Society

Friday

Alexander Larman

Kate Middleton must not become the new Diana

In the inimitable words of The Smiths (or, indeed, Carry On Cleo, where they borrowed it from), stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. For her first official solo engagement outside London since her cancer treatment, the Princess of Wales was photographed visiting the Ty Hafan children’s hospice in South Wales. She has become a patron of the hospice, and to this end interacted with the no doubt awestruck children with the ease and grace that have become a hallmark of all her public appearances since she married into the royal family. At a time of great difficulty for the Firm – it was revealed recently that

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Japan’s smoking ban is a sham

The Japanese city of Osaka has banned smoking on the streets in an apparent effort to smarten up the city and make it more ‘visitor-friendly’ ahead of this year’s World Expo, which begins in April. Smoking had been prohibited in six zones, including around the central station prior to the announcement. But on Monday, all public streets, buildings, parks and plazas in the city became smoke free. Smoking and vaping in all but the smallest eateries has been banned too, though designated smoking rooms will still be permitted. The fact that the smoking ban is getting significantly more coverage than the Expo itself highlights the difficulties organisers have had in rousing

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Migration mystery, Ipso’s trans muddle & are you a ‘trad dad’?

46 min listen

This week: why don’t we know how many people are in Britain? How many people live in the UK? It’s a straightforward question, yet the answer eludes some of the nation’s brightest statistical minds, writes Sam Bidwell for the cover this week. Whenever official figures are tested against real-world data, the population is almost always undercounted. For example, in England alone, nearly 64 million patients are registered with GP practices – higher than the Office for National Statistics (ONS)’s estimated population of 58 million. Sam argues there are serious consequences for our society at large, including for tax, housing and our utilities. Who is to blame for this data deficiency?

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why are ‘anti-racists’ silent about Arbel Yehud’s terrible ordeal?

Watching Arbel Yehud being freed in Gaza today, I thought to myself: this is what it must have been like at Salem. Here we had a diminutive woman being paraded through a baying mob of hollering men. They barked religious slogans at her. They shoved and jostled to get a better view of the marked woman. They thrust their mobile phones in her face to capture her terror for posterity. They’ll no doubt share the clips. ‘Look! See how scared she was!’ Mercifully, Ms Yehud was being marched, not to the gallows, but to liberty. She was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas-led pogrom of

Leah Pennisi-Glaser

In defence of ‘traditional’ exams

You might think that students will be celebrating the news that universities could be moving away from ‘traditional’ exams in favour of “inclusive assessments,” which include open-book tests and take-home papers. They shouldn’t.  I was one of the unfortunate Covid crop of undergraduates who didn’t sit a single exam during their time at university. Yes, I avoided the last-minute nerves about what was going to be in the exam paper – and I saved time not needing to cram during last-minute revision. But the truth is that avoiding exams devalued my degree, so much so that I didn’t bother going to my graduation ceremony. Avoiding exams devalued my degree, so

Tatyana Kekic

Is Serbia heading for its 1968 moment?

Serbia has been gripped by months of student protests in response to a tragic accident at Novi Sad railway station in November 2024, when the collapse of a concrete canopy roof claimed 15 lives. The protests have come to resemble a sort of May ’68 moment. Not in the sense that they are occurring in the same global context of cultural change, social liberation and anti-war activism. The demands of the protesters today are much narrower. But the students’ inventive tactics, grassroots organising, daily blockades and sit-ins at universities invite such comparisons. The president offered his condolences for the dog Donna, who was run over during a protest What began

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

How to solve a problem like the Chagos Islands

Very soon – as soon as the mutual courtesies now being exchanged between the new American President and his British counterpart are over – our government is likely to be at loggerheads with Donald Trump over our plan to cede the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), the Chagos archipelago, to Mauritius, then take out a long and expensive lease on the island of Diego Garcia so we can secure the operational status of our base there. This accommodates an American base of great importance to US defence. The agreement with the new Mauritian government has yet to be signed. It has been widely criticised here in the United Kingdom as

Tim Hayward

Can you still afford to eat out?

Many of us will remember, misty-eyed, how things changed around the turn of the century. How Britain ceased to be a nation brutalised by rationing and rissoles and instead blossomed into a utopia of celebrity chefs, endless food TV and a population seemingly willing and able to eat out most nights of the week. We no longer regarded ourselves as poor cousins to European nations with ‘cuisines’ – hell, Michelin stars glittered from every orifice. We had the uncalibrated zealotry of converts. In the years following the pandemic, UK hospitality came blinking back into the light, adopted a collective fixed grin and the can-do attitude of small businesspeople, and did

Arabella Byrne

Heaven is a Trad Dad

M y husband earns more than me. A lot more. I am, of course, extremely fortunate to be in such a position and am extremely grateful, especially when a large bill arrives on the doormat. So what, I hear you say. And you’re right – this is hardly a newsflash. According to the Office for National Statistics, the majority of couples in this country operate at a persistent gender pay gap in which the wife earns less than their husband. When we had our first child, the door to economic parity slammed shut behind me and has never opened since In our highly gendered arrangement, my husband – a ‘Trad

The Spectator

Letters: What we lose when we lose our factories

Chains of command Sir: Matthew Lynn is correct to emphasise the economic dangers of deindustrialisation (‘Not made in Britain’, 25 January). But there are cultural dangers too. It’s now 40 years since Correlli Barnett and I made a television programme called Assembled in Britain, drawing attention to the alarming retreat of manufacturing. No recent government has respected, still less encouraged, manufacturing industry. The result is today’s mess. What can you say about a civilisation that cannot produce the goods it needs, other than that civilisation loses integrity and pride? In 1944 Matthew King wrote a small classic called The Unwritten Laws of Engineering, pointing out that manufacturing civilisations were daily able

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

I’m being driven mad by Microsoft Outlook

Call me a cynic, but I suspect this week’s headlines about a revival of Heathrow’s third runway plan amount to little more than a political game. Arguments for and against this project have been aired many times over, from a white paper in 2003 to the Davies Commission’s final report (in favour) in 2015. Much to the detriment of London’s status as a global city, the runway has stayed in the long grass – due to marginal-seat politics under the flight path as much as genuine environmental concern – while no satisfactory alternative at Gatwick or Stansted has ever advanced and the advent of the Elizabeth line is Heathrow’s only

Harry Halem

Britain isn’t ready for space and AI warfare

How safe will this country be under Labour? The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) is supposed to provide the answers. It hasn’t been published yet, but may already be out of date. It’s expected to make the case for defence spending to rise from 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent – but that won’t be enough for Donald Trump, who has asked allies to devote 5 per cent of their national wealth to the military. And it’s not only what we spend but how we spend it that the government are struggling to get right. The upcoming SDR will be the fourth review in a decade. On past

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Is a soul the only thing unavailable in Harrods?

The Harrods bookshop, which I browse for masochistic reasons, is mesmerising: an homage to the lure of ownership. The first book I find is called, simply, 150 Houses. Is that enough? Then I find Luxury Trains, the Porsche Book, the Lamborghini Book and the Jaguar Book. Then I find a book designed for a lifelong self-guided tour of the world of James Bond, who is a fictional British civil servant. Then I find books called Dior, Balmain, Prada and Gucci. I didn’t know they did words. I want to tell you that the Harrods bookshop is entirely advertorial for the life I can’t afford, but that would be unfair. Because

The Spectator

How Heathrow went from six runways to two

Chocks away Rachel Reeves backed a third runway for Heathrow, reigniting a debate which has been going on for years. Yet Heathrow, when originally laid out in 1946, had six runways varying in length between 5,300 and 9,200ft: three pairs of parallel runways running east to west, north-west to south-east and north-east to south-west. As aircraft grew larger, there was less need for them to take off and land in alignment with the wind, but there was a need for longer runways. Heathrow gained its current layout in the 1970s when the east to west runways were extended to more than 12,000ft each, and three of the other four runways closed.

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Don’t believe the ‘Believe Her’ movement

I never expected to have strong feelings for a member of Germany’s Green party, but I really do feel extremely sorry for Stefan Gelbhaar, once (but not now or ever again) an MP for Berlin. Women should hang together, say some feminists. I couldn’t disagree with this more  Gelbhaar is a 48-year-old criminal defence lawyer who was, until very recently, running to be a candidate in the 23 February elections. He’s reasonably handsome if you like a Timothy Dalton chin dent. He has two young children and he’s a moderate, centrist Green, which is probably the root cause of his troubles. Late last year, quite out of the blue, Gelbhaar

Angus Colwell

Sex, Socrates and stiff upper lips: an interview with Agnes Callard

Agnes Callard is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and she lives with her current husband and her ex-husband. At the same time, yes. They raised the kids together as well (two from her first marriage, now 21 and 16, then one from her second, now 11). I mention this not as gossip, but because her approach to her marriage is an example of how she lives philosophically. Her latest book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, is an argument about how we shouldn’t take cultural norms and rote-learned advice for granted. Instead, we need to talk with others, regularly, about the reasons for our

Conrad Roeber

How Ipso surrendered to the trans lobby

Two months ago, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) upheld a complaint against The Spectator for referring to Juno Dawson, a transgender author, as ‘a man who claims to be a woman’. It may have struck some as unfathomable. I was less surprised. As I read the news, it took me back six years to when I was lead author of a report for Ipso, examining how the press treats trans-related issues. I have been a management consultant for more than 30 years so am used to being asked by institutions as varied as the BBC and the Football Association to help shape strategy. For Ipso’s project, it effectively asked

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Jew and non-Jew: Unity Mitford and aristocratic anti-Semitism

I was touched but not surprised that, despite his illness, the King attended the 80th anniversary of the ‘liberation’ of Auschwitz-Birkenau this week. His paternal grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was a rescuer. She hid the Cohen family in her house in Athens and is honoured as a ‘righteous’ gentile at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, where she is buried on the Mount of Olives. A less friendly aristocrat was Unity Mitford, whose views were probably a more accurate reflection of her class. Her newly published diary describes her friendship with Adolf Hitler. Here is a typical entry: ‘Lunch Osteria 2.30. THE FüHRER comes 3.15 after I have finished lunch. After

Peter Jones

How the ancient Greeks tackled treaties

Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire agreement. Though the ancients would have employed oaths, the practical ancient Greeks often ensured there was a flexibility about them: the real world might intervene. For example, treaties between city-states were agreed between opposing generals. Hostages were exchanged, oaths sworn and the terms of the treaty widely inscribed on stone and bronze pillars, but it was citizens who oversaw the treaty’s maintenance. In a Greek democracy, however, there was no saying how, under the influence of different leaders, policy might change and annul a treaty at a stroke. Then again, though treaties could be sworn to last forever, ‘circumstances’ were very unlikely to remain

Douglas Murray

The hard truth about Britain’s soft power

How hard is your soft power? According to David Lammy, Britain’s soft power is so strong and underrated that he has decided to set up a ‘soft power council’ to show just how hard we are. Put aside such details as waste and futility for a second. Surely there is something rather embarrassing about boasting about such things? It reminds me of the phrase ‘muscular liberalism’. A person may define the political concept of muscular liberalism. He may even be described by others as a ‘muscular liberal’. But no one should go around declaring themselves to be such a thing, without expecting to be greeted with a chorus of ‘I