Society

Monday

Debbie Hayton

The Scottish Greens are in cloud cuckoo land on trans rights

A minister in the Scottish government has likened people who share my opinions to racists or anti-Semites. Apparently my views on how best to support and include transgender people in society place me on the same footing as those who condemn and exclude others based on their race. This latest outrage comes from Lorna Slater, the co-leader of the Scottish Greens – Nicola Sturgeon’s junior partners in government. While complaining that the BBC should not give ‘anti-trans’ people a platform, Slater has claimed that: ‘We wouldn’t put balance on the question of racism or anti-Semitism, but we allow this fictional notion of balance when it comes to anti-trans [views]. The

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Spectator’s 2022 internship scheme is now open: no CVs, please

2023 scheme is now live, click here The Spectator’s internship scheme for 2022 is now open. We don’t ask for your CV and anonymise all entries – making our scheme the most genuinely open (and competitive) in national journalism. In our game, all that matters is talent – and we put a lot of work into finding that talent. Our internship scheme pays (but not very much) and we even provide help with accommodation for those who need it. Our scheme is famously tough, so those who get a place often get job offers elsewhere. The Spectator will only ever be as good as the people we hire – and

Thursday

Frank Young

Anxiety is killing parenthood

Britain is on a slow descent to oblivion. Scotland is even closer to the abyss, with a birth rate of just 1.29, well below the UK’s sub-replacement level of 1.65. It turns out the answer to the West Lothian question is that West Lothian will disappear. Doomsday demography should matter, but Whitehall is in no way prepared to deal with it. New research published this week found that mental illness in early adulthood could account for up to 60 per cent of future childlessness. A generation too worried to have children spells disaster for countries that need to support ageing societies. Researchers looking at the populations of Sweden and Finland

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Ed Sheeran is right about British courts

As they say in the music business, where there’s a hit, there’s a writ. It is something that no one knows better than Ed Sheeran, who yesterday won a legal battle over claims that his song Shape of You plagiarised an earlier song, Oh Why by Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue. The judge ruled that Sheeran had neither copied the song deliberately nor subconsciously. After his victory, Sheeran said: Claims like this are way too common now and have become a culture where a claim is made with the idea that a settlement will be cheaper than taking it to court, even if there is no basis for the claim,

The Spectator

What happened to Tory radicalism?

Whatever advantages money may have brought Rishi Sunak as he rose to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, his wealth has now become a serious hindrance to his career. Whatever decisions he takes, everything is seen through the prism of his personal financial situation. If he rejects demands for greater public spending, he will be accused of throwing the poor to the lions. If he raises taxes, he will be accused of failing to understand how ordinary people are struggling. If he cuts them, he will be accused of pandering to his rich friends. Even acts of private generosity by Sunak seem to arouse suspicion when made public. This week it

Susan Hill Susan Hill

My love affair with the Wolseley

I was sitting alone at a small table in the Wolseley, Piccadilly, waiting for my supper and feeling a sense of absolute contentment. The evening buzz in that theatre-set of a restaurant has always been slightly more subdued than the lunchtime one. The lighting is lower; there are candles, there is calm. On my right, a duke dined with his family; on the left, two celebrated actors next to a young rising star. There were elderly couples from New York who believed in dressing for dinner in glitter and diamonds; there were discreet lovers, old friends. The waiter was perfectly attentive – not too little, nor, importantly, too much. Wolseley

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The cult of the extortionate ‘English’ kitchen

A house around the corner is on its fourth kitchen in a decade. Every two or three years, the house changes hands, the pristine kitchen comes out and a newer, pristiner kitchen goes in. They are always white, they are always shiny, and when I peer through the basement windows there is nothing in the way of signs of life. I reckon I can predict the next kitchen. Think homespun, think rustic, think scullery maid in mobcap and pinny. What the rich want now is a plain old Plain English kitchen. Hand-crafted cabinets, antiqued brass, Delft tiles with authentic craquelure. Starting at £34,000 and going up to… well, how much

Michael Bryant

The law of war: conflict has always had its limits

The waging of war has never been a pure free-for-all. Every culture has had a sense of limits: when war could be legitimately declared and how it would be legitimately waged. For ancient civilisations, war was a means of preserving the cosmic order. The ancient Egyptians believed their wars had to be sanctioned by the gods. Under the Zhou dynasty, Chinese armies would wage war only after oracles were consulted. Similar patterns are observable from the ancient Hindus to the North American Indian tribes. The Second Lateran Council in 1139 banned the crossbow and ballista, the weapons of mass destruction of their day, because these armour-piercing instruments were considered too

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Can I convert you to my opinion?

I see that on the issue of gay conversion therapy, the Prime Minister has been floating around all over the place, like a giant albino blimp which has suddenly come adrift from its moorings. I believe Boris is now of a mind to ban conversion therapy for gay people but not for trans-gendered people, having already flip-flopped twice. This decision seems to have enraged many more people than it placated and lots of LGBTQI etc groups are shrieking with despair. Could I suggest, then, that the Prime Minister flip-flops again? Rather than banning gay conversion therapy, the government should examine the benefits of making it compulsory. I realise that for

Toby Young Toby Young

The most disadvantaged group in Britain? White working-class men

I’m not sure what to think about the BBC’s announcement that it wants a quarter of its staff to be from working-class backgrounds by 2027. On the one hand, I’m against hiring quotas of any kind and think every position should be filled by the person best qualified for the job. But on the other, if the BBC is going to have diversity targets – and fighting against them seems futile at this point – then this one seems better than most. The rationale for this quota, according to the BBC, is it wants its staff to ‘better reflect UK society’, but I’m not sure it will achieve that. The

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Male friendship is in crisis

Most of my women friends work hard to keep ancient friendships alive; the seasonal lunches, shopping trips and afternoon teas are observed as scrupulously as the feasts of the liturgical calendar. ‘Friends make all the difference in life,’ my mother used to say. In her late eighties, she would defy the wobbles of Parkinson’s and haul herself on to a bus for the all-important ‘Tea with Daisy’, inscribed with a shaky hand in her diary. My sister was the same. In September last year she marched her girlfriends off to Whitby for a week of what I assume was slightly manufactured jollity (she was dying of cancer), but you’d never

Peter Jones

The Russians aren’t the first to rewrite history

Historians in Russia have a long and craven record, now going back centuries, of being economical with the truth about their current regime. The Roman historian Tacitus had a fascinating explanation for why such economy was also the case under the early Roman emperors. First, some background. Livy’s 142-book moral and romantic history of Rome stretched from earliest times to 9 bc, including the end of the republic in 27 bc when Augustus became emperor. Livy saw libertas as a key component of Roman success, and put it down to the way in which, after the expulsion of the kings of Rome (508 bc), a republican system developed in which

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Covid fines, cancelled flights and sunflower oil shortages

Home Jonathan Reynolds, Labour’s business spokesman, said that the government should be preparing for energy rationing, but Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary ruled it out. Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, asked the British Geological Survey to reassess the effects of fracking, Essex police arrested 192 people from Just Stop Oil in a weekend of protest at oil refineries. By the end of March, 4,700 visas had been issued from 32,200 applications to sponsor accommodation for Ukrainian refugees; under the family visa scheme, 24,400 had been issued from 32,800 applications. Britain’s biggest bottler of sunflower oil had stocks for only three weeks left and said that food manufacturers were turning to

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Will the NHS ever give up the national insurance levy?

This week’s rise in National Insurance has caused the government enough trouble, but it faces potentially an even bigger problem next year – when it tries to prise the extra £12 billion raised in NI away from the NHS and use it to fund social care instead. The extra revenue from NI has been earmarked for the next 12 months for the NHS, to help it catch up with a backlog in routine treatments following the Covid-19 pandemic. But from April 2023 the intention is to rebrand the NI rise as the ‘Health and Social Care Levy’ – and to spend it instead on funding social care. Just how does

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

£120 steak that looks like a M&S meal deal: The Maine reviewed

Last week Chris Corbin and Jeremy King lost control of the restaurant group they founded: Corbin & King, which made the Wolseley, the Delaunay and Brasserie Zédel under Piccadilly Circus where, if they were lucky, tourists would tumble as if into a fairy pool. Corbin and King understand that a superb restaurant looks after its staff, and its staff look after its customers. It’s called love, and it matters, but that is gone now. Central London is ever more flinty, unimaginative and grasping: a playground for people who do not deserve it. Russians stripped their state and spent the proceeds in London. I saw them do it. Each luckless duck

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why Channel 4 shouldn’t be privatised

Enough of stagflation forecasts, each more frightening than the last. Enough – for now – of energy policy sermons, as the government at last proclaims a serious nuclear plan. Instead, let’s have a week of real business stories, starting with tales of the old and new City. First, a rum do at the London Metal Exchange. The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority are investigating the exchange’s handling, last month, of a ‘short squeeze’ on nickel, provoked by fear of disrupted supplies from Russia. The metal’s price rocketed 250 per cent in two days to trade briefly above $100,000 a ton, reportedly leaving a Chinese tycoon called Xiang ‘Big

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Our children are at breaking point – and it’s our fault

I think it’s time we stopped scaring the children. I think they’ve had enough. They’re at breaking point now, every generation more anxious than the last – and anxious younger, too. There’s a record number of British children diagnosed with anxiety, and a record wait – two years – for therapy, though I’m not at all sure the therapy as it is helps much. The usual idea is that if the kids are troubled, it’s the world that’s to blame: smartphones, Instagram, the constant comparing; Trump, Putin, the existence of Tories; Covid, global warming. No wonder they have the heebie-jeebies. But I think in fact that we’re doing it to

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Spies shouldn’t be political

Now that events in Ukraine are restoring a sense of proportion about the difference between aggressive autocracies and free countries, it seems almost incredible that, only last year, sporting teams etc were all but compelled to ‘take the knee’ in deference to Black Lives Matter. One official prominent in this obeisance (metaphorical not literal in his case) was Sir Stephen Lovegrove. As Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, he emailed staff in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, using the BLM hashtag, and castigating the racism of his own department. When challenged about creating this official link with a hard-left organisation with borderline racist views against

Francis Pike

Can Imran Khan cling on to power in Pakistan?

In the brief interlude of Chechen independence between the Russia-Chechen Wars of the 1990s, I travelled with Imran Khan from Grozny to Baku, where we were due to meet Azerbaijan’s finance minister. We had different reasons for our visit. I was interested in the business potential of the countries of the Caucasus, while Khan, a former cricketer turned fledging politician who had recently formed the Pakistan Movement for Justice party (PTI), was keen to support the then independent Sufi Islamic state of Chechnya. To get to Baku we had to catch a plane from the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan. Our Chechen hosts told us that we did not need