Society

Monday

John O’Connell

Stonewall and the problem with taxpayer funded campaigning

Liz Truss, the minister for women and equalities, is reportedly keen to see government departments withdraw from Stonewall’s ‘Diversity Champions’ programme. The scheme, which around 250 departments and public bodies have signed up to, sees quangos and other public sector bodies pay for guidance on issues such as gender-neutral toilets, pronouns, and transgender inclusion. Debates rage about the efficacy – or even legitimacy – of such programmes. But underpinning that discourse is the fact that huge sums of taxpayers’ money have been handed over to what are undoubtedly controversial campaigns. As well as receiving cash for the Diversity Champions programme, new research by the TaxPayers’ Alliance shows that Stonewall also

John Connolly John Connolly

Is Boris right to delay the lockdown easing?

It now seems likely that freedom day is going to involve rather less freedom than everyone had hoped. Later today, Boris Johnson is expected to announce that the 21 June easing of lockdown will be delayed by up to four weeks, until every adult has been offered at least one vaccine by the end of next month. The delays mean that nightclubs will stay closed and work from home guidance will remain in place – although the 30-person limit on wedding guests is expected to be lifted and there will be more outdoor events allowed to take place. The abrupt change to the lockdown easing plan comes as the Indian

Sunday

Peter Apps

How the residents of Grenfell Tower were failed

In April 2010, seven years before the building was burned to the ground, a smaller fire broke out at Grenfell Tower, leaving three residents injured and exposing a serious problem with the block. Instead of funnelling smoke out of the building, the tower’s smoke extraction system simply moved it up to higher floors. This was extremely worrying in a block with just one escape staircase. ‘Should a fire occur in the staircase of Grenfell Tower, there will be no escape route for residents of Grenfell Tower,’ wrote leaseholder Shah Ahmed in May 2010. ‘This raises serious health and safety issues and could trap the residents of building in a fire

James Jeffrey

Does the British government care about veterans’ suicides?

Ex-veterans minister Johnny Mercer appears to have launched a one-man frontal assault on the UK government. Rarely a day goes by when he isn’t voraciously criticising their shoddy treatment of veterans. Speaking as a veteran and ex-British Army officer like Mercer, I can’t say I blame him. One tour of Afghanistan was enough to break me. Mercer did three. Mercer’s most recent broadside came after the news that the eleventh person from 2 Rifles, an infantry regiment that served in Iraq and Afghanistan, had killed himself. ‘That veterans who served in the bloodiest conflict this country has seen for 50 years are still taking their lives in 2021 because they

Claire Fox

Can GB News live up to the hype?

British TV viewers have never had so many channels to watch, yet they’ve also never had so little choice. The Brexit referendum exposed this lack of political diversity all too clearly. As a panellist on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze for 20 years, I suppose I was something of a BBC luvvie. No doubt I was still seen as a bit of a maverick by some, but I was accepted on the media scene. However, when I casually mentioned back in 2016 that I was going to vote Leave, things changed.  ‘But you’re an intelligent, well-educated person, Claire’, said one senior producer. From that moment on, in studios and green rooms, I was

Saturday

Max Pemberton

Max Pemberton, Andrew Watts, Ysenda Maxtone Graham

20 min listen

On this week’s episode, Dr Max Pemberton explains that while just as many people are seeing their GP as before the pandemic, something has changed. (00:55) After, Andrew Watts argues that you shouldn’t buy a second home in Cornwall. (09:15) Ysenda Maxtone Graham finishes the episode, lamenting the loss of indoor singing. (14:00)

Rosa Freedman and Jo Phoenix

When feminists fight back

We have been told that our mere presence as academics makes students feel unsafe. We have been threatened with violence, disinvited from speaking and even blacklisted. We have had our academic freedom curtailed. Our crime? Asserting that there are two sexes — male and female — and for insisting that some spaces are legally allowed to be organised according to sex and not gender identity. The Equality Act 2010 protects women’s spaces where it is proportionate and legitimate: spaces such as prisons, domestic violence refuges and sports teams. The University of Essex has issued a public apology to us both. We were both blocked from attending events, and one of us

Friday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How serious is Britain’s third wave?

The link between Covid cases and hospitalisations has been broken, we keep being told – vaccination having reduced the severity of infections, especially among more vulnerable older groups. It is a point reinforced this morning by Public Health England which reveals that the number of cases of the delta (formerly Indian) variant have increased from 12,431 to 42,323 in a week, but without a corresponding rise in hospitalisations. But how true is it that what looks like a third wave in new infections will not be accompanied by a large wave of hospitalisations? Previous experience with Covid – using PHE data – suggests there is not a very long lag between

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Why the Oxford Queen portrait row matters

The sheer scale of the outrage over Magdalen College Oxford electing to remove a portrait of the Queen from the postgraduate common room can seem on the face of it to be absurd; why should we care what pictures a group of students choose to put on the wall? We didn’t care when they put it up in 2013. Why should we mind if they happen to have better decor available today?  A little digging however shows that, as is generally the case, this latest flashpoint is less about the putative cause and more to do with ideology. The portrait was taken down because ‘for some students depictions of the monarch

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Euro 2020 and the search for a new Englishness

A soccer contest is upon us. I know nothing of football as a sport, but even a dunce like me knows that these things are about more than 22 men chasing a ball for 90 minutes. Big sporting events such as Euro 2020 matter, especially for England and Englishness. Any big England game is a rare chance for people to fly the flag and briefly talk about Englishness. But we need to do more than talk about this when the football team is playing. A proper national debate about English identity is overdue and badly needed. New polling from British Future this week showed that only two thirds of BAME

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Polly Morgan Edition

34 min listen

Polly Morgan is an artist whose trade is taxidermy. She recently won the First Plinth Award, and in her time has sold to celebrity clients including Kate Moss and Courtney Love. On the podcast, she tells Katy about her unusual childhood growing up on a farm with ostriches, goats and llamas; why she got fired by Prue Leith; and the ins and outs of taxidermy.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The third wave: it’s here – but it shouldn’t delay our reopening

39 min listen

Experts are saying we are now officially in a third wave but how concerned should we be? (00:56) Also on the podcast: What will the mood be like when Boris meets Biden (14:33)? And are UFOs no longer a laughing matter?(23:00) With Scientist Simon Clarke, mathematician Philip Thomas, spokesperson for Republicans Overseas UK Sarah Elliot, Spectator World editor Freddy Gray, astrophysicist Tim O’Brian & author Lawrence Osborne Presented by Lara Prendergast. Produced by Cindy Yu, Max Jeffery and Sam Russell.

Debbie Hayton

Maya Forstater’s win is a victory for rational thinking

At her employment tribunal, two years ago, Maya Forstater was told that her views ‘were not worthy of respect in a democratic society.’ That was after Forstater had been cancelled by the Centre for Global Development think tank, an institute that had employed her, when she was caught preaching the gospel of science and reason on the internet. Some of her colleagues grumbled about her gender critical beliefs, and Forstater’s contract was not renewed. Today, after an appeal, last year’s judgment was cancelled. The significance of this case cannot be overstated. In the current ideological battle between fact and fantasy, only one side comes to the table with cogent beliefs.

Andrew Willshire

Greta Thunberg doesn’t like you

Dorian Lynskey recently wrote a piece celebrating Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday entitled ‘Bob Dylan doesn’t like you‘. The article highlighted the disdain Dylan has for fans, critics, journalists, and even the Nobel Prize Committee. Feted as the voice of a generation, and often acting like it, he still has nothing but scorn for those who acclaim him as such. Another ‘voice of a generation’, some three generations removed, Greta Thunberg has been acclaimed by many politicians for her climate activism. But there is little sign that Thunberg has anything but scorn for them in return. It would be fair to say to most world leaders ‘Greta Thunberg doesn’t like you’. The most

Bernard Cornwell

Why do my American friends keep asking me to marry them?

My diary has been filled with dental appointments, reflecting a truism that American dentists pray for British teeth. The tally in this past month is one root canal, three extractions and two bone grafts, which more or less equals the cost of putting one dentist’s child through a year of college. The epic began almost a year ago with a mild toothache, which my usually excellent dentist in Charleston, South Carolina, insisted needed the attention of a specialist. I rejected her advice with the confident assurance that I was getting old, the pain was mild, and it was a race between the tooth and death, a race that death would

The Spectator

Letters: In defence of the National Trust

Trust us Sir: I refute Charles Moore’s assertions (‘Broken Trust’, 5 June) that the National Trust frowns on local expertise, ignores its members and is prone to ideological zealotry. National Trust houses are historic treasures of national importance and we are very proud to care for them. Before the pandemic, the Trust was spending three times more on its houses than on coast and countryside. Covid has caused regrettable staff reductions, but we still have more curatorial posts than we did several years ago. This is hardly an organisation ‘attacking the very idea of country houses’. The report looking at links with slavery and colonialism was not driven by ideology,

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

What makes a pasty Cornish?

This week, world leaders are doing what countless Brits do every summer: unpacking their bags in a charming corner of Cornwall. The G7 summit — Joe Biden’s first, and Angela Merkel’s last — is taking place in the resort town of Carbis Bay, a stone’s throw from St Ives. Between the speeches and the roundtables, will the world leaders find time to tuck into Cornwall’s proudest and most popular export, the Cornish pasty? Boris Johnson talked about the region’s industrial history in the run-up to the event: ‘Two hundred years ago Cornwall’s tin and copper mines were at the heart of the UK’s industrial revolution and this summer Cornwall will

Luke McShane

The back-rank mate

Compared with Anastasia’s mate, or an epaulette mate, the humble back-rank mate is named without imagination or whimsy. It is the Ronseal of mating patterns, administered by a rook or queen to a hapless king stuck on the rank behind its own pawns. But there is a rich variety of tactical motifs which culminate in this simple pattern, as shown by two of Magnus Carlsen’s recent games. Dubov–Carlsen FTX Crypto Cup Prelims, May 2021 (see left diagram) Carlsen has just grabbed a pawn on e4, so the knight on d5 lacks support. The simple 21 Nc3 looks roughly equal, but Dubov launched a volley of tactics with 21 Qxe5. His

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Suddenly used cars are hot property

Companies should willingly pay tax wherever they generate profits — this column has long argued — because it’s fair they should contribute to the cost of the public services on which all business ultimately relies, and because the reputation of capitalism as a whole is tainted when corporate tax bills are reduced to absurdly low levels by the use of offshore domiciles and spurious royalty payments that most governments lack the willpower to challenge. So I welcome at least one half of the G7 finance ministers’ agreement last weekend on a new global corporate tax regime. The half I’m ready to praise is the proposal that all countries should have

Cheesecracker

2510: Prom session

Twelve symmetrically disposed unclued entries comprise three distinct interlinked quartets.   Across 1 Precise conjecture about coin-flip, oddly (8) 6 Peter out back, eating square meal (6) 10 Hit round ring – rim of upper drum (6) 11 Tiny baby consumed by gas (7) 12 Pedestrian holds back directions to Wick (5) 14 Advert I tweaked late in development (7) 15 We animate Ferris wheels (6) 18 Legal excuses persist regularly, certainly on detaining leader (8) 22 No time for anointing abstract artist (8) 24 Petition Henry for backing Greek musician (7) 29 Opening cut by old, extremely delicate round swords (7) 30 Honk grim old lady – look ahead