Society

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Terrorism remains a major threat to Britain

After the assassination of Jo Cox by a white supremacist, there was an angry insistence from progressives and the mainstream (the two were not yet the same) that the threat of the far-right be confronted. Questioning the role played by mental illness or even terming the assassin a ‘loner’ was framed as an attempt to shift the focus away from the killer’s motive. There was a mini moral panic over whether the culprit was being labelled a terrorist or not. The Independent ran a grievance-dripping op-ed under the headline: ‘Why are we so reluctant to label white attackers as terrorists?’ The author objected to ‘humanising perpetrators of violence and terror

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

We need to talk about the killing of David Amess

In the world I inhabit, the killing of Sir David Amess has been formally declared a terrorist incident, a suspect has been taken into custody, and the police have identified ‘a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism’. In a second world, constructed of headlines and commentary and tweets, a conversation is taking place that is almost entirely disconnected from this base reality. In this world, the Home Secretary is primarily concerned about the ‘corrosive space’ provided by social media, the Commons asks questions about the ‘toxic’ conduct of politics, and attention is given to the level of aggression and abuse experienced by MPs. These are important issues. It is not

Monday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Free speech didn’t kill David Amess

Every decent person was horrified by the senseless slaying of David Amess. And everyone will want to know what can be done to prevent similar atrocities from occurring in the future. But I fear that in the haze of anger and concern that has descended on the country following Amess’s death, we are coming to some questionable conclusions about the causes of such violence, and coming up with some iffy ideas for how to ensure that such a horrific attack on a public servant never happens again. Right now, the finger of blame is primarily pointed at the shouty, divisive nature of political discourse in the 21st century. The horror

Patrick Kidd

David Amess’s long campaign to make Southend a city

The last two contributions that Sir David Amess made in the Commons were to call for a debate on animal welfare and to express disappointment that he had not been asked in the reshuffle to become minister for granting city status to Southend. They were two subjects close to his heart, which he seldom missed an opportunity to raise. ‘I do not think that my honourable friend has asked me a single question in the House that has not mentioned Southend becoming a city,’ remarked Theresa May on the seventh occasion, out of eight in all, when Sir David bounced to his feet in PMQs, gave his usual hopeful smile

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The death of David Amess and the narcissism of the discourse

The speed with which tragedy turns into farce these days is quite something. Within minutes of Sir David Amess’s death being announced, social media was filled with sizzling hot takes. The back-and-forth centred on whether the decline in ‘civility’ and the use of dehumanising language in politics was to blame for the murder of an MP. It recalled nothing so much as the recriminations after Jo Cox’s death, except that the teams here had, as it were, swapped shirts at half-time. Back then, the left more or less directly attributed Jo Cox’s murder to the language used by the partisans of Brexit: ‘traitors’, ‘saboteurs’ and so on. Back then, the

Sunday

David Abulafia

Rhodes, Columbus and the next heritage battle

On 12 October this year, Columbus Day, a statue of the Italian in Belgrave Square was vandalised by activists from Extinction Rebellion who described Columbus as ‘father of the slave trade’. Entirely ignorant of his life and ambitions, Columbus’s critics frequently turn to the searing denunciations of Bartolomé de Las Casas who excoriated the Spanish policy towards the native peoples of America. They are unaware that Las Casas was a great admirer of Columbus, and that this friar, who felt such pity for the native Americans, actively recommended the mass importation of black African slaves as an alternative labour source. In the same week as the Extinction Rebellion stunt a

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

David Amess and the sanctity of the Last Rites

Amongst the many appalling details from the murder of Sir David Amess, one detail jumped out at me in yesterday’s reports. Father Jeffrey Woolnough, a Roman Catholic priest, arrived at the police cordon stretching across Eastwood Road North offering to administer the Last Rites to the MP, whom he knew to be a practising Catholic. But he was not allowed through.  “I was refused entry,” he said later. And he added that, as a consequence, he was unable to issue the sacrament.  “I’m so very sorry that I was not allowed to minister to Sir David at the end. The police had their instructions which I have to respect and abide by.” But why on

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

We must do more to protect our MPs

Sir David Amess’s backstory tells you much about his commitment to constituency politics that led to his cruel murder yesterday. He was born and grew up in a terraced house in London’s East End. There was little money. His dad was an electrician, his mother a tea lady and seamstress. In short they were not born into privilege and were exactly the kind of people who might visit an MP’s constituency surgery on a Friday in the hope of having their small catastrophes fixed. Democracy might be crowned with abstractions but it is built on the weekly efforts of our 650 MPs – who hear these struggles face to face

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Is the Pope a Protestant?

When Pope Francis was asked last month how he was doing after surgery on his colon in July, he replied: ‘Still alive, even though some people wanted me to die. I know there were even meetings between prelates who thought the Pope’s condition was more serious than the official version. They were preparing for the conclave. Patience!’ It was such a ferocious outburst that few people realised that Francis was talking about two separate things. He’s 84, which is old even for a pope. The medical reports said that he didn’t have cancer, but he did stay in hospital longer than expected and Italian doctors don’t have a great track

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Do we really need to panic about flooding in Britain?

Why does every government department and agency seem to feel it hasn’t done its job unless it has expressed some hysterical reaction to the threat of climate change? Launching the Environment Agency’s latest report on its plans to prepare for possible changes in England’s climate over the next century, its chair Emma Howard Boyd said: ‘Some 200 people died in this summer’s flooding in Germany. That will happen in this country sooner or later, however high we build our flood defences, unless we also make the places where we live, work and travel resilient to the effects of the more violent weather the climate emergency is bringing. It is adapt

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The BBC’s relationship with Stonewall is finally being scrutinised

I have often criticised BBC journalism on the issues of sex and gender because that journalism has often been quite bad. So it’s all the more important to for me to highlight instances when the Corporation does good journalism here. Stephen Nolan of the BBC has done that this week, and more. You might not be aware of the series of outstanding podcasts that Nolan released this week, examining the influence that Stonewall, a charity that lobbies on sex and gender issues, has over public bodies including the BBC itself. One reason you might have missed those podcasts is that the BBC itself has hardly bothered to promote them, even

Friday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

In praise of the working-class revolt against Insulate Britain

Every time Insulate Britain takes to the streets, I feel a warm glow. I find myself feeling moved by the direct action that takes place. I’m not talking about the eco-muppets themselves, of course, and their tantrum-like gluing of themselves to motorways and busy London roads. I’m talking about the working classes who have started to rise up against these am-dram middle-class apocalypse-mongers. That’s the direct action we should be cheering. This is the revolt that should warm the cockles of progressive people everywhere, or just anyone who believes in reason. The ticked-off HGV drivers, the deliverymen, the blokes trying to get to their building sites, the angry mums taking

Thursday

Posie Parker Posie Parker

John Lewis and the dreadful little emperors

John Lewis has accidentally created a perfect depiction of everything wrong with our precious Little Emperors in Britain 2021. Their latest advertisement — now pulled by the company after a complaint from the Financial Conduct Authority — is a minute-long home insurance promotion that is dripping in entitlement and wokeness, starring a kid who has never heard the word no. We start in the ransacked bedroom, with lids missing from nail polish bottles and red stiletto shoes amongst the many items thrown all over the floor. A little child pops up, scattering the innards of the cushion he must have dismembered. He is of course a boy in make-up and a

Debbie Hayton

Cambridge’s transgender Terf wars have gone too far

What is a witch? How do we spot witches? And how might we drum up the courage to talk to a witch? Cambridge Students’ Union Women’s Campaign has the answers. Their new pamphlet, How to Spot TERF Ideology, doesn’t call these people witches, of course. It calls them TERFs – but the sentiment is much the same. Women with minds of their own, experience of life, and the audacity to speak up for their rights are being subjected to appalling campaigns of intimidation and abuse. The TERF (which stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist) hunts are real and they are happening now. The baying mobs might not be demanding heads, but

St.John Burkett

What makes a conker champion?

Last weekend, for the 54th time, hundreds of competitors met to compete for the title of world conker champion in the village of Southwick in Northamptonshire. King Conker was there to oversee the proceedings. Jasmine Tetley beat the men’s champion Ady Hurrell in the Grand Final to retain the title she won in 2019. There are several different versions of the game of conkers, but essentially it involves ‘smashing’ your opponent’s nut before they break yours. At the world championships, competitors have to draw a conker blind from a bag for each match, and then have three swings at their adversary’s conker, before receiving three. This repeats for up to

Madeleine Kearns

Baby doomers: why are couples putting the planet ahead of parenthood?

For much of the last century, people had good reason to wonder whether it made sense to have babies. Millions of young men had died or been maimed in the trenches, and then along came the risk of being pulverised by an atom bomb. Nonetheless, men and women continued to have children and after both world wars there was a baby boom. As C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948: ‘It is perfectly ridiculous, to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances.’ Somehow, we have lost this perspective. Back then,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why we should all start hoarding cash and loo rolls

If there’s anyone in Britain who knows how to keep grocery shelves stacked, it’s former Tesco chief executive Sir Dave Lewis, who has been named as Downing Street’s ‘supply chain tsar’. Application of Tesco’s mastery of logistics and fierce discipline on suppliers should keep delivery trucks moving, so long as they have drivers. But even Lewis won’t be able to avert the pre-Christmas surge of panic-buying which I’m told Cabinet Office planners fear — especially if it’s combined with a major outage in the banking system. Last week’s Facebook crash was a warning that blank screens are only a couple of burned-out circuits or a cyberhacker’s half-hour away. And if

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The characteristic I most admire in politicians? Petulance

Many negative qualities are ascribed to politicians — name-calling, absenteeism, drunkenness — but you rarely hear of my favourite political emotion: petulance, which has caused us so much public entertainment in the political arena and promises to cause so much more. Think of Dominic Raab refusing to accept his demotion until he was made Deputy Prime Minister; the spat between Liz Truss and Dominic Raab over who gets to stay at Chevening; Angela Rayner’s scathing letter on Commons notepaper to a Brighton shoe shop after it failed to put a pair of £195 heels aside for her; the spectacular Starmer meltdown in February when Sir Keir went ‘puce’ and kept

Dot Wordsworth

The ground rules, from coffee to marriage

There’s a rude gesture in Pickwick that I don’t quite understand. Mr Jackson, a young lawyer’s clerk in conversation with Mr Pickwick, ‘applying his left thumb to the tip of his nose, worked a visionary coffee-mill with his right hand, thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime (then much in vogue, but now, unhappily, almost obsolete) which was familiarly denominated “taking a grinder”’. When I asked my husband he said, ‘Something sexual’, which I think unlikely. I’d contemplated grinding while trying to find out whether coffee grounds are so called because they are ground-up coffee or because they are like earthy ground fallen to the bottom of the cup.

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The joy of a cluttered museum

On a clear day, from the balcony of Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery in Carlisle, you can see the McVitie’s factory. If the wind were in the right direction, I like to think you’d smell digestives on the breeze. Originally, it was the factory of Carr’s, bakers of table water biscuits since 1831. Carr’s held the Royal Warrant from 1841 until 2012, when it lost the crown due to ‘changing tastes’ in the royal household. I blame Duchy Originals Oaten Biscuits. Inside the museum is a display of Carr’s covetable vintage biscuit tins and, on a satin hanger, the brown velvet waistcoat worn by Jonathan Dodgson Carr himself. The