Society

Tuesday

Julie Bindel

The BBC is wrong about OnlyFans

As the cost-of-living crisis bites and a recession looms, women are once again being fed a dangerous message: that the sex trade might be a great place to make money. In an article on the BBC website, OnlyFans has been cited as a lucrative way for attractive youngsters to top up their income.  Soaring prices have, we are told by the BBC, ‘led to a rise in young people posting sexual content for money’. The report cites as an example Alexia, a 20-year-old, who posts pictures and videos of herself on the internet. The BBC says her ‘9-5 salary is now dwarfed by the earnings she makes from her online presence.’ It goes on:

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Belarus’s opposition leader on her plan to take down Lukashenko

On this day in 2020, Belarus held presidential elections. Standing against the dictatorial incumbent of 26 years Alexandr Lukashenko was Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. An unlikely candidate, English teacher Tsikhanouskaya decided to stand for election in place of her vlogger husband Siarhei, who was arrested and subsequently jailed for 18 years after the authorities refused to register his own candidacy for the contest. Dismissed as a threat by Lukashenka on account of being a ‘housewife’, Tsikhanouskaya was permitted to run. Hugely underestimated, her rallies attracted tens of thousands of supporters, making them the largest in Belarus’s post-Soviet history. Despite unofficial polling indicating Tsikhanouskaya had won with as much as 60 per cent

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Did my generation break Britain?

When I was 11, I was a pompous little git, but was I also a playground prophet? It first dawned on me that I was one lunchtime in the late 1970s as I looked around at my peers. There they were shouting, swearing and hitting each other. Were we, I wondered, the clueless inheritors of a system we wouldn’t be able to take the reins of successfully? A system that we hadn’t been raised with the discipline to appreciate, or even to understand? Were we doomed to decline? The years since – and the current state of Britain – suggest I was right. Looking back, it seems clear I was picking up on the doomy declinism of

Monday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

It’s time for feminists to say #MenToo

Let me be clear: I am a committed feminist and a passionate supporter of the Enlightenment and its ideals. Indeed, I have been the beneficiary of those ideals in ways unimaginable to most people in the western world. I travelled from a genuinely patriarchal society poisoned by Islamism to a free, secular society where women, whatever issues we might still have, were equal to men under the law and able to pursue opportunities I could scarcely have dreamed of growing up. As I have written before, however imperfect western civilisation might be, we haven’t seen anything like it anywhere else in human history. The progress we have made is dizzying.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How did climate doomsters get the Great Barrier Reef so wrong?

We are, of course, in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ and the ‘sixth mass extinction’ of life on Earth. It is just that one of the iconic victims doesn’t seem to be playing ball just at the moment. As recently as May, environmentalists were warning that the Great Barrier Reef, the 1,500-mile coral structure off the coast of Queensland, was being doomed by warming seas. It was reported to be suffering a ‘mass bleaching’ – where the plants which live on the reef and provide food for it die off. The blame was put on warmer seas. Worse, this was the first mass bleaching event to occur in a

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How vulnerable are Ukraine’s nuclear power stations to attack?

For years, security services have worried about terrorists unleashing a ‘dirty bomb’ – where a conventional explosive is used to spread radioactive material over a large area. Russian forces now stand accused of threatening a similar form of warfare in Ukraine: attacking a nuclear power station with conventional weapons. Shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station on the Dneiper River in the south of the country over the weekend is not believed to have released any radiation, although it did damage some equipment and one worker has been reported injured. However, the possibilities for causing havoc by attacking nuclear stations is very clear. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned

Sunday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Truss and Sunak are blind to the coming crisis

In times of crisis in the 20th century, voters called for politicians from opposing parties to put aside their differences and unite in a national government. Such is the collapse of the Conservative party we now must beg Tory politicians to stop fighting and unite in a Tory government. Martin Lewis has said that Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson should be able to agree on a package to cover the expected 70 per cent rise in the domestic energy cap in the autumn (with more to come in January).  ‘You’re all in the same party,’ he cried. ‘You should be able to work out some unifying policy, something

Saturday

William Cook

The halcyon days of Anglo-German relations

In Brenners, Germany’s grandest grand hotel, in Baden-Baden, Germany’s smartest spa town, there’s a corner of a foreign drawing room that is forever England. Above the fireplace hangs a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds of the Honourable Mrs Beresford – a quintessential English Rose in a quintessential German Kaminhalle. At first sight it seems incongruous but in fact it’s rather fitting, for this hotel and this spa town epitomises the close relationship between the British and German upper classes, a relationship only slightly sullied by the awkward happenstance of two world wars. Brenners has always been a home from home for the British aristocracy: its guest book boasts the signatures

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

How ‘taking the knee’ spoiled football

Premier League footballers ‘taking a knee’ came in at the tail end of the 2019-20 season, when stadiums were empty because of the first Covid lockdown. Thus were the game’s moneyed elite spared having to initiate the fad in front of full houses. By the time supporters returned it was a fait accompli, normalised by endless self-righteous newspaper columns and political speeches on air by TV football pundits. Only one view of the matter was permitted. Any supporter who expressed dissent about the gesture of support for the Black Lives Matter campaign risked being branded a knuckle-scraping racist. Given that the gesture emerged in the United States as a show of outright

Friday

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Who is Sandi Toksvig to lecture Justin Welby about sin?

Has Justin Welby met his match in Sandi Toksvig? The entertainer has sent an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, complaining about his attempts to compromise with African bishops and avoid a showdown at the Lambeth Conference on the issue of same-sex marriage. The gist of it is: ‘Even though I don’t believe in God, I’m rarely going to attend my local church again’. This letter, and the swift reply to it from Justin Welby, tell us quite a lot about the relative standing of the CofE and what we are now supposed to call, as Sandi does, ‘LGBTQ+ people’. St Sandi’s letter to the Cantabrians is a masterpiece of faux-chummy

Patrick West

Don’t grass on your neighbour if they break the hosepipe ban

There’s nothing worse than a grass. Or so goes the wisdom expressed in soap operas like EastEnders. Of course, there are worse things than being a grass, but such an overstatement does reflect a common taboo found in many cultures: no one likes a snitch, telltale, narc, informer or sneak. Which is why the news that South East Water is asking its customers in Kent and Sussex to get in touch if they notice a neighbour ignoring a forthcoming hosepipe ban is unlikely to win it many plaudits. The supplier has placed a contact link on its website for people to report on miscreants they see flouting the instructions, inviting

Dalibor Rohac

Orbán is doubling down on Russian energy

Viktor Orbán’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, delivered everything the audience could have asked for. From an emphasis on ‘winning’, through an equivalence between the modern-day left and Cold War communism, to extolling the virtues of Hungary’s border ‘wall’, he covered it all. Its concluding segment, dedicated to Russia’s war against Ukraine, however, was significant by what it conveniently omitted: Hungary’s deepening energy dependence on Russia. Of course, nobody at CPAC was going to give Orbán a hard time over the fact that, his expression of solidarity with Ukraine notwithstanding, Hungary continues to import 65 percent of its oil and 85 percent of its

Mary Dejevsky

Nick Clegg is right – being European is special

The theme of the week has to be ‘coming home’: first the women’s football trophy, and now one-time Deputy PM, Nick Clegg, who says he will share his time between the two sides of the Atlantic. He had recently hinted at a return, describing himself as ‘at heart, European’. Some might question this as a reason for swapping continents. Why would anyone paid a multi-million dollar Silicon Valley salary, enjoying a multi-million dollar California mansion, with the cars, the staff and the space of the New World, even consider moving back to the Old Country, especially as the nights draw in and the (stratospherically priced) heating has to be switched

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Macron’s axed French TV license is a lesson for BBC campaigners

President Macron has finally found a policy he is capable of getting through the disputatious National Assembly, with a little help from Marine Le Pen and the rump centrist Républicains. He is abolishing the €138 (£116) redevance audiovisuelle, the rough equivalent of the TV licence. It was sold as a measure to tackle the cost of living crisis and passed despite the predictable squeals of the left and the French media elites which see the redevance as their special honey pot. The redevance generates a colossal €3.2 billion (£2.7 billion) annually and its suppression will gain approving hurrahs from those who yearn for a similar liquidation of the British TV

Thursday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Where does Justin Welby stand on same-sex marriage?

Justin Welby has made a valiant attempt to placate both sides of the Anglican divide. He has insisted that the official conservative teaching on sexuality, agreed at the Lambeth Conference of 1998, is still valid. But he also said that provinces that dissent, and affirm same-sex marriage, should not be disciplined. In effect, he is calling their dissenting view an authentic expression of Anglicanism. At the end of the speech he ducks the question In the crucial passage of his speech that he delivered this week, he asserts that, ‘for the large majority of the Anglican Communion’, to question the traditional teaching is ‘unthinkable, and in many countries would make

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Good riddance to the Tavistock

Most push notifications that pop up on my tablet concern impending catastrophe. But last week, one newsflash made my day. Glory hallelujah, the NHS is closing the Tavistock. A clatter of tattletales have warned since 2005 that the UK’s only clinic for minors confused about which sex they are – having been encouraged to be confused by British media and their own teachers – was fast-tracking children into often irreversible treatments in the service of ideologically driven ‘gender affirmation’. At last the Cass report has determined that the clinic’s practices are unsafe. The Tavistock will close by the spring, which by my calculation is seven months too late – if

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why British Gas’s owner is right to restore its dividend

‘What’s worse, they’re paying the profits to shareholders,’ said a grey-haired woman ahead of me in the Co-op queue. ‘Bloody shareholders,’ her friend of similar age and class spat back. I guessed they were talking about Centrica, parent of British Gas, which at a time when domestic energy bills are rising 23 times faster than wages (as Frances O’Grady of the TUC puts it) has announced half-year operating profits of £1.3 billion, up from £262 million last year – and the restoration of a penny-per-share interim dividend after a three-year gap. Both ladies looked likely to be beneficiaries of pensions nourished by dividends from the likes of Centrica, Shell and

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

How to poach peaches (and why you should)

I’ve never been very good at leaving things be. I tend to gild the lily. I may plan to do something simple, but I always find myself adding to it, primping, faffing. This is true in every area of life, but never more so than when I’m cooking. For that reason, this time of year can make me a little uncomfortable. When summer arrives in earnest – as opposed to those brief, misleadingly sunny weekends of late April and mid-May – we are inundated with beautiful fresh fruit. Right now, it’s strawberries, gooseberries, peaches and cherries; raspberries, blackcurrants and figs are just around the corner. And we are told over

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

When did we give up on the truth?

During that rather strange summer of 2020 I used the phrase ‘the gentle armed robber George Floyd’ in several articles for various publications, but the phrase was often taken out. I had thought it a mild corrective to the seeming beatification of a man who, while having been wrongly killed, was not, to my mind, quite worthy of the retrospective adoration being poured upon him. Nope, there would be no corrective – not about George. Indeed in that summer of lockdowns, hand sanitiser and existential angst it was pretty much impossible to challenge the programme of Black Lives Matter, full stop. Hence it was swallowed whole by the establishment and

Ben Lazarus Ben Lazarus

How to blend your own beard oil

Every few months I take out a box of essential oils and carefully lay them out on my kitchen table, organising them in order from sweet-smelling to musty. On the left will be scents like juniper berry, lime, frankincense and bergamot; in the middle, woodish fragrances such as sandalwood and cedarwood; on the right, the darker stuff of patchouli and pine needle – and occasionally, when I’m feeling brave in my endeavour to make the perfect beard oil, lavender. Next I fill several large vials with a mixture of carrier oils, usually almond, jojoba and argan (and normally with almond making up the bulk as it’s the cheapest). I then