20 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud, Svitlana Morenets talks about how the lines between patriotism and profiteering are being blurred in Ukraine; Owen Matthews interviews Leonid Volkov, Alexei Navalny’s chief of staff; and Ysenda Maxtone Graham calls for help from a 15-minute city. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Cindy Yu.
TikTok is perpetuating significant harm to the welfare and wellbeing of young children. This week, it was announced by the UK’s data protection authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), that they were handing down a £12.7 million fine to TikTok for significant breaches of data protection law. It is one of the largest fines to have ever been imposed by the body. The fact that there are children aged 13 and under may have been exposed to this material is beyond terrifying Having conducted a thorough investigation into TikTok, the ICO found that in 2020, up to 1.4 million UK children under the age of 13 were accessing and using
The misogynist mob strikes again. Its target this time was the American swimmer Riley Gaines. What was her offence? What did this young woman do to attract the attention — and the jeers and insults and threats — of the woke witchfinder-generals? She said men should not compete in women’s sports. Obscene. Fetch the ducking stool. This is Gaines’ heresy: to refuse to believe that trans women are women; to prefer the light of scientific and moral reason over the delusions of the mob Ms Gaines was mobbed at San Francisco State University. She had just given a speech on why women’s sports must be for women only, not biological
Since the middle of March in France, 1,247 Gendarmes, police and fire fighters have been injured in the line of duty. There have been over 2,500 deliberate acts of arson and around 350 buildings have been vandalised in some shape or form. Forty-seven of those gendarmes were injured on Saturday March 25 when they were attacked by a large and well-organised army of environmental extremists at Sainte-Soline in western France, some of whom came from Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The previous October 61 gendarmes were wounded at the same location. Television footage of last month’s violence showed the extremists advancing towards the gendarmes in a well-drilled military manoeuvre, throwing Molotov
Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, faced a media grilling this morning as he championed his plans to clean up the force. It comes a fortnight after Louise Casey’s damning report into the Met, which branded it ‘institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic’. A YouGov poll out today shows that public confidence in the Met has been shattered, with 42 per cent of Londoners saying they ‘totally distrusted’ it following recent scandals. Some 700 officers are currently on restricted duties, with hundreds more facing re-vetting or ‘risk management measures’. Rowley has pledged to ‘remove the cancer from the bone’ as he seeks to root out hundreds of officers found
On 4 April the Royal Household revealed the design for invitations to the Coronation, the work of heraldic artist Andrew Jamieson. While the design is a riot of flora and garden fauna, heraldic and otherwise, one feature of the invitation has above all invited comment – the presence of an anthropomorphic green ‘foliate head’, wearing a crown of oak and hawthorn, with leaves of daffodils curling up almost like a pair of horns. Within minutes, the decorative face had been named. He was the ‘Green Man’, a vaguely defined figure found on plaques in gardens around the nation, who is in turn indelibly associated with another concept: paganism. The Green
A dark cloud has descended over Queens Park Rangers, my beloved football club. On 22 October last year, when we beat Wigan Athletic 2-1 at home, we were top of the Championship table. Under our new manager, Michael Beale, we had won nine of our first 16 games, drawn three and lost four. Since then, it’s all gone Pete Tong – and not just a bit pear-shaped, but disastrously, catastrophically wrong. In the 23 games that followed, we have won twice, drawn six and lost 15, meaning we’ve only chalked up 12 points, the lowest tally in the division. We’re now just three points off the bottom three and look
Of all London districts, there is no more charming name than Mayfair. It makes one think of pretty shepherdesses, giggling and blushing as swains serenade them with garlands of spring flowers. But that would have been some time ago, even before the last nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. These days, the serenading would be courtesy of powerful sports cars, revving through the traffic to cock a snook at the cops. Yet there are survivals from a gentler era. Behind Berkeley Square in Bruton Place, you will find the Guinea Grill, which sounds cheerful and lives up to its name. Virtually next door is Bellamy’s, with more gastronomic ambition, but equally
It’s a nasty moment when you receive a letter informing you that a fortnight ago, at a specific number of minutes past an hour, your car was photographed turning into a side road which, at the time, you had no idea you weren’t allowed to turn into. You vaguely recall the junction. There was no ‘No entry’ sign: just a torrent of words (‘except’, ‘through’, ‘motor vehicles’, ‘access’) that you didn’t have time to read. That outing will now be forever sullied in your memory by the £65 fine. Protesting ‘but the sat-nav told me to do it!’ is as ineffectual, legally speaking, as Adam bleating to God that ‘the
Two thousand among the great and the good from around the world will soon receive a letter from King Charles III and Queen Camilla. The invitation to the coronation on 6 May, which has been unveiled today, is not what people might have expected. Elizabeth II’s coronation invitation was formal, and, even by the standards of 1953, old-fashioned: it looked like the sort of thing that Victoria would have issued for her eventful, near-disastrous ceremony over a century before. The implication was clear, namely that her reign would be a formal, decorous one, firmly in keeping with the high ideals of her predecessors, and it proved an apt portent for
It’s so strange now to think that I spent several happy years as a Guardian columnist, the only billet from which I’ve ever garnered a stand-alone anthology – The Guardian Columns 1998 – 2000: There is no other commentator who can turn received wisdom on its head like Burchill… no other journalist who can combine such relentless insight, malice and warmth to deserving causes. She is one of the best columnists around – an antidote to the glut of confession columns that saturate the weekend papers. Huzzah! Admittedly we fell out when I asked for a raise and they offered me a sofa instead – is it ‘cos I is a chav? –
Just when you thought you couldn’t handle any more depressing news, Gary Lineker has started dropping hints that his days in the Match of the Day presenter’s chair may be drawing to an end. I know. It really puts things into perspective. ‘I’m ancient,’ Lineker said, Aslan-like, on the latest Match of the Day podcast, ‘my time is nearly up.’ The most powerful man at the BBC – and football’s most famous Gary – then seemed to anoint his successor by giving the nod to the endlessly anodyne former Tottenham and Newcastle midfielder Jermaine Jenas. ‘He’s probably drifting toward my role,’ Lineker told presumably astonished co-hosts Alan Shearer and Micah
45 min listen
Posie Parker, aka Kellie-Jay Keen, is back from her Let Women Speak tour of Australia and New Zealand, where she was mobbed and hounded by radical trans activists. She tells me what happened, why she went in the first place, the state of the gender wars down under and her plans to run against Keir Starmer at the next election. We also look back into her own history and how it is she became the lightning rod of the feminist movement today.
After he anoints the King next month, Justin Welby’s thoughts will perhaps turn to his own future. If Anglican gossip is to believed, Welby plans to step down to make way for a new Archbishop of Canterbury once the new Supreme Governor has been crowned. You could hardly blame him for wanting a quiet life: the divisions within the Church of England are more acute now than at any time since he was enthroned ten years ago. Ever since February, when the C of E’s parliament, the General Synod, voted to introduce blessing services for same-sex couples, conservatives have been up in arms. The Church of England Evangelical Council, an umbrella
Home Britain joined Australia, Japan and nine other countries in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or the CPTPP. Kemi Badenoch, Business and Trade Secretary, said that projections of its contribution to the growth of the UK economy, of 0.08 per cent over a decade, didn’t tell the whole story. Teachers voted for more strikes; the Passport Office began five weeks of strikes. The Food Standards Agency investigated allegations that a meat supplier falsely labelled foreign pork as British and mixed rotting and fresh meat. In March, house prices were 3.1 per cent less than a year before, according to the Nationwide – the largest annual decline since
Two attacks in local villages, leaving 17 dead in one and eight in another, says my teacher friend from Kaduna State in Nigeria in one of his latest letters. He writes regularly about the threats that he and his family and students face from Islamist militias. But what stays in my mind, apart from the horror of the details, is his steadfast refusal to demonise his Muslim neighbours and his eagerness to find resources to think (and pray) through what he needs to do and to communicate. He wants to learn what it is that stops cycles of retribution; he wants to break out of the mentality which assumes that
Easter Monday marks the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. One of the most interesting things ever written by its most famous architect, Tony Blair, appeared (in the Sunday Telegraph) at Easter 1996, two years earlier. The piece, largely devoid of his vague boosterism, suggested he had thought about his subject. Under the title, ‘Why I am a Christian’, Blair wrote of Pontius Pilate: ‘The intriguing thing… is the degree to which he tried to do the good thing rather than the bad. He commands our moral attention not because he was a bad man but because he was so nearly a good man. One can imagine him agonising,
The tragically early death of the magnificent Paul O’Grady struck a blow at the national heart that’s unusual for a celebrity death. After all, this is, for most of us, the death of a stranger. This was a man who spent much of his professional life portraying a markedly waspish and unsentimental character, and even when he became more of what we used to call a ‘family entertainer’ he was never either sugary or oily. He reflected the British, or how we’d like to see ourselves, very well – unshowy, animal-loving, regularly quite angry, but most of all not fake. This rewriting of even the very recent past is symptomatic of a wider
The Chinese emporium where I buy balloons for my husband thinks I am a laughing-gas addict, I buy so many. My husband blows a few up and pops one each time he hears a chosen phrase on the radio. This week it is lived experience. From the kitchen, his explosions sound like a shooting party. He thinks it’s funny. I am his only audience. I’ve found a written source to draw on without any balloon popping. It is from Inclusive Minds, which is credited with helping the publishers of Roald Dahl, who have been rewriting his children’s books. It has a ‘network of Inclusion Ambassadors’ – ‘young people with many
Q. We have been introduced to some fellow parents at our children’s school. They are not quite on our wavelength – very status conscious and money obsessed – but we want to stay on good terms because our children are friends. Like us, they have moved to the country from London and bought an old property which needed extensive remodelling. We are ahead of the game, having come here a year before they did, and so they have asked if they can come and look at the work we’ve had done. They are the kind of people who will want to know what everything cost. I can’t very well say