Society Archives

Friday

14 Apr 2023

Is King Charles bringing Andrew back into the fold?

I am beginning to wonder if there are, in fact, two incarnations of King Charles that co-exist simultaneously. The first is a remarkably generous-spirited and forgiving man, who responds to insults and slights with Christ-like forbearance and shows nothing but a genuine love for his country and his people. And the second is a more flawed and capricious human being, who displays his temper both publicly and in acts of revenge against members of his family who have displeased him. If Charles really has managed to neutralise the two most troublesome and publicity-hungry members of the Firm, it’s a remarkable achievement These personae may appear to be contradictory, but when

Ross Clark

What’s the truth about long Covid?

How big a deal is long Covid and can it be treated? Opinions range from it being a serious impediment to the health of millions of those who suffered from Covid-19 to a figment in the imagination of the workshy. A study by the University of Oxford of a drug developed by US Pharmaceutical company Axcella Therapeutics may just help to shed some light. The drug, AXA1125, is designed to boost the performance of mitochondria, which generate energy for our cells and control the amount of inflammation in the body. It is believed that long Covid causes fatigue – among other symptoms – by inhibiting the mitochondria. While a drug to treat

Debbie Hayton

Why Daniel Radcliffe is wrong about children changing gender

Daniel Radcliffe has told a group of young people that adults worried about children changing gender have a ‘slightly condescending but well-meaning attitude of like, well, people are young and like… that is a huge decision’. The children in this film are being cruelly misled Yes, Daniel, it is a huge decision, and it is one that we should not be putting in front of children. Never before have children been told that they can choose whether to grow up to be a woman or a man. They can’t, of course. Human beings are male or female, a truth determined not by fantasies of the mind but the facts of

Thursday

13 Apr 2023

Jawad Iqbal

York doesn’t need Unesco world heritage status

The Unesco world heritage status award is a curious kind of international beauty contest in which historic locations vie to be anointed worthy of special recognition by a committee of UN cultural bigwigs. This supposedly brings with it some form of wider symbolic cultural validation through international acclaim. In fact what it really brings — indeed the only meaningful outcome — is mass tourism, often to the detriment of the winning locations as well as the people who live there. It is a mystery why anyone thinks this is something that requires obligatory celebration, no questions asked. Why should anyone living in this great city, one of the great wonders of

Aidan Hartley

How Moscow can pervert the course of Africa’s future

On the lengthy train ride to Kyiv I read my Plokhy as we trundled through seas of mud, passing villages with blue timber churches topped by golden domes gleaming in the spring dawn. A metastasis of Putin’s atrocities against Ukraine has been the entrenching of Russian influence, powered by guns and agitprop, across my home continent of Africa. I wanted to hear what people in Kyiv thought about this trend, since it threatens to roll back democracy in Africa three decades after the Soviet Union collapsed. Look at Africa’s UN voting patterns, what many Africans are saying, at the sudden appearance of Russian goons in the remotest corners and at

Olivia Potts

Chess pie: how to make the flakiest pastry

Chess pie was, in one sense, new to me when I started learning about it a few months ago. I’d never heard of this favourite of the American South until I came across it in a pie-centric cookery book. But in another sense, it’s extremely familiar – both to me and to anyone who’s ever eaten a pie or a tart before. Chess pie is a bit like an ur-pie, made with the most simple, most essential of pie ingredients. That’s possibly where its name comes from: the story goes that in the 1800s in Alabama, where nuts and other common pie fillings were expensive, a freed slave made a

Roger Alton

Football’s growing shame

It would take a brave man to pick a fight with Roy Keane, and nobody could quarrel with his view of Liverpool’s Scotland fullback Andy Robertson after a skirmish at Anfield. Robertson appeared to be feebly elbowed in the face as he approached linesman Constantine Hatzidakis at half time. The Scotland captain reacted in the traditional way, as if he had been waterboarded. Keane’s view was as ever imperious: ‘You know what he is that Robertson? I’ve watched him a number of times – he’s a big baby.’ If a linesman can’t smack Andy Robertson for getting handsy and lippy, then the game has gone Anyone who has ever seen

Tanya Gold

Serious about its whimsy: Sessions Arts Club reviewed

The Sessions Arts Club is a restaurant inside the Old Session House in Clerkenwell, a pale George III building where the criminals of Middlesex were once judged in splendour. It’s common for fine once-public buildings to become private buildings now: the old War Office on Whitehall will be, come summer, Raffles at the OWO. The acronym is not mine – it never is – and I doubt you could run a war from there, though you could try. You could throw a mojito at a laptop. I wonder if there is a connection between the ugliness of the new public buildings and the state of our public discourse: what is

Wednesday

12 Apr 2023

Winston Marshall

Britain’s grooming gangs: is Rishi Sunak doing enough?

50 min listen

For over forty years, tens of thousands of girls and young women have been abused, raped and some brutally murdered across Britain by grooming gangs. It is a scandal that should shame the nation, yet it is an issue that gets brushed aside by authorities, clouded out in the media by disputes over racist reporting, and largely ignored by politicians. All at the cost of justice for those young girls. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last week announced policy to – finally – attempt to deal with this horrific issue. To discuss the policy and the deeper story of the grooming gangs is journalist and documentary filmmaker Charlie Peters.

Kate Andrews

What junior doctors really earn

How much money do junior doctors really earn? If you’ve been listening to the British Medical Association – the trade union which represents junior doctors – this week you will have seen comparisons made between their salaries and the wages of Pret A Manger employees. The union talks about members having to ‘cut back on food and heat to pay bills’. To think of notoriously overworked junior doctors in such circumstances is outrageous. But how typical is that scenario of those demanding a 35 per cent pay rise? First-year junior doctors are still some of the better-paid workers in Britain, and this is only the jumping-off point A doctor can

Charles Moore

The apotheosis of Starmerism

To celebrate this week’s 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the European Movement has launched a ‘powerful intergenerational film’ which, it says, ‘exposes Brexit as the biggest threat to peace since the 1994 ceasefire’. The film contains ‘true stories of how… Europe’s mission, commitment and hope for a peaceful future transformed Northern Ireland, changed the course of history and inspired the world’. Not a lot of people know that. Even fewer know that ‘the only organisation with the courage and commitment to… win the Battle for the Soul of our Country – is the European Movement.’ Mere raving? Such thoughts are not a million miles from EU/US orthodoxy. In

The Spectator

King Charles and a tale of two coronations

The United Kingdom is one of the last countries in the world to host lavish coronation ceremonies. Europe’s new kings and queens keep these events low-key, whereas the British monarchy continues to be marked by splendour and mass popular appeal. This time last year, there were 3,874 applications for road closures to mark street parties to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee. A coronation is, of course, far more historic. Yet with just three weeks to go, there have only been 274 street party registrations. In many ways, the disparity is understandable. Elizabeth II had built up huge personal affection over a lifetime’s service. There was also a strong unspoken sense

The Spectator

China vs Taiwan: how do their military forces measure up?

Conditions of carriage The King and Queen will travel to and from the coronation in a carriage which boasts heating and electric windows. Are these uncommon luxuries? Popular Mechanics magazine in the US reveals that the King is not alone in expecting mod cons in his carriage: even the Amish employ various modern technologies in their horse-drawn buggies. Their $8,000 vehicles have had brakes since the 1960s, originally salvaged from scrapped Volkswagens. Now, 10% have disc brakes. Most have bodies made from fibreglass and all those in use in Ohio and Pennsylvania have headlights and tail lights by demand of state legislation. Many also have interior lights, usually powered by

John Rutter

How to prepare a musical feast fit for a King

Years ago, as a penniless young musician, I sometimes played the organ at weddings and learned a bitter lesson: the congregation hadn’t come for the music. I was used to concert audiences who listened attentively and rewarded pleasure received with appreciation given, and it came as a shock to discover that wedding congregations chattered or nipped out for a ciggie during our lovingly rehearsed anthems, failed to join in the hymns and allowed their infants to howl – though once I had become a parent I grew more forgiving of this. Words of appreciation afterwards were rare. Thus I resign myself to expect scant public attention to be paid to

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Doctors on strike, Labour on the attack and Tupperware in trouble

Home President Joe Biden of the United States visited Northern Ireland, shook hands with party leaders, talked with Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (though not about a trade agreement), and went on to the Republic of Ireland, for the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The accountancy firm Johnston Carmichael resigned as auditors to the Scottish National party. Its decision coincided with a police search of the SNP’s headquarters in Edinburgh following the arrest and release without charge of Peter Murrell, the party’s former chief executive and the husband of Nicola Sturgeon, who was the SNP leader and first minister. Tony Danker was sacked as

Adrian Wooldridge

The new elite: the rise of the progressive aristocracy

In the pre-modern world positions in society were largely inherited. Some people were born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them – ‘The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate / God made them high or lowly / And ordered their estate’, in the words of the Victorian hymn. The meritocratic idea was the dynamite which blew up this view of the world and provided the materials for the modern era. But its reign is threatened as never before. The 1960s and 1970s brought a wave of attacks on the meritocracy, starting with criticisms of the workings of the

Rod Liddle

The police are a law unto themselves

The journos weren’t very impressed with Nicola Sturgeon’s house. Never mind the plod staring like morons at her barbecue or heaving out sacks of half-completed pools coupons to their summer marquee on the front lawn – the southern hacks were more interested in the paucity of this real estate. Her house was, we were assured, ‘modest’ and ‘humble’ and ‘unfashionable’, and most damningly of all, a ‘new-build’. Actually, not most damningly of all – that would be ‘on a new-build estate’. They were clearly appalled that it wasn’t a Georgian rectory in three acres of manicured lawns with a cottage garden, or that it didn’t have a basement kitchen-diner. It

Gareth Roberts

The rise of rowdy theatre audiences isn’t a surprise

The incident at Manchester’s Palace Theatre last Friday night at the close of a performance of the musical version of The Bodyguard – audience members singing loudly over the showstopping final number ‘I Will Always Love You’, being manhandled out by security, the show actually being stopped, and police called – has led to lots of chat about etiquette in auditoriums. We are told that rowdy audiences are becoming more of a problem, with a similar incident the week before at Bat Out Of Hell in London, and a new campaign from the theatre union Bectu against anti-social behaviour in theatres. It occurs to me that these particular alarums and incidents came about

Dot Wordsworth

What’s the difference between ‘tax evasion’ and ‘tax avoidance’?

I used to avoid paying tax. I opened an Isa for my pitiful savings, for example, to avoid tax on the interest. But now I daren’t say I avoid tax because HMRC is encouraging people to report me for it. ‘Report tax fraud or avoidance,’ is the headline on a public-service government website. ‘Report a person or business you think is not paying enough tax or is committing another type of fraud,’ it urges. In the past, it seemed clear. The Oxford English Dictionary says: ‘tax avoidance n. the arrangement of financial affairs so as to reduce tax liability within the law. tax evasion n. the reduction of tax payments

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What’s the best response to a patronising man?

Q. I have some fairly new friends who very generously invited me to stay with them in Turkey. They told me who would be coming and I was slightly dreading meeting up again with one man I haven’t seen since we were much younger. He was always patronising and a bit misogynistic, and – as I was to discover – is even more insufferable now he has become successful. Everyone was lying by the pool and he asked me what I was reading. When I showed him – a fairly undemanding classic novel – his comment was: ‘Gosh, well done!’ I was infuriated but the only responses I could think