Society

Wednesday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

A Christmas prayer

Dear God, Please help me to keep it together this Christmas. For it is a testing time as well as a joyful one. Help me to make sense of this season, in which the wonderful story of the birth of your Son jostles with all sorts of ghastliness. Give me the calm fortitude to bear the advertising, the tinsel, the pressure to be a perfect family, meaning a self-satisfied bourgeois bunch, worshipping at the shrine of their miserable materialism. Help me not to flirt too much with that foxy young mum down the road Help me not to be too much of a fool at Christmas parties. They are smaller

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

Why Omicron may overwhelm the NHS

What we know from the imperfect data we have is that Omicron is vastly more infectious but less virulent than the Delta variant. If the UK Health Security Agency is right in its modelling estimate that as of last Sunday, there were already 200,000 cases of Omicron in the country, compared to 60,000 confirmed and 40,000 suspected cases, we cannot exclude a mass pandemic of Omicron infections in the new year. At this rate, even a much milder virus would still overwhelm our hospital capacities. A study by Discovery Health, a South African private health insurance administrator, based on 211,000 positive test results, showed that the hospitalisation rate of Omicron

Tuesday

Andrew Watts

My year-long battle with the parking profiteers

I had been cross enough about having to go to Sennen Cove. Aside from the fact that I don’t care for the place — what is the point of a Cornish beach if the sand is too coarse-grained for sandcastles? — I resented the fact that I would not even be able to park near the place I hated. The car park on the beach is full from nine in the morning; I would have to drive up to the town — which is so far away that some of the houses aren’t even second homes — and walk. Furiously I bought a ticket, chucked it in the car and

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Health and the big social divide

27 min listen

We’ve long known that where you live, who you live with, how you grow up, and how much money you have can have long lasting consequences for you health. Those that live in inner city neighbourhoods are far more exposed to health risks such as air pollution or drug abuse compared to leafy suburban residents. Does this connection between socioeconomic background and health fall on the responsibility of healthcare professionals and policymakers? Do nurses and doctors now also have to think about air pollution and green spaces? And is this holistic view of health helpful and indeed possible? In a special episode of Spectator podcasts, Kate Andrews is joined by

Monday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

My fight with Viagogo

My wife had a brilliant idea for my 12-year-old daughter’s Christmas present: tickets to go and see Sigrid (a pop act, apparently, m’lud) at Wembley. She sent me a link. Quick, quick, I thought: get them while they’re hot. I clicked through and bought three old-fashioned physical tickets. I sucked up the delivery fee because I imagined, sentimentally, my daughter looking back years later on those yellowing stubs and remembering her first ever gig. First mistake: the site I’d clicked on was the resale site Viagogo. I should have checked the venue’s own ticketing site but I was on my phone, I’d clicked on the link my wife had sent

Sunday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

‘Get boosted now’: Boris Johnson’s third jab plan

‘Get boosted now’ is the government’s new slogan. In tonight’s address to the nation, Boris Johnson announced that he was bringing forward his timeline of offering a booster jab to all eligible adults by one month: from the end of January to New Year’s Eve. The heavy push for third doses is the government’s latest attempt to curb the spread of the Omicron variant, which early evidence suggests is more likely to transmit amongst double-vaccinated people (though there is still no evidence, either way, that the variant undercuts vaccine efficacy for protecting against severe illness). The focus on booster jabs suggests that, temporarily at least, No. 10 has accepted that

Peter Apps

The scandal of the government’s cladding cover-up

The Number 10 Christmas parties during lockdown have dominated the news agenda in recent days – and for good reason. But there has arguably been an even bigger government scandal brewing, one which has largely been overlooked in Westminster. On Tuesday the government told the Grenfell Tower Inquiry that it was ‘deeply sorry’ for the ‘past failures’ which contributed to the devastating 2017 fire which killed 72 people. Apologies always come in varying forms of breadth and sincerity and this one (as is often the case when delivered by an expensive QC) was carefully limited. The government said that it had assumed fire regulations were being monitored ‘at a local

Alberto Giubilini and Julian Savulescu

The ethics of the Omicron travel ban

The Omicron variant had not even been named when the government’s reflexes sprung into almost involuntary reaction last month, and it introduced yet more Covid restrictions. The ‘red list’ was immediately revived and South Africa was placed on it. All travellers from there and several other African countries were soon forced into expensive quarantine hotels to live on microwaved mush for ten days. Some European countries even banned flights from southern Africa, while, in turn, Switzerland responded to the first cases of Omicron in Britain by banning unvaccinated Brits from entering the country. Whenever Covid rebounds, the first thing to happen is that international borders are closed. Governments seem to entertain

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Vaccine passports may prove a pointless distraction from Omicron

Sajid Javid ditched vaccine passports when he became Health Secretary but he now has to bring them in again, albeit in an updated form where a lateral flow negative test will also be accepted. But how to get this past the Commons where 65 MPs have now decided to rebel? How to do this now given that the argument – that vaccine passports restrict transmissibility – has now collapsed? The big news is that the AstraZeneca vaccine has ‘zero’ effect on people catching Omicron. The vaccine still offers protection from getting seriously ill, but the premise of vaccine passports – that the double-jabbed are less likely to be infectious than the unjabbed – has

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

How the Met failed the victims of Stephen Port

The names Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor will not be familiar to most but they represent one of the most damning cases of Metropolitan police incompetence in living memory. On Friday, a jury at Barking Town Hall found that officers’ failure to properly investigate Anthony’s murder contributed to the subsequent murders of Gabriel, Daniel and Jack. While the men and women tasked by the coroner with weighing up nine weeks of evidence in the inquest accepted that police were burdened with a ‘heavy workload’, they concluded there were ‘fundamental failings in these investigations from the beginning’ which ‘cannot be overlooked’. It would be impossible to overlook

Dominic Sandbrook

Make History Great Again!

Why don’t today’s children know more about history? In an age when information has never been easier to access, it’s alarming how many youngsters are ignorant about the past. In July, a survey of 1,000 schoolchildren found that four out of ten had no idea what the Battle of Britain was, while another four out of ten had never heard of Cleopatra. More than half didn’t know the Romans spoke Latin. Of course every generation complains that children are ignorant of facts that we used to take for granted. Often it’s simply a question of changing priorities: where children once learned about Walpole and Gladstone, they now learn about the

Friday

Emily Hill Emily Hill

Emily Ratajkowski is having her cake and eating it

After listening to an hour-and-a-half of Emily Ratajkowski talking about My Body I had to look up naked pictures of her on the internet to understand what she was complaining about. She arrived fully clothed to the ‘How To Academy’ to be interviewed by Pandora Sykes. This made it hard to know whether her dangerous-sounding upbringing as ‘an only child in a house with no walls’ had affected her physically.  ‘It had a profound effect on me,’ Emily told Pandora, explaining that she gets the ‘woozies’ to this day. For those of you who have absolutely no idea who Ratajkowski is, never mind what she’s saying, Wikipedia explains her surname is

Thursday

Imogen Marchant

Not all Durham students want to silence Rod Liddle

A week on from Rod Liddle’s appearance at a dinner at Durham university’s South College, the fallout continues. Yesterday, my fellow students gathered outside the college, brandishing signs saying ’No hate’ and ‘Principal without principles’. Their target? The college’s head, Tim Luckhurst, who made the fateful decision to invite Liddle to speak and then to call students who walked out ‘pathetic’. Now students are calling for Luckhurst to apologise – and resign.  As a Durham finalist, I’m fed up. The university has released more communication about Rod-gate in the last three days than I have received all term about what is going to happen with my exams. My college, my

Patrick West

The BBC is right to ditch the ‘Bame’ label

Broadcasters in the UK have declared they will no longer use the acronym BAME to refer to black, Asian and minority ethnic people. Following a report by the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 have committed themselves to avoiding this catch-all term ‘wherever possible’, in favour of more specific terms to describe ethnicity. This is good news.  Last year a task force set up by UK Music, which represents the commercial interests of the sector, called the term ‘outdated and offensive’; this latest report concluded that it could cause ‘serious insult’. Quite so. The categorical term ‘BAME’ might as well have

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: should I force dinner guests to take a lateral flow test?

Q. My mother-in-law has remarried and now lives in South America. She has a large family with nieces, grandchildren, godchildren, etc. So what she has done is ordered all these different Christmas presents for them to be sent via Amazon to my house for me to individually gift wrap and take to the post office. It is such a tedious and time-consuming job and I suspect she won’t reimburse me either. I need to stop this happening next year but how? — Name and address withheld A. When your mother-in-law thanks you, tell her that it was a pleasure to help. But the really good news is that seeing you

Tanjil Rashid

Common prayer: when churches become mosques

A Presbyterian minister, a Pentecostalist pastor and a Sunni imam come to worship in the same place. It’s not the start of a joke: this is literally what happens at my local church in east London which, strangely, now encompasses a mosque. It was in danger of being closed, but instead the walled church complex has been partitioned, with a chunk of it sold off to Muslims while the main church building remains the home of two different Christian denominations. The site serves as a sanctuary for followers of rival creeds, a kind of suburban Temple Mount. The shared use indicates an unlikely chapter in the life of a once-renowned

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Cutting ties: the sad decline of men’s neckwear

Of all the global trends exacerbated by Covid, the demise of the necktie is probably not the most important. It is, however, worth noting — because the way we dress tells us a lot about who we are. The tie has been on the retreat as a quintessential item of the male wardrobe for the past 30 or so years. Thanks to all that working from home, it is now at the edge of imminent extinction: soon it will be worn only by eccentrics, dictators or eccentric dictators. The worker bees have returned to their office hives, but on the whole their ties have not come with them. It cannot

Michael Palin

Sheffield, our great underappreciated city

I was born and raised in Sheffield, a proud steel-making city which drew much of its energy from a sense of under-appreciation. Manchester had the airport, York and Leeds the fast mainline to London. Film stars went to Birmingham for premières. But we were part of Yorkshire, the greatest of English counties, with more acres than words in the Bible. Yorkshire tea, Yorkshire pudding. Yorkshire grit. Now the grit has got caught in the works following the cricket scandal. It could be a long time before the Yorkshire brand recovers. One great Yorkshire institution is Bettys of Harrogate, which provides tea, cakes and respectability to the ladies of God’s Own

Melissa Kite

Why I prefer to rely on natural immunity

‘Did you hear it?’ said a friend of mine, red-faced with the flush of a piece of news she couldn’t wait to offload, as she rushed into a church hall where we were attending an event. She was bursting with excitement because a mutual acquaintance had just been on a radio phone-in show banging the drum for the vaccine. I confessed I had not heard it, because I had no idea she was planning to go on. But it didn’t surprise me because this lady has had a go at me for being ‘one of those anti-vaxxers’ because I won’t have the jab — mainly because I’ve recovered from Covid.

Peter Hitchens

Only a benevolent dictator can save Oxford

Only a dictator can save Oxford now. Local government simply cannot grasp how precious this marvellous, unrivalled city is, and how easy it will be to erode it into bare, dispiriting bleakness and ugliness. Any fool can see that the ancient colleges of the university must be preserved, but the setting in which they stand has no reliable defenders. It is true that a plan to put a bypass through the ancient pastures of Christ Church meadow was defeated in 1968. But that was after 27 years of wrangling, during which this hideous megalo-maniac scheme was actually described as ‘indispensable’. In the half century during which I have lived in