that means that they are available to news reporters to write about and dramatists to make art about A petition urging the BBC to drop its projected series Grenfell has had more than 50,000 signatures, and there’s anger too at a play being prepared for the National Theatre by the writer Gillian Slovo. ‘Before you do this sort of thing, you should get our permission, because this is our pain, our story,’ said Maryam Adam, who escaped from the burning tower and