Society

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Most-read 2021: The Covid vaccines may affect periods. Are we allowed to talk about this?

We’re closing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles in 2021. Here’s number nine: Lara Prendergast writing in August about the possible link between the vaccines and periods. It’s fashionable to talk about periods. Books on the subject, with glossy red and pink covers, are bestsellers. They have sassy titles like Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement and Period:Twelve Voices Tell the Bloody Truth. The Periodical is a podcast for ‘everyone who bleeds, and their friends’. And this being our ultra-capitalist world, you can obviously buy a T-shirt, notebook or phone cover with a period-related slogan slapped across it. ‘Anything you can do, I can do bleeding’ is

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson and Kate Andrews

Sage memo makes the case for lockdown

On Monday, Covid restrictions were rejected after the cabinet debated the issue robustly for the first time since the pandemic started. The Prime Minister said he’d revisit the decision, so the debate is very much still ongoing. But it wasn’t just ministers meeting that day. Sage assembled its experts as well, with over 70 scientists and government officials in attendance. The minutes, seen by The Spectator, give an interesting summary of the official case for more lockdown restrictions. Everyone is wrestling with two questions; if there are no more restrictions, how far will Omicron case numbers rise? And how will that translate into hospitalisations? If there is reason to believe

Patrick West

It’s too late to save comedy from ‘cancel culture’

Will comedy become the latest victim of ‘cancel culture’? Dame Maureen Lipman fears as much.  ‘Cancel culture, this cancelling, this punishment, it’s everywhere,’ she told the BBC yesterday. She says that the world of comedy is in danger of being ‘wiped out’ because comedians are scared that audiences will take offence, and that they self-censor their material as a precaution. ‘It’s in the balance, whether we’re ever going to be funny again,’ she said. It would be an ironic tragedy if this were true, because in no other field of entertainment as comedy has ‘cancel culture’ been at its most insidious, relentless and blatant. Lipman’s warning is therefore unfounded, superficially

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Improving the status quo – can severe asthma be better treated?

28 min listen

Everyone knows somebody who has asthma. 5.4 million people in the UK are currently receiving treatment and 200,000 of them have severe asthma. A form of the condition that doesn’t typically respond well to medication. For many, asthma is a severe and debilitating condition but there exists a disconnect between its severity and the organisation of resources to treat it. When it comes to treating an illness, remission is rarely black and white, but for asthma it’s commonly steroids. What if anything is the alternative? Steroids have become the frenemy of both patients and the healthcare system. On the one hand, they’re cheap to administer and largely effective. But on

Julie Bindel

Most-read 2021: The Green party’s woman problem

We’re closing 2021 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 10: Julie Bindel’s piece from March on the Green party’s muddle over trans rights: At the Green party spring conference this weekend, a motion which sought to introduce a party policy on women’s sex-based rights was defeated. A whopping 289 delegates (out of 521) voted to not include biological females in the party’s list of oppressed groups. All the motion aimed to do was simply add a paragraph to the Green party’s ‘Our Rights and Responsibilities Policy’. The motion reads: This is to include the protected characteristic of sex as currently our Record of Policy statements supports

Rizwan Virk

Are we living in the Matrix?

With the release of the fourth Matrix film this Christmas, the idea behind the original movie is once again being talked about. The notion that the ‘real world’ is a computer-generated simulation was considered pure science fiction when the original film was released in 1999, but philosophers have long argued that there are good arguments to suggest we could very well be. The argument is known as ‘The Simulation Hypothesis’, and — as crazy and counterintuitive as it sounds — it’s discussed quite seriously by academics, physicists and philosophers. Elon Musk, for one, made headlines a few years ago when he said that the chances that we are in ‘base

Tuesday

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

It’s time to end the era of forced lockdown restrictions

Monday’s Cabinet meeting held over Zoom was a fraught affair by the sounds of it. Michael Gove and Sajid Javid were reportedly the leading voices calling for more restrictions on household mixing and on the hospitality sector, while the likes of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss argued that the data did not warrant such a draconian and retrograde step. The Prime Minister seems to have been swaying somewhere in the middle. In the end it was agreed that no new restrictions would be imposed that day but the data would be constantly analysed with a view to imposing restrictions swiftly and before Christmas if alarming trends were picked up on

Monday

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

There’s nothing quite like Christmas on the Isle of Man

If two years away had left me in need of a reminder that home can be a peculiar place, waking this morning to the sound of air raid sirens would have done the job. Other places left with such equipment would probably not decide that they could fulfil the dual purposes of summoning volunteer firefighters for their shifts, and signalling the imminent end of days, if only because only one of the two is worth getting out of bed for. But then again, the point of the Isle of Man is that it is not quite like anywhere else. Blocking traffic to and from the airport to make way for

Andrew Tettenborn

Harry Miller’s ‘transphobic tweets’ victory is a win for free speech

Court decisions don’t often call for three cheers, but today’s Court of Appeal determination in the Harry Miller case is an exception. Essentially the judges have told the police to rewrite the rules on recording what they see as hate incidents.  However technical this looks, this is actually an enormous blow in favour of the freedom of ordinary people to say what they want. It is also an admirable Christmas present for anyone seriously concerned with protecting free speech, not to mention a high-profile triumph for the Free Speech Union, who stood squarely behind the appeal. Fighting cases like this needs moral and financial support: and in tandem with Fair

Debbie Hayton

Why is Quidditch snitching on JK Rowling over trans rights?

To those of us who know Quidditch from the fantasy world of the Harry Potter books, the idea of grown-ups running around a field with a broomstick clasped between their legs is a bit ridiculous. But make no mistake: this is serious stuff. The sport has its own governing body, the International Quidditch Association, that manages its rule book. And there’s also a World Cup, currently held by the United States, which has won the tournament three times. But now, there’s trouble brewing in the world of Quidditch. As the sport has grown, a problem has emerged. The name Quidditch is trademarked by Warner Brothers. In a recent statement, US Quidditch explained that this

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Is Piers Corbyn really dangerous?

I thought the police statement — bureaucratic, anonymised, bone-dry – got the tone just right. In confirming the arrest of Piers Corbyn on suspicion of encouragement to commit arson, a spokesman confirmed only that ‘a man in his 70s’ had been arrested in Southwark, south London on Sunday morning. This, for those who missed it, is understood to relate to Mr Corbyn’s fire-breathing (literally: he took his nylon-clad life in his hands with a stunt involving lighter-fluid) speech to an anti-vax rally in the capital. He told his audience, presumably once he’d had a Murray Mint to get the taste of the lighter fluid out of his mouth, that we

Sunday

Professor Gordon Wishart

Another lockdown will only fuel the cancer crisis

One of the biggest mistakes made in previous lockdowns was to neglect non-Covid healthcare, cancer especially. As we prepare for an Omicron wave, might we be about to make the same mistake? Chris Whitty was asked this in a parliamentary inquiry recently and he was surprisingly dismissive. ‘This is sometimes said by people who have no understanding of health at all. But it’s not said by anyone serious, if I’m, honest,’ he said. Contrary to what Professor Whitty suggests, several serious people are very worried about what might happen to cancer if there is too narrow a focus on Covid. Take Clive Dix, ex-head of the vaccine taskforce, he recently

Charlie Walsham

How the BBC lost its way on Covid

I have been a BBC journalist for many years, and in that time I have been committed to impartiality and the corporation’s Reithian values to inform and educate. My despair about the BBC’s one-sided coverage of the pandemic though has been steadily growing for some time. And in early December, as I listened to a BBC radio broadcast, I felt the corporation reach a new low. During a morning phone-in show on 5Live the topic of discussion was Covid jabs and whether they should be mandated, or if punitive action should be taken against those who refuse them, such as imposing lockdowns on the unvaccinated. Setting aside the fact that

Simon Clarke

Don’t underestimate the Omicron variant

As the Omicron variant makes its way through the population of the UK, the Chief Medical Officer’s warning that we don’t know all that much about the variant, but ‘all the things we do know are bad’ was not what anyone wanted to hear this week. Unfortunately, Chris Whitty is right. The Omicron variant’s assault on the UK has been like a blitzkrieg so far, and it has left a trail of shock and confusion in its wake. It is no wonder that Sage have advised this week that more restrictions may now be needed to prevent a rapid rise in hospitalisations. There is still a lot we don’t know

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

My Twitter conversation with the chairman of the Sage Covid modelling committee

The latest Sage papers have been published, envisaging anything from 200 to 6,000 deaths a day from Omicron depending on how many more restrictions we’ll get — up to and very much including another lockdown. Earlier today I had an unexpected chance to ask questions of Graham Medley, the chair of the Sage modelling committee.  He’s a professor at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) which last weekend published a study on Omicron with very gloomy scenarios and making the case for more restrictions. But JP Morgan had a close look at this study and spotted something big: all the way through, LSHTM assumes that the Omicron variant is just as deadly as Delta. ‘But

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Is Omicron really no less severe? A look at South Africa’s data

It’s an open secret that ministers are nervous about advice from Sage, given its track record in exaggerating the risk posed by Covid. But where else to look? One answer is to the financial markets, who have only one question: is Omicron going to be genuinely more severe? If so then it’s time to sell. If not, it’s time to buy. The problem is that market research is seldom made public and that gloomy news gets the most clicks – which, of course, creates a media bias. The FT, for example, has access to all of these market reports on Omicron (including JP Morgan’s sense-check of Sage) but it will

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Lara Prendergast, Christopher Howse, Lionel Shriver, Peter Hitchens, Joanna Lumley and Caroline Moore

55 min listen

On this week’s very special Christmas episode, we’ll hear from Lara Prendergast on why she’s planning to party hard this Christmas. (00:57) Next, Christopher Howse on those helping to preserve the UK’s medieval churches. (06:31) Then it’s, Lionel Shriver on the Covid heretics she admires most. (16:41) Followed by, Peter Hitchens on Christmas in Russia during the last days of the Soviet Union. (25:23) Penultimately, we have Joanna Lumley on getting the key to the Sistine Chapel. (35:69) And finally, Caroline Moore on how ghost stories became a British Christmas tradition.(41:51) Produced and presented by Sam Holmes Subscribe to The Spectator magazine this Christmas and get the next 12 issues –

Adam Hyman

Pubs and restaurants are being decimated by Covid uncertainty

The run up to Christmas is normally a merry time for the hospitality industry. Our nation’s restaurants, pubs and bars are usually bursting at the seams. Most people are out celebrating with their family, friends and colleagues – with crackers being pulled, pigs in blankets served and a glass or two of mulled wine drunk under the mistletoe. Yet, the exact opposite is happening right now for the hospitality industry in the UK. Instead it’s the nightmare before Christmas. Ever since people in Britain have been told to work from home by the government and told to cut back on socialising by chief medical officer Chris Whitty, pubs and restaurants have

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why do social workers keep failing children like Arthur Labinjo-Hughes?

Why does the number of children dead from abuse — like poor Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson — stay roughly the same year in, year out? More children are taken into care every year in this country. So why doesn’t this reduce the number of desperate, abused children who are dying at the hands of the people who should be caring for them? The cases of both Arthur and Star reveal a disturbingly casual approach My suspicion is that it’s become normal for over-worked, badly-managed social workers simply to focus on the easier cases, and leave the violent addicts and the psychopathic step-parents alone. And if this is true, what

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Billie Eilish is right about our porn-sick society

You could have knocked me down with a snowflake when Billie Eilish slammed pornography on the Howard Stern Show this week. It is a strange paradox of Generation Woke, to whom Eilish is an idol, that while everything from brunch (the actor Alan Cummings said it reminded him of ‘white privilege’) to Brum (the mischievous TV toy car ‘who may reflect the language and attitudes of the 1990s’ as the BBC warned us) is deemed offensive, truly offensive things such as under-privileged women earning a living by being used as sexual meat puppets for the entertainment of men is now being framed as a perfectly wholesome pursuit. (Unless it’s your