Society

Monday

Patrick West

The BBC’s gender equality project has come unstuck

The BBC’s 50:50 project is designed to empower women. One of its targets is to ensure that half of the contributors are female. But while this aim might have been questionable from the outset – is this really something the BBC should be focusing on? – its mission has been undermined: the BBC has admitted it does ‘not monitor whether a contributor’s gender differs from their sex registers at birth’.  In effect, trans women, who were born as male, will be counted as women. ‘The BBC has now ‘disappeared’ women as a sex class and instead monitors ‘gender identity’,’ fumed one senior BBC insider, one of many Corporation staff who have protested

Robin Ashenden

How Russia’s war in Ukraine has changed Estonia’s outlook

Estonia Independence Day – celebrating the country’s 1918 emancipation from the Russian empire – takes place on 24 February each year. This year, Independence Day for the Estonians was horribly ironic. ‘Instead of opening the news in the morning and seeing the expected ‘Happy Independence Day Everyone!’’ Lidia, a language-specialist, told me, ‘the headline was ‘Russia has invaded Ukraine’.’ How do you celebrate independence from Russia while reading about the Russian invasion of an independent near-neighbour?’ One result of this, Lidia said, was a ‘deep connection to Ukraine (developing) overnight, something that couldn’t have existed before’. This seems to be true at all levels. Unlike in many other post-Soviet countries – Georgia,

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Should Apple snoop on your iPhone?

Should Apple use software to scan the photo library of every individual iPhone in search of images of child abuse? GCHQ thinks so. So does the National Cyber Security Centre. (Well, you might say: they would, wouldn’t they?) And so does professor Hany Farid, inventor of a technology called PhotoDNA, which is already used across the web to scan for illegal images. He told the Internet Watch Foundation that, though Apple paused proposals to roll out this software last year thanks to ‘pushback from a relatively small number of privacy groups’, ‘I contend that the vast majority of people would have said, ‘sure, this seems perfectly reasonable’’.  At issue, it

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Why can’t we enjoy England’s football win without politicising it?

Not everything has to be politicised all the time. Some things are just news. Often bad news, such as an erupting volcano or a motorway pile-up. But just occasionally there is a brilliant happening that defies all but the most obsessive hunters of snark or seekers of negative political agendas. The England women’s football team winning the European championships by beating Germany in front of a full house at Wembley yesterday must qualify as one of those. Let joy be unconfined. It certainly was down on the south coast where I was on Sunday. Heavily tattooed balding men with bull terrier gaits wore their England shirts with pride and punched

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

What does England’s victory mean for women’s football?

Well, thank goodness for that. Just as it seemed the England’s women’s football team might be about to extend the nation’s 56 years in search of a continental football title, a glorious release courtesy of an injury time winner from Chloe Kelly broke the spell. Saving us all from yet more psychological trauma like that inflicted by Gareth Southgate’s men’s team’s recent near misses, the Lionesses’ victory sent the stadium and the country ‘into raptures’. It was a terrific game and crowned what has been a fine tournament. To paraphrase a great war-time patriot, no one would quibble with ‘allowing ourselves a brief moment of rejoicing’. But then, for the good of the

Sunday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Russia’s RuTube is no match for YouTube

As Russia has stepped up its military campaign in Ukraine, the crackdown at home has intensified. The Kremlin has suppressed news sources that didn’t align with its world view, squashing the country’s last remaining independent media. But even Vladimir Putin couldn’t quite plug all the gaps as the truth about the reality of his deadly campaign continued to trickle back to Russians at home. Frequently this was happening via social media. At the time of the invasion, an increasing number of Russians, nearly 40 per cent, according to the independent Russian polling organisation Levada Center, most often got their news this way. With reliable mainstream sources of information on the

John Keiger John Keiger

The French buy-out that explains Macron’s strategy

It’s a platitude that France and Britain are rivals and have been for centuries. But, since the 1904 Entente Cordiale, the rivalry is more a question of competition than conflict. Always, in the darkest hour, each sided with the other, even if post-war they didn’t fully recognise the other’s contribution. Britain congratulated itself over the Dunkirk evacuation when in truth without French troops holding off the Germans, the ‘plucky’ armada would never have completed its mission; to this day the French believe that American troops were more numerous than British in the Normandy landings.  With the passing of the French war-time generation the postwar moral debt to Britain and residual goodwill

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

How Rebekah Vardy went from underdog to ‘Cry-Bully’

It was Depp vs Heard and Best Of Breed at Crufts rolled into one: yes, the Wagatha Christie gravy-train came to a screeching halt yesterday having taken three years and £3 million in lawyers’ fees to reach the terminus. And with it, Rebekah Vardy’s reputation as a Cool Girl hit the buffers. I was vaguely on Team Vardy to start with; childhood abuse, broken home, homeless at 15, teenage bride, three times married, mother of five, eventually finding fame, fortune and Fendi by marrying Jamie Vardy. Coleen, on the other hand, seemed the boring good girl who had been with Wayne since they were schoolmates – before he had money,

Lucy Dunn

The grim reality facing junior doctors

The NHS is facing the biggest crisis in its history. GP surgeries are breaking under pressure, waiting lists could top nine million by March 2024, and there’s a huge shortfall of staff. Many medics are opting to simply throw in the towel. Having recently qualified as a doctor, I can’t say I’m surprised. For junior doctors, stress, burnout and bullying are quick to take a toll: seven per cent of medics leave within the first three years. This bucks the expected trend: that people are at their most vitalised nearer the start of their careers. For medicine, the evidence suggests otherwise. Clinical placements reveal harsh realities early on, acclimatising trainees to

Nigel Jones

Is the death penalty making a comeback?

It’s been a busy week for hangmen. In Japan, Tomohiro Kato, a 39-year-old man, was hanged at a Tokyo prison for killing seven people and injuring ten others in a 2008 murderous rampage in which he drove a truck into a crowd before stabbing several other random victims. Kato admitted his guilt and blamed his crime on his alienation from society and insults he had received on social media. It was the second execution in Japan ordered by the government of prime minister Fumio Kishida, who took office in 2021, after the death penalty had been held in abeyance for several years. However, it’s unlikely to be the last. Tetsuya

Friday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is the eurozone in crisis?

Is the eurozone heading for another 2010-style sovereign debt crisis? Today comes the news that inflation in the eurozone hit 8.9 per cent in the year to July. Although it is a record high, it is not as quite as towering as inflation in Britain – at 9.4 per cent. However, what it does do is expose the vulnerability of the eurozone – and how Italian public debt threatens to undermine it. This week, the yield on Italian ten-year government bonds rose to 3.5 per cent as investors began to wonder again if the country can honour its debts. Granted, it’s not quite as high at the rates of over

Alexander Larman

Rebekah Vardy’s spectacular own goal

Jamie Vardy is one of English football’s most prolific strikers. But thanks to his wife, his surname will be forever associated with one of the all-time great legal own goals. Rebekah Vardy has spectacularly lost her high-profile libel battle against Coleen Rooney in the so-called ‘Wagatha Christie’ case.  It’s hard to overstate how damning today’s judgment is of Vardy: Mrs Justice Steyn said that Vardy’s evidence, which she had treated ‘with very considerable caution’, ‘was manifestly inconsistent with the contemporaneous documentary evidence’ and was ‘evasive’ or ‘implausible’. She also decided that Rooney’s Instagram post – which sparked the bust-up between the two WAGs in the first place – was ‘substantially true’. A drama has been

Debbie Hayton

On the front line at Drag Queen Story Hour

Henleaze, a suburb in the north of Bristol, is an unlikely place for a protest. This is a well-to-do area where the houses sit behind neatly-clipped hedges and cost over half-a-million pounds. But across the road from the local Waitrose yesterday morning, Henleaze’s library was surrounded by at least a dozen police officers and two angry groups of demonstrators. A gaggle of toddlers and their mums had also gathered. Drag Queen Story Hour was about to begin. Those protesting against the appearance of Sab Samuel, a drag queen who goes by the stage name Aida H Dee, were clear what they thought. ‘It’s wrong. This is aimed at toddlers and these kids don’t

Thursday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Why the Tavistock clinic had to be shut down

There are many reasons why what is sometimes crudely called ‘the trans issue’ is important. One is the political failure that left the legitimate views of many women (and men) ignored by decision-making individuals and bodies, who instead prioritised the views of interest groups and campaigners. Another is the multiple failures of governance that have seen numerous public bodies fail to deal properly and responsibly with questions of real public interest, because of their enthusiasm to follow the subjective agenda of interest groups rather than amass and act on objective evidence. Simply put, organisations that are supposed to make decisions on the basis of facts have sometimes chosen to proceed

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Scotland’s drug deaths scandal is a problem no one seems able to solve

Scotland has a high amount of drugs deaths. But it’s not just that. It’s that Scotland suffers drugs deaths at levels unknown anywhere else in the UK or Europe – nearly four times worse than any other country for which records exist. This scandalous figure has been updated today, showing that – although it fell one per cent this year – it has trebled since the SNP came to power. It speaks to a wider collapse of public policy. And one that requires urgent attention. The new figures published show drug-related deaths have fallen to 1,330 – just nine fewer than the year before and the second-highest ever recorded. As a share of the

The Spectator

Germany’s energy crisis is a warning to Britain

During the eurozone crisis, southern European states had to go cap in hand to Germany to stave off national bankruptcy. A decade on and it is Berlin doing the begging. Europe has reluctantly agreed a 15 per cent cut in gas use this winter in the hope that German factories can stay open and German citizens can keep from freezing. Meanwhile, Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom threatened to reduce the gas flowing through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline yet again so that Germany would receive only a fifth of the amount it did before the Ukrainian invasion. While Berlin has said it plans to wean itself off Russian gas over

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The parallel universe you can explore on two wheels

Many of us daydream about escaping into an imaginary parallel universe. The good news is that Britain has its own genuine, and literally parallel, universe that we can escape into at any moment. It’s the National Cycle Network that threads its way quietly and meanderingly over, under and alongside our gridlocked main roads and our daily lives. Once you try it, you’ll fall in love with supposedly ‘broken Britain’ all over again. You’ll be reminded that it’s a country of dog-walkers, rivers, farms and front gardens. And you don’t have to wear Lycra to do this. You just need ordinary clothes, plus KitKats, Thermos and sandwiches, and off you trundle

Dot Wordsworth

The etymological ingredients of ‘flageons’

‘Don’t you know the answer?’ asked my husband with mock surprise, throwing over to me from his armchair a copy of the Daily Telegraph. The question, from a reader on the Letters page, was what Mrs Beeton meant by flageons of veal. I had no idea and nor did the Oxford English Dictionary in 20 volumes. The recipe was for a sort of giant hamburger or hot meatloaf made from minced veal, suet, eggs and breadcrumbs. That gave no clues about its name. It could hardly have connections with flagons or flagellation. A day later another reader found in her edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management from 1915

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

How to save Royal Mail

The government’s ‘cost-of-living tsar’, Just Eat co-founder David Buttress, was appointed last month as a Canutian gesture against the inflation tide. He says his role is to encourage retailers and utilities to offer discount deals that might relieve short-term pain for consumers. But wouldn’t it be good if he also had powers to shame companies or sectors for profiteering by whacking their prices up far ahead of inflation? Any firm for which energy or scarce raw materials are major cost elements has possible reason for scorching price rises; many others do not. Buttress could start by looking into hire-car rates, which have doubled (and more) across Europe since 2019 –

Prue Leith

Why Liz Truss shouldn’t be PM

Two and a half years ago I joined the Tory party to vote for Boris, then unjoined as soon as I could. I’ve never been a Tory voter but I believed in Boris and never thought of him as a cliquey, old-school Conservative. Now I’d like to rejoin to keep Liz Truss out. She seems to want to be PM just for the sake of being PM – we’ve had enough of that. But I’m hoist on my own petard. The party has wised up to tactical joining and you need to be a member for six months to vote. One of the many reasons we have a chronic staffing