Society

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters: Why I left the Society of Authors

Write and wrong Sir: As a former member of the Society of Authors I read with interest Julie Bindel’s article about its failure to defend J.K. Rowling when she received death threats (‘Write-off’, 26 November). I asked on the society’s ‘Children’s Writers and Illustrators’ Facebook page why they had not spoken out in support of a fellow children’s author and the administrator replied that Rowling ‘has not requested an intervention’. I hadn’t realised that the defence of freedom of speech was something which had to be specifically requested. The other responses I got ranged from blandly negative to downright vitriolic and it wasn’t long before the administrator closed the discussion.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

We should never have tried cosying up to Chinese investors

I can’t read ‘China rocked by protests’ and ‘Zero Covid could be the end of Xi Jinping’s rule’ without recalling 4 May 1989, when I watched chanting students march into Tiananmen Square and overheard the British ambassador Sir Alan Donald declare: ‘There, you see how liberal China is becoming.’ I was a banker back then and had just visited the People’s Bank of China to discuss its appetite for investing in UK government debt – having flown up from Hong Kong, where business was booming under the reassurance that the British-run outpost’s way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years after the forthcoming handover to Beijing. The consensus among

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Changing times: can companies really transform themselves?

35 min listen

It’s fair to say that the tobacco industry is one of the most controversial ones out there, with the phrase ‘Big Tobacco’ almost a meme, a shorthand for unscrupulous business practices. No wonder then that tobacco companies are trying to remake themselves, companies like Philip Morris International. PMI has a history dating back to the 1840s, and yet, today, their tagline is now ‘Delivering a smoke-free future’. Over the course of ten years, they’ve seen a third drop in the volume of cigarette sales. They’re keen to talk about their story of ‘transformation’, which is why they’ve sponsored this podcast. So what’s really going on? Cindy Yu talks to David

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 03 December 2022

Many bids and plays have been named after former great players. They may not have invented the bid as such, but they have coined it and made it famous. Names like Samuel Stayman and Easley Blackwood will live on for as long as the game is played. In 1929, Theodore Lightner gave his name to the ‘Lightner double’, used to request an unusual lead – often against a slam – when we hope to score a ruff or need dummy’s first bid suit led. This is well-known. What is rather less well-known is the ‘reverse’ Lightner double, occurring when you are on lead but want to alert partner that something

Melissa Kite

In praise of old-fashioned vets

‘You’re very easy to deal with, I must say,’ said the tall, handsome vet who was examining the spaniel. I laughed. ‘That’s not what the last vet said.’ The last vet sacked me after I asked to see my dog’s notes. After a long and arduous battle with corporate vetdom, I made my way down south to a proper country practice and a chap recommended by my horse vet. He was old-fashioned, I was assured. An old-fashioned vet simply means a vet who will make a diagnosis by using his expertise and experience, causing minimal distress to the animal, and not charging you many, many thousands for high-tech invasive testing

Taki

Why I’m rooting for Elon Musk

Why bother with something true to life, dignified and classy when you can create something untrue, cheap and vulgar? While surfing through channels looking for a black and white oldie, I came across something that I think is called Rogue Heroes. I’m not sure of the title because the programme annoyed me so much that I turned it off after less than ten minutes. And it took as long as that because the trash was based on a terrific subject: the war in the desert pitting the bold Rommel against timid Monty. What made the few minutes I watched seedy and sordid was the language. I’m no prude and can

Frank Young

Parents need to do more to stop their kids watching porn

Nothing scares politicians more than telling parents how to do their job, which is a shame because a bit more finger wagging might be just what we need. The Online Safety Bill returns to parliament this week to be debated by MPs once again – with the legislation aiming to stop kids looking at porn online.  Getting tough on Big Tech is easier than asking more of parents MPs have already spent around 40 hours debating this Bill, in previous forms. In this time only eight MPs have suggested that parents might just have some responsibility in stopping their children accessing porn online. Fifty MPs have so far opined on the merits of switching off

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The strange chair appointment of Oxford’s Vice Chancellor

To enormous fanfare last week, the Dame Louise Richardson Chair of Global Security was established at the Blavatnik Business School in honour of the soon-departing Vice Chancellor. It was a remarkable event in a couple of respects – first, global security is frankly a dud subject for a chair at Oxford. More to the point, the Dame was appointed to this vanity project when she was still in office, which was an extraordinary departure from usual custom and protocol. Normally an honour of this sort would be proposed after the departure of the scholar it’s named after – normally an individual of exceptional distinction in an established field – and left to their successors to promote. In this case, she obtained it while

Tuesday

Toby Young Toby Young

The good, the bad and the ugly of the new Online Safety Bill

The new version of the Online Safety Bill seems, on the face of it, to be an improvement on the previous one. We’ll know more when it’s published – all we have to go on for now is a DCMS press release and some amendments moved by Michelle Donelan, the Digital Secretary and architect of the new Bill. The devil will be in the detail. Let’s start with something that hasn’t got much coverage today, but which I think is important. Plans to introduce a new harmful communications offence in England and Wales, making it a crime punishable by up to two years in jail to send or post a

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

An ageing population and a life of learning

33 min listen

As Britons live longer and the population ages, society will soon have to rethink what it means to be of ‘working age’. Training and learning will have to be offered to older age groups who are healthier and more capable of work than their predecessors; while healthcare has room to improve in making sure that health conditions are not barring those who wish to work from working. What can employers and the government do, armed with the right information and analysis, to prepare for this transition? On the special podcast episode, Martin Vander Weyer, The Spectator’s business editor is joined by Guy Opperman, Minister for Employment at the Department of Work and

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Online Safety Bill is still a censor’s charter

One of Rishi Sunak’s pledges was to remove the ‘legal, but harmful’ censorship clause that Boris Johnson was poised to bring in via the Online Safety Bill. A few weeks ago it was said that he had done so and I wrote a piece congratulating him. I may have spoken too soon. The Bill as published would actually introduce (rather than abolish) censorship of the written word – ending a centuries-old British tradition of liberty. The censorship mechanism is intended for under-18s – an improvement on the original, draconian plan. But it still raises problems that I doubt have been properly discussed in Whitehall given the bias amongst officials desperate to

Amber Athey

In the studio with presidential candidate Kanye West

Ye is not in Calabasas anymore. The superstar rapper, designer and now 2024 presidential candidate flew to western Maryland on Monday alongside his new campaign manager, the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous and the de facto leader of the ‘Groyper Army’, Nick Fuentes. The trio landed at Frederick Municipal Airport only to find that their driver was nowhere to be found. The limo company had accidentally sent him to Washington Dulles. Ye, or the artist formally known as Kanye West, was in town to appear on Timcast, the podcast hosted by disaffected liberal Tim Pool. Timcast staff munched on Black Hog BBQ (they ordered it because they heard Ye likes barbecue) and wondered aloud

Monday

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Where’s the moral outrage at England’s cricket tour of Pakistan?

Everyone on the television agrees: seeing an England team give succour to a repressive regime by playing prestigious fixtures on its soil is deeply troubling – or ‘problematic’ to use the latest horrible buzz word. A society that represses gay people and women and whose ruling class routinely engages in corruption to further its own interests should not be ‘normalised’ via world-class international sport, runs the argument.  But all these conditions apply in Pakistan just as they do in Qatar. Yet has anyone heard a squeak of broadcast media complaint about the England cricket team’s tour of that country? Far from agonising about whether to take a knee, wear a

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why ‘Uber for the countryside’ is a great idea

The disappearance of rural bus routes is one of the small tragedies of our time. It isn’t, alas, a very glamorous tragedy. It affects older people, poorer people, people who live in unfashionable parts of the country. You seldom see Twitter storms about rural bus routes. You don’t see footballers campaigning on the issue with moist eye, bent knee and clenched fist. Those awkward one-deck buses, trundling from village to village, debouching the odd person here and there at an unloved bus stop on a drizzly rural B-road: they will never occasion so plangently romantic an elegy as Flanders and Swann’s ‘The Slow Train’, which lamented in the 1960s the equivalent decline of the railways.  But small tragedy

Joel Kotkin

America is entering a golden age of democratic capitalism

America could be entering the ‘Great Stagflation’, defined by economist Noriel Roubini as ‘an era of high inflation, low growth, high debt and the potential for severe recessions’. Certainly, weak growth numbers, declining rates of labour participation and productivity rates falling at the fastest rate in a half century are not harbingers of happy times. But the coming downturn could prove a boon overall, if Americans make the choices that restore competition and bring production back to the United States and the West. In the United States, the contours of a new post-pandemic economy are becoming clear, particularly in the Sun Belt and parts of the heartland. That revival could

Sunday

Francois Balloux

Why China can’t stop zero Covid

The Covid situation in China is not looking good right now. The authorities have trapped themselves into a situation from which there’s no obvious escape strategy. Whatever they choose – or will be forced – to do next will be very costly. The country is extremely poorly prepared for a major surge of the virus So far China has only managed to suppress Covid with brutal restrictions. Those are becoming increasingly untenable and the population is suffering. Unrest is spilling out into the streets in cities across the country. A major surge seems largely inevitable in the short term unless the authorities choose to enforce even more ruthless measures. A

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Yes, five million are on out-of-work benefits. Here’s the proof

How can 20 per cent of people in our great cities be on benefits at a time of mass migration and record vacancies? It’s perhaps the most important question in politics right now, but it’s not being given any scrutiny because the real figures lie behind a fog of data. But the fog is easily cleared, if you know where to look. What follows is for anyone with an interest in doing so, and it follows a few queries to The Spectator about how we found the five-million figure we’ve been using for a while. To solve a problem, you need to recognise a problem Every month, an official unemployment

Julie Bindel

Where did it all go wrong for trans charity Mermaids?

Farewell Susie Green, the CEO of Mermaids, a charity that describes itself as supporting ‘trans, non-binary and gender-variant children, young people and their families’.  Green resigned rather abruptly on Friday, and the statement from its chair was short and to the point. An interim CEO will be appointed in due course.   Mermaids has found itself under scrutiny after deciding to bring a case against the LGB Alliance, the only UK-based organisation that focuses exclusively on same-sex attracted people. Mermaids claims it was not, in fact, established to support lesbians, gay men and bisexuals — but rather to discredit and disband trans charities like itself. The outrageous claims and questions by Mermaids witnesses and counsel during the tribunal,

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The empty Englishness of Love Actually

One of the pleasures of fiction, be it book or film, is that it can take us to actual places beyond our own national boundaries – and into other worlds which don’t exist. Think of fictional states from Narnia to (Graham) Greeneland – and Richard Curtis’ London, that parallel version of our capital seen in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually, where no one has ever seen a machete and swearing is only ever done in a jolly way. When I asked on social media for suggestions as to what this world might be called, I was inundated with suggestions. Curtistan, Curtopia, Notting Shill, Notting Swill, Treacletown and

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

China’s zero-Covid anger is erupting

Protests seem to be breaking out in several major Chinese cities in what has been a week of horrors for China’s zero-Covid policy. Rare displays of public anger have risen to levels not seen since the Shanghai lockdown, and perhaps even since the death of the whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang three years ago. Chinese social media lit up the night he died, and a similar level of frustration and pain is being shared online right now. The latest tragedy is the death of ten people after a fire broke out in their locked down high rise in Urumqi, the capital of the remote region of Xinjiang – leading to angry