Society

Tuesday

John Ferry John Ferry

Sturgeon’s economic plan will hurt Scots

Poor old Nicola Sturgeon. The news agenda at the start of this week was meant to be dominated by her new economic prospectus on independence. Then along comes Jeremy Hunt with his scrapping of the mini-Budget, which ensured everyone’s attention was on Downing Street rather than Bute House. If you did miss it, yesterday saw the First Minister set out the latest – and what was expected to be the most substantive – paper on the economic plan for exiting the UK (or Scexit, as Nationalists don’t like to call it). Did it live up to expectations? Of course not. Putting together a sensible economic case for making Scotland the

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Podcast special: how to wean Britain off Russian fertiliser

17 min listen

28 per cent of the world’s fertiliser supply comes from Russia and Ukraine. Since war broke out in February, fertiliser prices have rocketed to record highs because of the disruption. British farmers are under pressure as the industry deals with higher energy costs at the same time; while consumers are facing higher food prices. Is there a way to reshore our fertiliser supply chain? CCm Technologies in Swindon thinks so – and reduce emissions at the same time. They say they can make high efficiency and low polluting fertiliser from organic waste, gathered from British farms, creating a completely self-sufficient production line. For their cutting edge science, CCm Technologies won

Saturday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Harriet Sergeant, Lionel Shriver, Martin Vander Weyer and Philip Patrick

30 min listen

This week: Harriet Sergeant writes about why ethnicity matters in sexual abuse cases (0:30), Lionel Shriver takes aim at the American university students failing their exams, (8:06), Martin Vander Weyer looks at the latest forecasts for housing prices (17:01), and Philip Patrick thinks Japanese food is overrated (25:19). Produced and presented by Natasha Feroze.

Hannah Lucinda Smith

The sorry state of Turkish football

Pity the fans of Trabzonspor, a football club from Turkey’s Black Sea region. In May, the team was crowned champions of the Super Lig, Turkey’s answer to the Premier League, for the sixth time in their history. Three months later, they lost to FC Copenhagen in the Champions’ League play-offs meaning that, for the first time in 27 years, no Turkish team will play in the tournament. Trabzonspor’s defeat was a drop in a wider malaise. The Turkish game has been in decline for a decade, battered by mismanagement, political interference and the devaluation of the Turkish lira, which is worth just one-eighth against the euro what it was in

Friday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why won’t Graham Norton speak up for JK Rowling?

Is silence still violence? I’m just wondering because this week Graham Norton was asked about the deluge of hateful slurs and threats that are frequently fired at JK Rowling and he dodged the issue. Instead he rambled on about how celebs should not comment on difficult topics like transgenderism. So was his silence on the misogynistic monstering of JK Rowling an act of violence? ‘Silence is Violence’ is the radical slogan du jour. It was popularised by Black Lives Matter. There were moments over the past couple of years when you couldn’t browse the internet for five minutes without encountering a post saying that anyone who keeps schtum on hatred

Matthew Lesh

Are falling house prices really a tragedy?

Higher interest rates are making borrowing less affordable, so the average buyer has less to spend on a new property. Halifax found that the house price reduction has already begun, with a 0.1 per cent drop last month. Falling house prices can be a harbinger of economic doom – this kind of decline usually signals the imminent start of a recession. Many will treat lower house prices as a tragedy. Oxford Economics has described the current predicament as ‘the most worrying housing market outlook’ since just before the 2008 financial crash. Homeowners will see their wealth shrink, at least on paper. Recent buyers with loans larger than the value of

Thursday

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Channel 4’s Hitler art show is no laughing matter

Can Channel 4 sink any lower? The TV channel has purchased a painting by Adolf Hitler so that a studio audience may decide whether to allow comedian Jimmy Carr to destroy it with a flamethrower. In other words, popular television is trolling the Jewish community, all those around the world who suffered under Nazism and anybody who remains in possession of a moral compass. The fate of one of the world’s most problematic and disturbing artefacts will be determined by a studio audience and a comedian. As a symbol of 2022, it’s pretty good. Who thought this was a reasonable idea? Step forward Ian Katz, Channel 4’s director of programming. ‘This

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Kanye West is not OK

Ye is the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. Even more formerly, he was known as Yeezus, back when he was dropping tracks like ‘I Am A God’. But Kanye is not the messiah; he’s an extremely naughty boy.  This week he appeared on US television show Tucker Carlson Tonight to attack Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s role in the Abraham Accords between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain. Kanye claimed this was done ‘to make money’ and said of the Kushner family, who are Jewish:  ‘I just think that’s what they’re about, is making money. I don’t think that they have the ability to make anything on their own. I think they were

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

NHS waiting list exceeds record-breaking seven million

NHS waiting lists have exceeded seven million people for the first time since records began. That means nearly 12 per cent of people in England are waiting for consultant-led treatment. A&E waiting times broke records too: nearly 33,000 people waited more than 12 hours from decision to admit to admission. The target is four hours. This all adds to a difficult week for the health service. Staff shortages affecting the whole economy – a record 2.5 million people are not working due to long-term sickness – are now being felt in the NHS too. Recently some hospitals have experienced a shortage of blood because of donation centres having to close due to problems

Wednesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The SDP is the anti-futility party

Two lessons learned from the breakfast buffet at the Hilton Hotel, Deansgate, Manchester. First, the plates are no longer minuscule, but pleasingly broad. However, they consist of a smallish bit in the centre and a gently elevated wide rim – the message being: put the food only in the middle. The outer circle is simply decorative, so don’t be uncouth. The second is that you are no longer enjoined to help yourself. There’s a bloke there who does the serving for you. So if you go up and say ‘bacon, please’, he will put a piece of bacon on your plate. One piece. The same with the sausages, the fried

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The joy of tuning in to the night

‘That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency,’ wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.’ Her thought extends beyond ‘compassion fatigue’ in the face of global suffering on a scale beyond our homely ken, but to life itself in its unfathomable abundance: the dramas, the joys and the sorrows and the sheer activity that surrounds us and would engulf us if we paused for long enough to think about everything. We screen almost all of it out. We have to. Our Derbyshire home is on a hillside

Harriet Sergeant

Why we must accept ethnicity matters in child grooming cases

A 24th man has just been charged with the rape of a 13-year-old girl more than ten years ago in Bradford. Twenty-four men. One 13-year-old girl. It takes some absorbing. The case will come to trial in due course, but it prompts reflection on other cases of historic sexual abuse against girls where the victims have been white, working-class, usually in care and very young. One girl admitted her first memory was of sexual abuse aged five. The perpetrators have often been men from the British Pakistani community living under a Labour-run council. It all happened a decade or more ago. Nothing to see here, we are told. Just some

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Hard to swallow: the unjustified hype around Japanese food

Tokyo After 23 years in Japan, having tried everything from yatai (street food) to deep-fried globe fish in a kaiseki (traditional) restaurant, I have come to the conclusion that Japanese food is overrated. It is rarely less than perfectly presented, and it can be superb – but it can also be bland and homogenous. Part of the problem is that much of what delights the Japanese about their food is unrelated to its actual taste. If British food, in the bad old days at least, was simply fuel, Japanese food has always been, to some extent, art. A high-end Japanese meal is the equivalent of a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk, with the

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The genius of bottomless brunch

I’m rather fond of the many service stations on the M4, since I am convinced they are all named after Jane Austen characters who never made it into the final drafts of the novels. But as an alternative, west of Lord Chieveley and Lady Membury and just east of Sir Leigh Delamere, you can try the Three Trees Farm Shop & Café just south of Junction 15. There is a bank of four car chargers outside, which is what drew me there. The farm shop is wonderful, with charming staff, and stocked with the kind of high-margin artisanal goods you can buy as presents for the people you are visiting

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Moules mouclade, as big a hit as Beyoncé

Mussels were probably the first thing I ate as a child that I knew at the time was ‘an acquired taste’. They made me feel impossibly grown up, coming with a brigade of bowls, one for the mussels themselves, one for chips, one for bread, one for empty mussel shells, and a little lemon-scented bowl of water to dip my fingers in. My dinner alone must have taken up half the table. From then on, I ordered mussels every time they were on the menu, knowing they would transform me from a gawky 12-year-old girl wearing cargo pants into a veritable sophisticate. But I never once tried moules mouclade. Like

Mark Mason

The beauty of a Wetherspoons pub

The J.D. does indeed come from J.D. ‘Boss’ Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard. But Tim Martin’s reason for ‘Wetherspoon’ is slightly different from the commonly told version. Yes, it was the surname of one of his schoolteachers in New Zealand. But Mr Wetherspoon didn’t tell Martin he would never amount to anything – rather he struggled to keep control of his class. And when Martin opened his first pub in Muswell Hill in 1979, he feared a similar problem. More than 40 years and nearly 900 pubs later, the fear seems ill-founded. Yes, the chain was in the news last week for its slow recovery from the pandemic, with

Peter Hitchens

Make rail travel great again

Since I took the Golden Arrow to Paris and back in 1965, I have always thought of that train journey as one of the great joys of life. I cannot remember how many pre–tunnel trips to the City of Light I made, via Dover and Calais, Folkestone and Boulogne or (best of all) Newhaven and Dieppe. My great regret is that I never took the old Night Ferry, a special set of blue and gold sleeping cars designed to run on both French and British railways, on which you could (in theory at least) slumber your way between the two capitals – though perhaps not while it was actually being

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

Inside The Privileged Man, the support group for men who have it all

‘It’s like that whole #MeToo thing,’ says Esmond Baring, 44, scion of the famous banking family and founder of The Privileged Man, a support group for, er, privileged men. ‘Once you’ve realised you’re not alone, you can ask for help.’ Baring is rakishly handsome and talks with the zeal and articulacy of the true convert. He met co-founder Pete Hunt, 40, in 2011 on the island of Bali after he’d experienced a fairly vigorous nervous breakdown. Ten years later, both having left the corporate world to which they felt ill-suited, they established The Privileged Man. Baring says his breakdown caused him to participate in a 12-step programme during which he

The Spectator

2574: A Chinese – solution

Each unclued Across light (including the pair at 16/7) is a SWEET and the unclued Down lights can be preceded by SOUR. First prize Steven Lodge, Bridgwater, Somerset Runners-up Diana King, Leeds; A. Weir, Broughty Ferry, Dundee

Mike Adams

Why America’s cannabis experiment failed

Indiana Once cannabis legalisation in the US started being taken seriously a decade ago, the majority of liberal Americans supported it. It just seemed like common sense. No longer would pot users have to rely on street dealers, so criminal organisations would wither away. At the same time, states would benefit from billions in tax revenue. Booze, after all, was once held under the thumb of prohibition in the US, bringing about 13 years of black market activity and gang violence, which all ended when prohibition was repealed in 1933. The alcohol trade is now one of the leading earners in America and contributes roughly $260 billion to the economy.