Society Archives

Sunday

22 May 2022

Why is the NHS erasing women?

Cervical cancer and ovarian cancer only affect women. So why has the NHS been quietly erasing the word ‘women’ from information pages on its official website? According to the Mail, NHS advice pages on these conditions were edited at the beginning of the year to remove references to the word ‘woman’. Last year, women seeking information about cervical cancer were told that, ‘cervical cancer develops in a woman’s cervix (the entrance to the womb from the vagina). It mainly affects sexually active women aged between 30 and 45.’ But in 2022, the advice reads, ‘cervical cancer is a cancer that is found anywhere in the cervix, [and] the cervix is

Saturday

21 May 2022

Peter Apps

Why disabled people will be forced to stay in burning high-rises

‘Grenfell is a story about a failed evacuation.’ These are the words of Professor Ed Galea, an internationally respected expert in fire safety and evacuations who, among other things, wrote a pivotal study into the attempted evacuation of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. But this is something the British state, and particularly the Home Office, appears utterly unable to accept. For decades, this country has relied on telling residents in burning tower blocks to ‘stay put’. This has been baked into the way we build our high rises: we require walls, floors and ceilings to effectively break the building up into a series of small, fire resisting boxes. This

Friday

20 May 2022

Alexander Larman

Will anyone watch a Harry and Meghan Netflix docuseries?

Picture the convivial scene. You have been invited into the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s palatial £11 million mansion in Montecito, California as an honoured guest. Once you have removed your shoes, been frisked for weapons or recording devices and been offered a kombucha smoothie, you are ushered into the inner sanctum of the world’s most talked-about satellite branch of the royal family. What would you expect to find? A dartboard with Prince Charles’s face on it? Endless piles of obscure genealogical books that explain why Prince Harry is, in fact, the rightful heir to the throne? Or endless expensive, studiedly tasteful rooms that lack any heart and soul whatsoever?

Brendan O’Neill

Idrissa Gueye and the problem with Pride

Is waving the Pride flag compulsory now? The Idrissa Gueye scandal suggests it might be. Footballer Gueye did not play for his team, Paris Saint-Germain, on Saturday because he declined to wear a new top on which the players’ numbers are emblazoned with the Pride colours. How dare he. Reject Pride, get shamed. Gueye is from Senegal and he clearly has quite traditional beliefs. It seems as though homosexuality is not something that he personally wants to celebrate. And for that, for holding true to his own moral convictions, he is being treated as a heretic. The French Football Federation has demanded an explanation. He must either ‘issue an apology’

Philip Patrick

Is this the return of football hooliganism?

Everton secured their Premier League safety last night, coming back from two goals down to bag a 3-2 victory against Crystal Palace. It was all too much for some of their fans who, having endured seven nail-shreddingly tense minutes of extra time, swarmed onto the pitch at the final whistle. There was at least one unpleasant consequence of the pitch invasion as an Everton fan taunted Crystal Palace manager Patrick Viera, who responded with a kick. This isn’t just a one-off, however. People are seriously starting to ask: are we seeing the return of football hooliganism? Thursday’s League Two play-off match also saw fans on the pitch at its end with punches allegedly

Thursday

19 May 2022

Joanna Williams

Is ‘woke’ real?

Woke is a strange phenomena, but what does it actually mean? Activists and columnists alike declare that being woke is simply being aware of social injustices and challenging racism and sexism. But if that is the case, where are the out and proud woke warriors? Where are the ‘I’m woke’ pin badges and the ‘Being Woke’ clubs for people to join? The more we are told woke is cool, the harder it gets to find someone who self-identifies as woke. So is woke real? The Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) casts doubt on whether it is. The think tank has published new research suggesting that ‘woke’ is essentially

Freddy Gray

What is Black Lives Matter?

It’s hard not to admire Patrisse Cullors, the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter foundation. Under fire over yet another set of revelations that suggest her world-famous anti-racism organisation is in fact little more than a racket, she has admitted she made ‘mistakes’. But what else could a poor girl do? An organisation of BLM’s size was simply not equipped for the millions upon millions of dollars it suddenly received in the summer of 2020, when the locked-down world went crazy over the death of George Floyd. It was all ‘white guilt money’, says Cullors. She’s absolutely right, of course. In those mad days of 2020, as protests spread and

Harry Mount

Who is David Sherborne, libel lawyer to the stars?

If you’re a celeb with a burning grievance, the hottest place in town is an unassuming, Georgian terraced house in Gray’s Inn, Holborn. Five Raymond Buildings is the number one libel set in the country. And its most prominent barrister is David Sherborne, aka ‘Orange Sherbet’ – the permatanned schmoozer with the wind-tugged, auburn tresses. Sherborne is currently representing Coleen Rooney, wife of ex-England footballer Wayne Rooney, in the ‘Wagatha Christie’ case. She’s being sued for defamation by Rebekah Vardy, wife of Leicester striker Jamie Vardy. Mrs Vardy disputes Mrs Rooney’s allegation that Vardy leaked stories about her to the Sun. It’s the biggest libel case at the Royal Courts

Ivo Dawnay

It’s time for the chop, Boris

Thinking about it, there is only one thing that my father-in-law Stanley and I really agree about: it’s the hair. His oldest son’s policies, achievements, claims (and other things) strike us both in very different ways: in Stanley’s case with a farmyard cockerel’s swelling red-breasted pride; in mine with a deep-rooted despair of the type the dwellers in the Cities of the Plain must have felt before Jehovah smote them. But we agree about the hair. When it first went on the public stage, the hair was a glorious diversion, like Tommy Cooper’s Turkish fez, Rod Hull’s Emu or, perhaps more nobly, the playful, streaming flags and banners of the

James Heale

Changing channels: the new war for political broadcasting

It’s hard to step outside nowadays without being confronted with a massive picture of Piers Morgan. In the adverts for his new TalkTV show he can be seen crushing the House of Commons in his hands or pointing to an address for the channel’s complaints department. ‘Love him or hate him,’ the adverts declare, ‘you won’t want to miss him.’ Actually, it seems, people don’t mind if they do. At the last count, barely 40,000 tuned in. In contrast, Morgan’s final appearance on Good Morning Britain drew almost two million viewers. So what’s going on? One answer is that TalkTV, like any new channel, will take a while to establish

Michael Simmons

The politics of bowls clubs

Bowls has a reputation as a sedate pastime, but it can be as fiercely competitive as any other sport. It can even get rowdy. At the Edinburgh cup final in 2012, a young player, angry at losing the match, stripped down to his boxers in protest. When committee members from his team tried to restrain him, he headbutted the club secretary. Bowls players have always taken the sport very seriously. According to popular legend, Sir Francis Drake was playing bowls at Plymouth Hoe when the Spanish Armada came into view off the headland. He insisted on finishing the game. Battle could wait, bowls couldn’t. The object of the game is

Martin Vander Weyer

How far will house prices fall?

‘Forecasting is a mug’s game’ is a truism attributed to everyone from fantasy author Douglas Adams to former Bank of England governor Mervyn King. It reminds us that commentators should never be smug when they call the near future right, or quick to crow at others who turned out to be wrong. I may have been a step or two ahead of the pack this season on inflation and recession risks and I’ve always said crypto, which we’ll come to in a moment, was the road to perdition. But I confess my record on property trends is frankly lamentable. Way back in the ‘negative equity’ era of the mid-1990s, I

Rod Liddle

What we learnt from Eurovision

Twice during the Eurovision Song Contest our television lost the signal and the set went blank – once, mercifully, during the performance of a hirsute, gurning, cod-operatic bellend from that patently European country Azerbaijan. ‘Putin’, my wife and I both reckoned, seeing as Russian hacker groups favourably disposed towards their country’s leader had promised that they would do what they could to disrupt the broadcast and indeed the voting. If this really is the third world war, then I suppose it is a suitably banal and modernist take on universal annihilation – this yearly celebration of joyous gayness and very bad music suddenly part of the same war as the

The Spectator

Letters: Banning Russia’s culture only benefits Putin

Don’t ban Russia’s culture Sir: It is uncouth, illiterate and actually beneficial to Putin when theatres, opera houses and other cultural institutions in Britain and across the globe block access to these heights of culture (‘Theatre of war’, 14 May). During Stalin’s last decade and throughout the Cold War, Isaiah Berlin was a superb help to this country and to Russia through his connection with Anna Akhmatova, including the award to her of an honorary doctorate at New College, Oxford, in June 1965, the year before her death. Censorship and blocking of the free flow of culture between Russia and western society is what the Soviet Union enforced. It was

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Inflation’s 40-year high, Tory MP’s rape arrest and monkeypox in Britain

Home The annual rate of inflation, impelled by energy costs, rose to 9 per cent, its highest since 1982. Unemployment fell to 1.2 million, 3.7 per cent, its lowest since 1974 and below the number of vacancies of 1.3 million. Britain said it wanted to do something about the Northern Ireland Protocol, but the EU said it couldn’t. The Democratic Unionist party said it would not take part in the power-sharing executive of Northern Ireland unless Britain did. Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, told the Commons that a new law would adjust Northern Ireland’s trading status. Maros Sefcovic, vice-president of the European Commission, said the EU would ‘respond with all

Taki

The art of laziness

New York Living a life of pleasure is fun, but it can also become tiresome. Living an ethical life of responsibility is beneficial to the soul, but also boring. I am stuck between the two at times, and I think age has a lot to do with it. A constant reminder of the very visible yoke of age comes daily, as I march up and down Park Avenue noticed by absolutely no one. I really don’t mind, cross my heart; in fact, it makes me laugh at times when I’m dressed to the nines and go unnoticed even by the panhandlers. And being dressed correctly nowadays makes one really stand

Peter Hitchens

Why was a brilliant BBC serial kept in its most secret vaults?

BBC Four announced this morning that ‘The Roads to Freedom’ will play on the BBC for the first time since the 1970s on Wednesday 27 July. In May, Peter Hitchens asked why the BBC had kept it in the archive… If someone had managed to bottle the essence of the 1960s – the exciting, adventurous bits – wouldn’t you want to take at least one deep draught? I certainly would. I sometimes long for the power to recreate that odd, dangerous, thrilling time, if only to see if I have got it right in my memory. In fact, they did bottle it. But nobody is allowed to taste the vintage. Well,

Charles Moore

How not to level up parliament

Justified relief that soldiers are now coming out of the Azovstal steelworks alive is accompanied by anxiety about what might happen next. The day before the news broke, I was talking on WhatsApp to Daniel Detcom, a Ukrainian territorial reservist (in normal life, a disc jockey), currently on active service in Mykolaiv. He told me that the Azovstal issue was producing disagreement among Ukrainians. Those fighting in the steel plant were mostly more nationalist than President Zelensky. Some people suspected him of not striving hard enough to help them, because they might be better for him as ‘dead heroes’ than as active participants in a future Ukraine. It may be

Douglas Murray

The dishonesty of how we respond to tragedies

It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It is six years since Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in her constituency by somebody who appeared to be a sort of aspiring Nazi. Back then, various campaign groups and newspapers in this country had no problems with claiming that guilt for that attack could be liberally spread around. Some said that everybody on the political right bore responsibility. Others claimed that anyone who was leading Britain’s ‘Leave’ campaign in the EU referendum shared the blame. It was different in October last year, when Sir David Amess MP was murdered

Dot Wordsworth

Why nothing ever comes ‘for free’

‘It’s not as nice as it looks,’ said my husband, not leaving time to look it in the mouth before wolfing down the lemon and sultana Danish that I had thoughtfully bought him, reduced on account of its age. ‘Every day in this store,’ the till at Marks & Spencer’s had told me in a tone indicating that I might be interested, ‘someone gets their shopping for free.’ Yes, I thought, it must be that bloke that exits pursued by the security man. I thought other things too, since I am afflicted by what the French call déformation professionnelle and tend to sub-edit other people’s utterances – those of machines