Society

Friday

5 Nov 2021

Pfizer’s Covid pill breakthrough

After the UK medicines regulator yesterday approved Merck’s Covid pill for use on recently infected, vulnerable patients, Pfizer announced its own successful treatment, Paxlovid. Pfizer’s pill was shown to reduce the risk of hospitalisation and death in Covid patients by up to 89 per cent compared with a placebo. The drug has proved so effective that enrolment in the trial has been stopped and Pfizer says it plans to apply to the US regulator for emergency use ‘as soon as possible’. The pill is most effective when treatment starts as soon as a patient becomes aware they are infected with or have been exposed to the virus. It’s taken with

Debbie Hayton

Why is Mermaids promoting breast binding at events for young people?

Mermaids is arguably the most influential charity focusing on transgender rights in the UK. It claims to have been supporting transgender, non-binary and gender-diverse children, young people, and their families since 1995, and has been at the forefront of key policy changes affecting transgender people in this country. Today, however, the charity is distinctly evangelistic. This approach worries me greatly. As a teacher, I know how impressionable young people can be. I think it is deeply irresponsible to suggest, as Mermaids do, that children have a gender identity that can differ from the sex that was ‘assigned at birth’. This evangelistic approach from some in the trans movement can also

Fraser Nelson

Less than one hour left: The Spectator’s Brexit butterfly cover as an NFT

There is less than one hour remaining on the sale, and the current highest bid is 4 WETH / $18,000. Those interested in making a bid can click here. Last month we ran an article about digital art and non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) and since then we’ve had readers asking: what about The Spectator’s Brexit butterfly? In almost two centuries of our publication’s history, this is perhaps the best-known of all our covers: ‘Out, and into the world’ with our endorsement of Brexit. The phrase was reprised from our 1975 cover when we were one of only two publications to back Brexit in that referendum (the other was the Morning Star) and

Thursday

4 Nov 2021

Brendan O’Neill

The perverse fantasies of XR’s founder

If we don’t cut carbon emissions, your mother will be raped. This is the deranged prediction of Roger Hallam, the weird-beard co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. Eco-doomsters used to say the ice caps would melt and polar bears would perish unless we all went green. Now they’re upping the ante. Now they’re prophesising gang rape, murder and war if you don’t shrink your eco-footprint. Better get recycling. Hallam’s nutty foretelling of an epidemic of rape appears in a piece of writing titled ‘Advice to Young People, as you Face Annihilation’. He’s a cheery soul, isn’t he? Apparently he wrote it when he was in jail for four weeks last year on

Robert Porter

In defence of bagpipes

Many people love to hate bagpipes. Everyone from William Shakespeare to Alfred Hitchcock has held them in contempt. For some, they are almost a form of punishment. Last week, a frustrated motorist blasted bagpipe music in the faces of Insulate Britain protestors on the M25 before he was stopped by police. Most pipers will tell you they are sick of hearing that the definition of a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes and doesn’t. Equally, someone once told me the joke that the bagpipes are an ingenious breathalyser test: you blow into the bag and if the noise that comes out doesn’t want to make you

Matthew Parris

Do you really need to see the GP in person?

Only later, perhaps even a decade later, as the pandemic of 2020-22 shrinks in our rear-view mirror, may we be able to assess its enduring consequences. So I am only speculating when I suggest that one of these may be the beginning of the slow death of general practice in the United Kingdom. And, no, this will not be a column attacking Britain’s GPs, whom I think to be mostly dedicated and hard-working men and women whose careers are demanding, whose work is difficult, and who are not paid excessively for the hours and expertise they bring to their vocation. Rather as with the class for which we use the

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I politely avoid going to a memorial service?

Q. I will shortly be attending a major social gathering in London at which I can look forward to seeing some dear old friends and speaking to them in person for the first time in many months. Therein lies the problem. I will probably not be able to speak to these key people. I can anticipate that, just when I am properly engaging with someone who is normally too busy to talk on the telephone, and with whom I have a lot of ground to cover, a ‘person from Porlock’ will hove into view and bring our intimate chat to a halt. Mary, my question is: how, without being rude,

Toby Young

Sky Sports is ruining my football season

When I promised my 13-year-old son, Charlie, that we would go to as many QPR games as possible in 2021-22 to make up for not going to any last season, I hadn’t anticipated that the match schedule would be in a constant state of flux thanks to the capricious, all-powerful tyrant that is Sky Sports. It makes trying to plan your life more than a few weeks ahead impossible. For instance, I booked an eye-wateringly expensive three-day break for the whole family in Margate from 27 to 30 December, meaning we would be in London to watch the Boxing Day fixture against Bournemouth at home and miss only one game

Gavin Mortimer

Fishing for votes: what’s really behind our trade war with France?

A decade ago, French-bashing was all the rage. David Cameron famously declared Britain would ‘roll out the red carpet’ for those fleeing the steep tax hikes proposed by the newly elected Socialist president François Hollande. The French economy continued to be a source of derision for the British, culminating in the managing director of John Lewis describing it as ‘sclerotic, hopeless and downbeat’ in October 2014. The following month, Hollande despatched his 37-year-old English-speaking economy minister to London with instructions to prove to the British that the French economy was in good health. That minister was Emmanuel Macron. ‘Whether we like it or not, the Anglo-Saxon press are the opinion-formers

Freddy Gray

Superbad: Joe Biden’s plummeting presidency

Who can blame President Biden for nodding off at the COP26 summit on Monday? It was an astronomically boring session — opening statement after opening statement, pompous speaker after pompous speaker, insisting that the time for words on climate change is over. Now is the time for… zzzzzzzzzzzz. It’s a miracle the jet-lagged, 78-year-old leader kept his eyes open for as long as he did. Poor Joe. He has a lot on his addled mind. He’s been in office for less than a year and his presidency is already a catalogue of crises. On Tuesday, as the President stood on the COP stage in Glasgow, impotently lecturing China and Russia

Peter Hanington

How we rediscovered the charms of haiku

One of the more encouraging developments of the past year and a half has been the number of us who, instead of turning to drink, have been turning to haiku. Haiku hashtags have been popping up on social media since the start of the pandemic. It turns out that 17 syllables in that classic five-seven-five formation are just what we need when we’re trying to express how we feel about these unsettling times. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest have proved to be the perfect medium for this short-form poetry. Of course, the quality is mixed. Some of the hashtags attract efforts that are less ‘narrow road to deep north’

Gus Carter

Are banking apps luring young people into debt?

Last month, my bicycle got a flat tyre. ‘Both of those tyres are gonna need replacing and you’ve knackered your sprockets,’ huffed the bike man. The bill came to £230. It’s the kind of irritating expense that means I run out of beer money a week before payday. I’ve always assumed I’m a reasonably normal spender. Work pays me, the money gradually disappears over the month, with hopefully a bit left over for my Isa. I’m vaguely aware that something exists called a ‘credit card’, but my parents always made clear to me that if you don’t have the money for something, don’t buy it. Where I differ from older

Nigel Lawson

Net zero is a disastrous solution to a nonexistent problem

Human folly is all too common. But in a long life I have never come across anything remotely as bad as the current climate scare. The government’s COP26 targets are ambitious (and eye-wateringly expensive). Amid the debate, one important question seems to be missing. Are we really facing an existential threat? Or might the climate change ‘crisis’ in fact be quasi-religious hysteria, based on ignorance? It is true that, since the industrial revolution, when we began to use fossil fuels — first coal, then oil and gas — as our source of energy, this has led to a steady, albeit gradual, increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the

Rory Sutherland

How men’s wardrobes prove constraints can be good for us

One thing that surprised every-one during lockdown was how many people derived unexpected pleasure from living under imposed restrictions. Can people become happier when temporarily prevented from doing things they would normally do? Almost certainly. Sometimes such circumstances force us to try something new which we subsequently prefer; at other times we enjoy having an external excuse not to do things we don’t want to do at all. There is an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry gleefully realises that his mother’s death provides him with a reason to cancel all his upcoming engagements. All of us, I suspect, recognise this: we have moments where we are grateful to

The Spectator

Letters: Why net zero is impossible

Carbon deceit Sir: At this week’s climate change conference, countries will be urged to follow the UK’s ‘lead’ in setting the goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 (‘Cop out’, 30 October). This goal is impossible for any advanced economy based on mass consumption. The majority of British manufacturing has shifted abroad, where labour is cheap and items are mostly produced with electricity supplied by coal and other fossil fuels. For a real figure for Britain’s emissions, the consumption of goods produced overseas must be included. As our consumption has increased enormously over the past 30 years, this carbon addition will be substantial. It is a dangerous nonsense for rich

Martin Vander Weyer

Don’t let China’s climate sins cloak its crushing of Hong Kong

China’s failure to bring anything new to COP26 surprised no one. The world’s worst carbon emitter offered no advance on President Xi Jinping’s earlier promise to reduce coal use after 2025 and bring overall emissions to a peak in 2030 — thereby negating for at least a decade much of the rest of the world’s efforts to clean up the planet. But spotlighting China as a climate sinner should not be allowed to cloak its other villainhood, as an abuser of human rights: so let’s not forget Hong Kong. The fate of the once-British enclave and its future as an international business centre have been much on my mind lately.

Charles Moore

National Trust members fight back

At the National Trust’s annual general meeting last week, the voting was much more unusual than the public will have learnt from media reports. In most resolutions, the numbers voting exceeded 100,000. In past years, the figures have been lower than 40,000. The reason for this high turnout was the controversies of the past 18 months. Motions about the erosion of curatorial expertise and the ill treatment of Trust volunteers would have won easily had not the chairman exercised the right to use the discretionary proxy votes which the Trust’s curious governance permits. Without these, the rebel resolutions would have been more than 15,000 votes ahead. In achieving these results,

Melissa Kite

My pro-vaxxer friends are changing their tune

My pro-vaxxer friends have been a lot nicer to me since they started testing positive for Covid. I’m calling my vaccinated friends ‘pro-vaxxer’, by the way, just so they can see how it feels to have a quirky-sounding label applied to them based on their personal choices about how to withstand a pandemic. Meanwhile, I’m most certainly not going to call myself an anti-vaxxer because I’ve had dozens of vaccines, just not this one. I don’t need a label that’s become a term of abuse and was used by an MP while condemning people who don’t want the vaccine as the sorts of scoundrels who might launch a physical attack

Dot Wordsworth

The real ‘scallop’ war: how do you pronounce it?

‘You say scallops and I say scallops,’ sang my husband in his best Ginger Rogers accents. Since we both pronounce the bivalve to rhyme with dollop, there was a certain lack of contrast. There has been a scallop war with France in past days. Though both French and English enjoy them on the plate, it is the French in the 15th century who provided us with the name, escalope. We just knocked the beginning off the word. Our cockle too, from at least a century earlier, is from the French word that gives them coquilles St Jacques. (Mussel is from Latin musculus, ‘muscle’, which also gave the word mus, ‘mouse’,

Kit Wilson

Are we ready for the metaverse?

Facebook has rebranded itself as Meta and last month chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of 10,000 jobs to help build the ‘metaverse’ — a concept so radical nobody yet knows what it really is. People in the media tend to describe it as ‘a 3D version of the internet’. Facebook describes it rather vaguely as a network of ‘virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you’. Some suspect it might actually be hell. The term metaverse first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which future humans distract themselves from economic collapse by submerging