Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: War in the Middle East, drought in Yorkshire and a knighthood for Beckham

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs (which he had previously opposed) on the recommendation of Baroness Casey of Blackstock, who had been asked to audit the matter. His announcement came after four men born in Pakistan and three Rochdale-born taxi drivers of Asian descent were convicted of offences against two teenage girls who were repeatedly raped and assaulted in Rochdale from 2001 to 2006. The Casey report said that Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire had ‘disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation’. At the G7 summit in Canada, Sir Keir

Ian Rankin

Beware taking up running in your fifties

Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the Auckland Writers’ Festival and would meet again, post-Brisbane, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. A book tour of Australia and New Zealand is a bit like being in a David Lodge novel – writers are more likely to travel halfway round the world if a few potentially sizeable crowds are waiting for them. A.C. Grayling, who I broke bread with in Auckland and saw again in Sydney, seemed to have scored the most palpable hit by being invited to be philosopher-in-residence at a festival in Margaret River, centre of Australia’s most

The Spectator

How often do plane crashes have sole survivors?

Sole survivors A 40-year-old British man, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, was the sole survivor of the crash of an Air India jet shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad en route to Gatwick. A surprising number of aircraft disasters have had a sole survivor – at least five others where more than 100 were killed. — On 16 August 1987 a four-year-old girl, Cecilia Cichan, survived the crash of North West Airlines flight 255 shortly after takeoff from Detroit; it killed 156. The plane’s wing flaps had not been extended (a suggested cause of the Air India disaster). — On 6 March 2003, a 28-year-old soldier, Youcef Djillali, survived the crash of Air

Michael Gove

Why the Tories should oppose regime change

As a minister I lived by mantras: simple principles that summed up how I believed you got things done. Faced with a PowerPoint presentation as means of influencing policy, I’d sling it back in the box with the injunction ‘Think in ink’ – in other words, make a proper sustained argument on paper instead of trying to advance shonky argument with a series of unevidenced assertions, a dodgy graph and the words ‘levelling up’ on every page in bold. Told that the prospect of a judicial review should mean shelving a policy, I’d write on the submission: ‘If the legal advice says no, get a better lawyer.’ Informed by officials

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My modest proposal

It’s surely time we dropped our cynicism and got behind the government’s National Abortion Drive, another noble attempt to kickstart our floundering economy. The United Kingdom has made great strides of late in this area, recently overtaking France in the number of abortions performed annually, the figures showing the largest increase since this sort of stuff was legalised. The door, then, is already ajar. All we need to do is push a little. Our elected representatives were intent on doing just that this week by voting for an amendment that will now decriminalise abortion right up to the day of birth. I don’t wish to seem churlish, but to me

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The tangled bureaucracy of appointing an Archbishop

Cardinals elected the new Pope within a fortnight but it will take almost a year to choose our next Archbishop of Canterbury. The beloved Anglican interregnum is intended to ‘take soundings’. These are unproductive if held in an echo chamber. The chairman of the Crown Nominations Commission for the successor to Justin Welby, Lord Evans of Weardale, is an efficient and discreet public servant. But most of the large group of voting members, including both its C of E bishops (York, Norwich), come from the fastest-declining part of the Church, its liberal wing. Thanks to Welby’s reforms, the commission now has no fewer than five members from the wider Anglican

The Spectator

The unvarnished truth about rape gangs

Some crimes are so horrific that our instinct is to look away. And there can be few as appalling as those perpetrated by the rape gangs whose activities Dame Louise Casey reported on this week. Girls as young as ten were beaten and sexually abused. They were tortured with baseball bats, knives and meat cleavers. They were urinated on, had cigarettes stubbed out on them, were burned by lighters and branded on their buttocks. Some contracted venereal diseases. One 12-year-old was compelled to undergo an abortion. These crimes weren’t rare, but sustained and widespread, carried out in up to 50 towns and cities across Britain over decades. The perpetrators were

Wednesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why are young Christians returning to tradition?

41 min listen

Today’s Holy Smoke is a curtain-raiser for ‘Recovering the Sacred’, a Spectator event at St Bartholow-the-Great in the City of London in which a panel of experts will explore the rediscovery of traditional worship and theology by young Anglicans and Catholics. The event will be held on Tuesday 8th July; for more details, and to book tickets, go to: spectator.co.uk/church In today’s episode Damian Thompson talks to Anglican James Vitali and Catholic Georgia Clarke, two Generation Z professionals bursting with enthusiasm for their faith. It’s an exhilarating discussion; don’t miss it.  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Alexander Larman

Should we worry about the Princess of Wales?

The announcement, when it came, was a strangely botched one. The official Ascot carriage list had stated at 12 p.m. that the Prince and Princess of Wales would be riding in the second carriage in the royal procession, accompanied by their friends Mr and Mrs Justin Rose. It was already known that Prince William would be presenting the prizes at today’s race meeting, so there was inevitable excitement at his presence and that of his wife. Catherine always brings a touch of glamour to whatever occasion she graces, helped by, of course, the finest couture that money could buy. So it was an unexpected and disappointing change, made half an

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

MPs have opened the door to infanticide

Well, it’s hello to prenatal infanticide now that Tonia Antoniazzi’s amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill has passed the Commons after all of two hours’ debate with 379 MPs voting in favour. Can we get our heads round what that means? Nothing a woman does in relation to her own pregnancy can make her liable to prosecution. At the same age of gestation when premature babies are admitted to neonatal wards with a very good chance of survival, less fortunate foetuses can be killed with impunity by their own mothers. So anyone like Carla Foster, who aborted her baby Lily at 32 weeks’ gestation, will now get off free.

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Why liberals ignored the grooming gang scandal

For many years, liberals refused to talk about the grooming gangs scandal. The systematic sexual abuse and rape of hundreds, possibly thousands, of vulnerable children by offenders from ethnic minorities was a story that too many people were happy to ignore. There was an effective prohibition on discussing it in left and liberal circles. Grooming gangs was a subject guaranteed to silence a dinner party. So, we decided to pretend that it wasn’t happening. Finally, the so-called great and the good have woken up to a scandal that was happening in plain sight Finally, the so-called great and the good have woken up to a scandal that was happening in

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The establishment was more afraid of ‘the gammon’ than the groomers

‘When history is written as it ought to be written’, said the great Trinidadian Marxist CLR James, ‘it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity’. On no historical calamity is this truer than the rape-gang scandal. When future scribes look back at this violent tear in the British social fabric, it is the forbearance of the public they will marvel over. It will dazzle them. These vile prejudices were the fuel of this scandal The spectre of public volatility has stalked this scandal from the start. The establishment’s irrational dread of the feral masses shaped its yellow-bellied decision-making. From the

Lara Brown

A grooming gang inquiry will expose Labour’s guilty men

Sir Keir Starmer claimed in January that those who were concerned about the systematic rape and abuse of little girls were ‘calling for inquiries because they want to jump on a bandwagon of the far right’. Yesterday, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, promised that victims would finally get the full national inquiry which campaigners have been demanding for so many years. If Starmer has any sense, he will bring out his party’s bodies willingly before he is forced to Cooper’s statement in the Commons was relatively encouraging. She conceded that much of the (admittedly shoddy) data around child grooming points to ‘clear evidence of overrepresentation amongst suspects of Asian and Pakistani

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

The good and bad news about the UK-US trade deal

Donald Trump and Keir Starmer’s transatlantic trade deal has finally been signed. Before making an early exit from the G7, the US president approved an executive order giving legal effect to parts of the US-UK deal. The outline of the agreement was settled weeks earlier during a conference call, with Trump in the White House and Peter Mandelson, the UK ambassador in Washington, standing, slightly creepily, over his shoulder, as Starmer dialled in from 4,000 miles away. If the deal is to progress further, an almighty row could be brewing The delay in any further announcement left conservatives, and businesses, wondering whether the deal outline a month ago was turning

Mike Pitts

The remarkable quest to identify Captain Cook’s Endeavour

The announcement that a shipwreck in Newport Harbor, 200 miles up the coast from New York City, has been proven to be James Cook’s HMS Endeavour, will not surprise those who have followed the search for years. In 1768, when Cook set out to record the transit of Venus in Tahiti, the first of his voyages of discovery, he was a mere lieutenant. The Endeavour was not the best of his ships, and the solo journey – two ships sailed on each of his second and third Pacific voyages – was not the most productive.   Every detail of what has survived of the timbers of ship ‘RI 2394’, matches

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

JK Rowling’s takedown of Boy George was a joy to behold

Few things are more delicious to watch than an uneven battle of wits – and it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than one between Boy George and JK Rowling. ‘Which rights have been taken away from trans people?’, Rowling asked her followers on X this weekend. ‘The right to be left alone by a rich bored bully!’, Boy George responded. ‘I’ve never been given 15 months for handcuffing a man to a wall and beating him with a chain,’ wrote JK Rowling We waited with bated breath for the inevitable response from the Harry Potter author. When it came, it didn’t disappoint. ‘I’ve never been given 15

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Ballymena got what it wanted

Thursday evening. All quiet in Ballymena so far, after three nights of wrath. On the kerb of Waring Street – just off Larne Street, which rioters tore through on Tuesday and left burning and beaten – sit James and Casper, both 16. James is wearing a balaclava with a Rottweiler’s face printed on the front. Casper wears a hoodie. Opposite the boys, a woman is handing out signs for people to put in their windows which read ‘LOCALS LIVE HERE’, and down the road, on the corner of Henry Street and Railway Street, a man is pointing his phone at a row of parked police jeeps, and will expectantly livestream

Sunday

Debbie Hayton

Bristol museum’s trans exhibition is like something out of a cult

The Bristol Museum and Art Gallery is one of those places that makes me feel uncomfortable. I feel picked-on even visiting the website. At the top of the screen – before any mention of the collections and exhibitions – we are all told that ‘Bristol Museums welcomes trans and gender-diverse visitors, volunteers and members of staff’. Perhaps this is a response to the Supreme Court judgement that biological sex quite rightly takes precedence over paperwork when distinguishing women from men? But I find it unhelpful and intrusive. I might be transsexual, but I am a human being just like everyone else, and I don’t need special treatment. I certainly don’t

Joshua Young

AI is rotting our children’s minds

‘He’s more machine than man now’, complains Obi-Wan Kenobi of his notoriously fallen apprentice Darth Vader in Star Wars. The same thought crossed my mind last week in the wake of the worst betrayal I have suffered as an English tutor. Something is wrong when your favourite pupil uses AI to generate the two-line reference they had offered to write for you, making you sound even blander than feared. ‘Ottillie,’ – not her real name – I blurted, ‘how could you?’ The reply was endearing but terribly ominous: ‘I wanted it to be perfect.’ ChatGPT is already shockingly good, much better than most people admit. Get it to rewrite itself to sound less like

Lana Hempsall

Motability won’t give up its lucrative business without a fight

Motability, the scheme set up to provide vehicles, scooters and powered wheelchairs to disabled people, has become something of a monster. By the end of 2024, Motability supported a staggering 815,000 vehicles, up by 200,000 in the last two years alone. It is clear that the scheme has extended way beyond its original purpose and is in dire need of reform. But Motability is determined not to give up its lucrative business model without a fight. Only five per cent of Motability cars are adapted for those with physical disabilities Andrew Miller, the scheme’s chief executive, has hit back at criticism of Motability. ‘We’ve been a business all along. Any sense