Society

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why incels aren’t terrorists

Sometimes, a nutter is just a nutter, even when he’s a homicidal nutter. In the case of Jake Davison, the Plymouth killer who murdered five people, then himself, the indications are that he was a sad, bitter, angry man with a grudge against society in general and women in particular. He didn’t have a girlfriend, and, like every other sad case nowadays, from cannibals to neo-Nazis, he found company and a label online. At any other time, we’d be content to call him an evil creep, a sadistic coward or possibly a homicidal loon, and confine ourselves to the valid question of how his shotgun licence was renewed. There are

David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

My roots burnt with Greece

On 11 March this year my father passed away from prostate cancer after several weeks in a hospital in central Athens. As we sat around his bed, I remember thinking that I was watching 3,000 years of Greek history slowly perish before my eyes. My father was an only child, and I am British. His line of Greeks is at an end. Now fires have ravaged Greece and the olive trees that stood in my ancestral village for centuries have burnt to the ground. This year has seen the almost literal burning away of my roots: because if I am British, I am also a Greek — of sorts. This

Debbie Hayton

Scotland’s transgender guidance is a safeguarding nightmare

On Thursday, teachers planning residential trips were told that it may be just fine for teenagers of the opposite sex to share a room.  In 25 years of teaching, I have seen many daft ideas trickle down from government, but the Scottish government’s latest guidance, ‘Supporting Transgender Pupils In Schools’, takes the biscuit. Of course it promotes affirmation of transgender identities. This is Scotland, after all, where Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP seems to be in thrall to transgender ideology. The party previously enacted legislation that talked about people ‘becoming female’. But while that law took liberties with the rights of women, this latest guidance impacts the safeguarding of children. Astonishingly, the reference

George Chesterton

How I fell out of love with football

The new Premier League season has begun and I don’t know what to think. I tried to watch all of England’s Euro 2020 matches, but I never made it to the end of any of them. When the final against Italy kicked off, I retired to a quiet room feeling angst and confusion. Why was I so out of step with everyone else? Gareth Southgate’s players seem like lovely boys. And while they probably represent the better aspects of our evolving culture, it seems likely we may soon discover that they remain fallible. But if the response of the public to England’s triumphs and tragedy was one thing, the reaction

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: H1 2021

When the pandemic struck, we at The Spectator adopted the brace position. Like many publications, we furloughed staff and prepared for the worst. When subscription growth picked up, we became the first company in Britain to return the furlough money to the taxpayer and say we’d instead trade our way through the storm. Our last reported sales in 2019 were 83,000 (a record high) and we set a pretty big goal: to hit 100,000. I’m delighted to report that sales of The Spectator averaged 105,850 copies in the first half of this year, up 27 per cent on the first half of last year. Digital-only sales are popular but when new

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Why the government was right to drop vaccine passports

12 Sept 2021: Health Secretary Sajid Javid has announced that the government is shelving its plans to introduce mandatory domestic vaccine passports (details here). Below is Lionel Shriver’s column from August 2021, in which she argues vaccine passports were always a bad tool for tackling Covid-19. Despite having mocked app-happy Albion in my last column, I finally downloaded the NHS app. (Lest I seem a raging hypocrite, the institutional app is quite distinct from the Track-and-Trace Covid one, possession of which marks you as insane.) I found the app’s elaborate security features for registration bitterly comical. I had to photograph my passport, then record a video of myself speaking four prescribed numbers

The Spectator

Who cut more coal: Thatcher or Wilson?

Woolly thinking There were protests in Whitehall to save Geronimo, an alpaca due to be put down after testing positive for tuberculosis. How many alpacas are there in Britain? — The British Alpaca Society claims to have 1,500 members who between them own 45,000 alpacas. — The society’s annual show can attract as many as 600 animals for display. — The wool from the animal, a native of South America, was introduced to Britain in 1836 by Sir Titus Salt, the industrialist and founder of Saltaire, the model villagein West Yorkshire. Cool reception Some of the less-reported findings from the IPCC report on global warming: — ‘In recent decades the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why filling Father Christmas’s sack will cost more this year

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey looks increasingly uncomfortable as inflation notches upwards from ‘nothing to worry about’ towards the Bank’s latest prediction of a decade-high 4 per cent peak later this year and a possible ‘Oops, we’re back to the 1970s’ if spiralling wage and price pressures confound the forecasters. I wrote last week about the UK’s lack of lorry drivers, but that’s just one of many bottlenecks that need unblocking, as Bailey says, to bring ‘a wave of supply back on to the market’ and quell the blip. More significant globally, and much more difficult to resolve, is the logjam of shipping. The composite World Container Index published

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Liberté, égalité, vacciné: France’s Covid passport revolt is just beginning

Montpellier Three weeks ago, 100,000 demonstrators turned out on the streets of France to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s hastily passed law to require vaccination passports to get on a train, eat at a restaurant or visit a shopping centre. A week later, the number had more than doubled. Last Saturday, it doubled again. One police union estimated that close to 500,000 had turned out, although as usual the Interior Ministry claimed a much lower number. Enormous demonstrations were staged not just in Paris but in more than 150 cities and towns across France, as well as in the overseas territories of Guadeloupe and Réunion. All this in the middle of

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The National Trust has lost the language of architecture

Press officers, breathe easy. This is not another column attacking the National Trust. Actually, I tell a lie. It is. But my complaint isn’t bullying or slavery or LGBTQ+ery or even chocolate Easter eggery. It is more single and specific: the National Trust does not speak architecture. Or if it does, it’s keeping shtum. Since the great May reopening, I’ve dragged my husband around half a dozen National Trust properties, landscapes and gardens (he hardly ever protests, always pays for tea). We’ve done Stourhead, Oxburgh, Ickworth, Lacock, Cobham Woods and Disraeli’s Hughenden Manor. In the gap between lockdowns last year, we did Sissinghurst and Knole. I cannot fault the car

Taki

The Olympics have become a celebration of human frailty

Coronis Embracing one’s vulnerability seems to have replaced the higher, faster, stronger ethos of the Olympics. The very frailty that makes us human appears to have triumphed over the need to excel, or so the Games sponsors tell us. Not that I watched any of it. Not a single second, so help me you-know-who. I liked Sebastian Coe’s remark in last week’s Speccie about taking advice from Djokovic, who quit the mixed, thus leaving his partner in the lurch. I’ve always liked and admired Coe and always mistrusted the Serb, but then I’m a small-timer where sport is concerned. One thing I’ve never done is quit, however, and I did

Matthew Lynn

How the ‘Nixon shock’ reshaped our economy

The dotcom bubble. The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. The oil price spiral of the 1970s. The launch of the single currency. It would be fun, in a nerdish kind of a way, to debate which was the most seismic economic event of postwar history. But in fact the answer would be this: the ‘Nixon shock’, a fateful day when the final link between gold and the money you carry around in your pocket, or on your bank card, was finally severed. And it happened 50 years ago this week. A half-century on — enough time for some historical perspective — how’s it going? Well, since then we have

Dot Wordsworth

The dramatic evolution of ‘actor’

‘That chap in Line of Duty. That’s what I’d call a bad actor,’ said my husband with vague certainty. He was responding to a remark on the wireless about Iran being a bad actor. Language, as usual, is in a state of transition. Actor is now employed to mean some person, or moral entity, acting in a good or bad way. But if you ask anyone what an actor is, the answer would be a person taking part in a drama, on stage or the equivalent. This goes to show the difference between the main meaning of a word now and the meaning of words from which it originates. Actor

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why cocktails are superior to wine

I often argue that, in theory at least, well-made cocktails are indisputably better than wines costing 20 times more. My argument runs as follows. In making a cocktail, you can mix, in any combination you wish, any of the liquids known to humanity. In making a wine, you are stuck with using grape juice harvested by grumpy Frenchmen from scrubland east of the Gironde. Mathematically, the odds that the best drink you can generate derives only from a few bunches of such grapes is so small as to be infinitesimal. Besides, almost no one drinks grape juice, and nobody has ever seriously tried to sell non-alcoholic wine. If it really

Bruce Anderson

The wine that made me change my mind about Valpolicella

There was a marvellous general of yesteryear called George Burns. He had a good war and a splendid peace. He also held senior posts for longer than would be permitted in these diminished times. Colonel of the Coldstream for 32 years, he was Lord-Lieutenant of Hertfordshire for a quarter of a century. Many stories are told about him. Connoisseurs of equestrianism say that he was much the worst rider ever to appear at the Queen’s Birthday Parade, always looking like a magnificently attired and bemedalled sack of potatoes. He also had a set diet: a game bird at every meal. Once, he collapsed, was rushed to hospital and opened up.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I stop my husband repeating himself?

Q. A very old friend has rented a holiday house and invited my husband and me to stay. The property happens to belong to another friend so we have stayed there in the past and know it’s fairly stupendous with cook, garden, pool, sea and mountains etc. It now goes for a massive rent which, fortunately, our other friend, who has done very well in business, can more than afford to pay. She knows my husband and I no longer have the money we used to and she definitely does not want us to contribute. Our problem is that among the other guests will be a couple who, while not

Toby Young Toby Young

I took my wife to a Millwall match – and it didn’t go well

The fighting started just as Caroline turned right on to the Uxbridge Road after emerging from QPR’s stadium on Loftus Road. About 25 football fans began punching and kicking each other in the middle of the road, forcing the pedestrians on the crowded pavement to surge backwards to avoid being caught up in the mêlée. Caroline suddenly found herself pinned against a shop window along with two of our sons, barely able to move. I was still on Loftus Road with our third son, struggling to re-attach the wheel of his bicycle, which he’d left locked up outside the stadium. I glanced up when I heard the commotion and saw

Peter Jones

The timeless appeal of Latin

The government’s promise to fund a pilot scheme promoting the teaching of Latin in secondary schools is music to the ears of the charity Classics for All, which has introduced classical subjects into more than 1,000 state schools. Latin has been taken up with especial enthusiasm in primary schools, where word derivations have proved very popular. The ancients loved them too. The Roman Varro (116-27 bc) wrote a 25-volume de lingua Latina (‘On the Latin Language’). Six survive, three discussing etymology, all full of interest because Varro, ignorant of scientific etymology (it developed only from the 17th century onwards), produced total nonsense. For example, he thought canis ‘dog’ was related

Mark Solomons

Will Sizewell C see off the avocet?

There are many reasons why birds disappear — and why they return. The avocet, however, is probably the only one that owes its resurgence to the Nazis. After a 100-year hiatus in Britain, this elegant black and white wader reappeared after the second world war. Four pairs were found in Minsmere nature reserve and another four in Havergate Island, both along the Suffolk coast. These areas had been flooded to prevent a German invasion, making them ideal nesting grounds. The avocet had taken flight from parts of Holland damaged by the Nazis, travelling 100 miles or so here across the North Sea. Amid headlines about the Cold War and the

The Spectator

Letters: Why aren’t Italians fighting for their liberty?

Wage concern Sir: Martin Vander Weyer’s call for higher wages to end the shortage of British HGV drivers (‘Your country needs you at the wheel of a lorry’, 7 August) should be extended to other hard-pressed economic areas which have lost cheap labour from the poorer EU countries. For far too long, farming, hospitality, construction, care homes and other vital services have failed to recruit and train local staff or pay a decent wage. Low wages at the bottom of the economy increase the cost of social welfare benefits, bring in less or no money from income tax and VAT and thus adversely affect the whole economy. David Thompson Capel