Society

Saturday

Danny Shaw

How did theft become effectively decriminalised in Britain?

Haven’t we all had that panicky, sinking feeling at one time or another? A realisation that we’ve been the victim of a crime. Perhaps it happened when you couldn’t find the mobile phone in your back pocket. Or after you spotted fragments of glass on the road near your car windscreen. You might have felt dread returning home to find your front-door key won’t turn in the lock… because an uninvited guest has secured it from the inside. Burglary, car crime and pickpocketing are a feature of our lives like back pain and the common cold; we can take precautions to reduce the risk but they’re bound to happen at

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Why everyone should be ‘quiet quitting’

The Devil Wears Prada, a 2006 box-office hit adapted from Lauren Weisberger’s best-seller, is the story of Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), an earnest reporter trying to break into New York journalism. Eventually she takes an entry-level job as a personal assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the Anna Wintour-ish editor of Runway, a Vogue-ish fashion bible. Miranda runs her assistants and everyone else ragged with evermore unreasonable demands. One morning she gives Andy four hours to bring her a steak from Smith & Wollensky, a piping hot latte from Starbucks, and a copy of the new Harry Potter book. Not the one in bookstores: the unpublished manuscript for the next

Friday

Douglas Murray

The best response to Salman Rushdie’s stabbing

The attack on Salman Rushdie on-stage in New York is deeply shocking and sadly not surprising. People have been calling for his death for over three decades, ever since the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. That novel led to a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and the Iranian government putting a bounty on the British author´s head. They were encouraged in this by Muslim leaders in Britain. The repercussions for Rushdie were swift. Rushdie himself went into hiding, protected by the security services of the British state at the behest of Margaret Thatcher´s government. He stayed in hiding for many years, during which time there

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The shameful attack on Salman Rushdie

We are all praying that Salman Rushdie will be okay. What happened in Chautauqua in New York today is indescribably appalling. An author, a man, stabbed in the neck just as he was about to speak on freedom of expression. This attack is a vile affront to liberty and to the principles of an open society. Much remains unknown. We don’t know what condition Rushdie is in: he was last seen being carried on a stretcher to an air ambulance. And we don’t know anything about the attacker or the motivation. But there are things we do know. We know that for more than 30 years Rushdie has lived in

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Landlords are exploiting generation rent

As interest rates hit nearly 2 per cent and inflation tops 9 per cent, many Brits are feeling the pinch. But once again it seems that generation rent is worst off. Last month, my landlord hiked my rent by £450, or nearly 30 per cent. I’m far from alone: rents across the UK have gone up by as much as 17 per cent. Renters in the UK have been overlooked since the cost of living crisis began to grip the country earlier this year. With inflation soaring and the cost of energy, water, food, petrol and other essentials also rocketing, life is suddenly, alarmingly, getting more expensive. The Bank of England’s

Julie Bindel

Why is the Globe making Joan of Arc non-binary?

Feminists tend to be fascinated with the story of Joan of Arc. She was irreverent, impertinent, way more intelligent than her enemies, and was true to herself and her beliefs right to the end. War hero and religious martyr, Joan has been described as ‘Jesus with a sword’. A 16-year-old peasant girl who decided to take on an entire army is a female to admire and hold up as a role model. But it would seem that we have to make allowances for an ‘intersectional’ and ‘inclusive’ approach and consider whether Joan was female after all. A tweet from Shakespeare’s Globe theatre explained: ‘Our new play I, Joan shows Joan

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

BBC’s Huw Edwards in hot water after blasting ‘feeble’ journalist

Kara Kennedy is a young Welsh journalist with a promising career ahead of her. Having graduated with her Master’s in journalism from Cardiff University last year, she has already landed work at the Daily Telegraph and the Express, as well as interning at The Spectator. On Wednesday evening, she tweeted with excitement about her first comment piece being published in the print edition of the Telegraph. The article was a critique of the Welsh Labour government and its left-wing first minister Mark Drakeford. His government was, in Kennedy’s estimation, too fond of lockdowns, transgender ideology and universal basic income, the latter of which she warned would ‘universalise welfare dependency and

Debbie Hayton

The BTP should stick to policing not trans rights

The policing bible could not be clearer: ‘Police officers must not take any active part in politics. This is intended to prevent you from placing yourself in a position where your impartiality may be questioned.’ But has anyone told the British Transport Police? The BTP’s officers were out in force at Brighton’s Pride festival at the weekend, holding up a ‘Police with Pride’ flag. Officers were also using the festivities as a recruiting opportunity.  ‘We want you to apply to be part of a modern, diverse and inclusive police force,’ said BTP superintendent David Rams. As well as encouraging diversity, the BTP was clear about who they don’t want signing up: people

The Spectator

A-level results: has government reversed grade inflation?

As A-level results come out today, we will find out if the government has made any progress in stemming exam grade inflation. As always, some candidates will celebrate while others will be disappointed. This year, though, the latter group is expected to be more numerous because exam boards are supposed to be clamping down on the implausibly high grades awarded during the two years when school exams were suspended due to lockdowns. Anyone looking solely at exam grades without other information to hand might wonder: what was it about Covid that appeared to boost the educational attainment of so many 18-year-olds? In 2019, the last normal year, 76 per cent

Ursula Buchan

Who needs a hosepipe? The watering cans worth investing in

In the hot, dry summer of 1976, I was working as a gardening student at Arboretum Kalmthout in Belgium. The temperatures in July were frequently 40°C by lunchtime, so we worked in the early mornings and through the evenings. My job was to drive a tractor pulling a trailer, on to which were placed dustbins full of water drawn from a borehole. These were ferried around the grounds so we could water rare, precious and drought-hating rhododendron and tree species. The owners of the garden were white-faced with apprehension all that month but the stratagem worked and we saved the lot. Something of that anxiety comes back to me, for

Christopher Howse

What I’ve learnt from editing a newspaper letters page

Letters to a daily newspaper have a curious power to gain an impetus of their own. ‘I owned a Triumph Herald many decades ago,’ wrote Robert Brown of Crosby to the Telegraph in January. ‘She was my first love. On cold winter nights I would keep her warm with an old mackintosh thrown over her engine under the bonnet. Perhaps it was this that protected her from a thief one night. She was driven off our drive on to the road but steadfastly refused to go any further.’ It soon became clear that we’d hit a seam of experience in recent history, when lives and loves were expressed through small

The Spectator

Letters: The Tavistock is a national health scandal

The race isn’t run Sir: Bravo Fiona Unwin (‘Rooting for Rishi’, 6 August) for the best piece I have read on the grassroots take on the Conservative party’s leadership election. Having attended several such hustings both this time and over the years, this one does remind me of 2005: David Davis vs David Cameron. Lots of career-focused senior MPs backing an early front-runner, and then quiet reflection from the life-experienced sensible grassroots membership. Few predicted the 2005 winner until that electric party conference speech. This time, with dozens of events like the one the vice-president of West Suffolk describes, the typical Spectator reader rather than the Westminster hack will select

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

How ‘kindness’ became big business

In those moments when I most fear that the West is on the skids, I find it helps to make a list of end-time signs, phenomena that indicate decay, like sparks along a piece of faulty wiring. So far my list goes like this: NFTs; babyccinos; liver-flavoured ice-cream for dogs; the fashion for encouraging children to cut off their genitals; the fact that Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, thinks it deeply wrong to talk them out of it; freak shakes; Heinz ‘pink’ sauce; gannets dead all down the North Sea coast; swearing six-year-olds still in nappies (says my teacher friend in the North-East); risking nuclear war over Ukraine; the

Mary Killen

Should you grass on a neighbour who breaks the hosepipe ban?

We know many water companies are themselves guilty of profligate waste through unrepaired leaks. So to snitch on a neighbour, who is making a comparatively tiny personal contribution to the drought, seems petty. But we are only human and it is hard to watch your flowers and vegetables wither and die while your neighbour is still drenching his own produce with gay abandon. If you have a smart water meter you might be more careful about over-use as Big Brother is watching you. Candy, a wife and mother of three in my nearby town, showed me her own bill for water use. It announced that her total water use was

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

How to save money: switch to cash and reprogram your boiler

We’ll find out shortly whether official statistics agree with economists surveyed by Bloomberg who say UK GDP probably shrank by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter. But at an uncomfortable moment when we know things can only get worse, looking backwards doesn’t help and nor does holding out hope for a miraculous ‘emergency budget’ in September. As for forecasting beyond that, it’s almost too scary to contemplate. Better to shun economists and politicians and focus instead on facts that tell us what’s happening now – such as data from Barclaycard – and things we can do keep our own budgets in balance. Spending on ‘essential items’ was up by

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The death of saving

I was intrigued to learn from Tom Daley – that young man who became famous for jumping off a platform into some water – that homophobia is a ‘legacy of colonialism’. The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, begs to differ. He believes that it is homosexuality which is a legacy of colonialism and had been brought to his benighted country by effete whitey – and so he may well think Tom is indulging in the disagreeable act of ‘whitesplaining’. However, it is possible, if not likely, that both Tom and Yoweri are correct – after all, it is difficult to be homophobic if you have around you a complete absence of

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Water woes: who’s to blame for the shortages?

For residents of the London borough of Islington whose homes were flooded this week by a burst water main, Thames Water’s decision to announce a hosepipe ban the following day must have come across as a sick joke. Just a few days before the flood, the company sent out an email asking its customers to be a ‘hot spell hero’. ‘Every drop you save really is another drop more in your local river or reservoir.’ But Thames Water seemed unable to follow its own advice: five million litres of water were lost during the leak. The episode neatly encapsulated much of what is wrong with Britain’s water industry: crude, 1940s-style

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 13 August 2022

To paraphrase E.L. Wisty, the late, great Peter Cook’s alter ego, ‘Some people are born lazy, some become lazy and some have laziness thrust upon them.’ If you are any of these, there are going to be some contracts that you could make but don’t. I speak from years of experience! The more we play, the better we become at recognising patterns and we instinctively know how to play many hands. But even for the best players, hands do come along where the only way to find the right line is to play it through in your head, all the way to the end. This hand stumped an international player,

Melissa Kite

There is nothing speedy about speedy boarding

When my black passport arrived in the post, I decided to take a trip. I’m not a good flier, so the absence of foreign travel for three years had to be making my fear of flying potentially insurmountable. A one and a half hour flight to Cork felt manageable. The builder boyfriend had already been over to have a look at this farm we’ve had our eye on. Incidentally, I know this passport is meant to be dark blue, but it’s not, it’s black. And to make it more alarming, the picture of me inside it is bright orange. I had slapped cheap make-up on my face and was wearing

Jeremy Clarke

How I found perfect happiness

The view from the upstairs window was of other large and secluded houses perched on other still-green Surrey Hills. I spent six days here. Every day the owner would go to London leaving me alone with two rare and valuable prick-eared, six-toed house cats called Tio and Luna. The only instructions I was under concerned these low-slung, vividly marked cats. Under no circumstances were they allowed outside except on a lead. I was to be especially careful not to let them slip out between my feet when I opened the front door. A well-rehearsed system of ‘air lock’ door opening and shutting, if punctiliously observed, rendered the possibility nigh on