Society

Thursday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Technology is robbing us of the power to forget

Two years ago, Lauren Goode, a senior writer at Wired magazine, cancelled her wedding and it was awkward. These things always are, but you get over it because the brain slowly learns how to skip over painful memories. Or it did, before social media. Goode has made a career out of wittily stripping away the pretensions of consumer tech, and when her wedding plans blew up consumer tech had its revenge. She ended her eight-year relationship in 2019 — but the internet didn’t get the message and kept confronting her with ‘a cyborg version of me, a digital ghost, that is still getting married’. As she wrote in Wired, at

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: the Mona Lisa has her say

In Competition No. 3214, you were invited to choose a well-known painted portrait and let the subject speak for itself, in poetry or prose. Among those who seized the opportunity to have their say were pre-Raphaelite poster girl Lizzie Siddal, who fell dangerously ill while spending several months floating in a tin bath for Millais’s 1852 ‘Ophelia’; David Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark (and their cat Percy); Franz Hals’s ‘Laughing Cavalier’; and ‘Weeping Woman’ Dora Maar (‘All his portraits of me are lies. They’re Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar,’ she once told the American writer James Lord.) The challenge drew a modestly sized but accomplished entry and in another

Wednesday

Lois Heslop

Should Britain brace itself for a major flu outbreak this winter?

Could flu be a bigger problem than Covid this winter? Professor Anthony Harnden, the deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, has warned that it might be, suggesting that the low prevalence of flu over recent months could come back to ‘bite us’ as the weather worsens. There are also fears that reduced levels of flu in recent months could make it much harder to develop a successful jab. In a normal year, the route to a flu vaccine is well trodden. The annual flu vaccination programme first began in England in the 1960s, and since 2000, all over 65s have been offered the jab every year. Healthy children have also

Tuesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Was Hurricane Ida really caused by climate change?

It’s climate change, innit? No sooner had Hurricane Ida smashed into the coast of Louisiana with winds of around 150 mph than the usual claims began to be made, the ones we get every time a hurricane makes landfall in the US: that it has been caused in part by man-made climate change. Climate models have tended to predict that tropical storms will become stronger as warmer seas lead to more energy being absorbed by the storms. Trouble is, observational evidence does not suggest that this has happened — at least not yet. While records of storms exist since 1851 they cannot be taken to be complete records A Princeton University

Annabel Denham

On child vaccination, parents should have the choice

On Saturday, the Health Secretary made his most bullish comments on child vaccination so far. Writing in the Times, Sajid Javid argued that offering all teenagers the jab will ‘solidify our wall of protection,’ offering a stronger defence against Covid and new strains. In doing so, Javid has intensified the debate on whether over-12s ought to be vaccinated. Earlier this month, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised that jabs should be offered to 16 and 17-year olds, bringing the UK into line with countries such as Sweden. The JCVI is now investigating whether the jab could be offered to all 12-15 year olds, as in the US and several other

Monday

Terry Barnes

Zero-Covid is wishful thinking if Australia wants to rejoin the world

As former Australian foreign minister and High Commissioner to the UK Alexander Downer wrote in last week’s magazine, almost all Australian states, like neighbouring New Zealand, are determined to eliminate Covid-19 at all costs. At the beginning of this year, Australia seemingly had defeated Covid. Total numbers of people infected, out of 25 million, were in the few thousands, with related deaths in the hundreds (mostly in care homes). Even now, with a major Delta variant outbreak across our two biggest states, New South Wales and Victoria, less than a thousand Australians have died from or with Covid, almost all elderly or people with other health complications. Currently, Greater Sydney

Sunday

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

What the Afghan animal airlift says about Britain

The evacuation of Pen Farthing and his pets from Afghanistan this week is not a ‘feel-good’ story. It is not a charmingly eccentric rescue mission. It’s a moral abomination that shames Britain. While American soldiers lifted their dead for their final flight home, British soldiers were carrying dogs onto a plane. When time was running out to get people who served with us out alive, ministers were sponsoring clearance for his charter flight and senior commanders were dealing with his supporters. Before we go any further, I’d like to be clear about one thing: I don’t particularly blame Pen. I’d probably want to get my pets out of a warzone

Peter Hughes

Why football fans are still booing players taking the knee

On the opening day of this year’s season, I went to see Chelsea play Crystal Palace. The match programme featured an article on Paul Canoville, Chelsea’s first black player. I remember watching him in the 1980s when he was racially abused by his own fans. Large sections of the crowd taunted him with monkey chants and racist slurs. Outside on the Fulham Road, bigots sold National Front News and urged fans to ‘Keep Britain White’. This grotesque spectacle wasn’t confined to Chelsea. At every ground, black players faced abuse from supporters. We’ve come a long way since then. A few years ago, Paul Canoville returned to Stamford Bridge and did a

Saturday

Richard Ekins

The law is not fit to stop Extinction Rebellion’s street protests

Extinction Rebellion (XR) are once again blocking London’s streets, reportedly emboldened by the Supreme Court’s recent Ziegler decision – which found that deliberately blocking roads can be lawful protest. The police maintain that the judgment does not substantially change the law and that XR, like everyone else, has a right to assemble and protest but not to cause serious disruption to the community or to hold the streets to ransom. But while the judgment is not a sea change in the law – whatever some protestors may now say – it does reveal that the law as it stands is failing to adequately protect the public’s right to use the

Michael Mosbacher

In defence of cruel foods

Fishmongers are an endangered species in London. Thankfully, 15 minutes walk across Westminster from The Spectator’s offices there is an excellent fish stall on Tachbrook Street market in Pimlico. Jonathan Norris’s stall — much frequented by 1990s Tory politicians — does a thriving trade in live lobsters. He will happily boil the crustaceans for you in his lobster kettle, but buying them alive is more fun, especially if you have children in tow. At this time of year the lobsters are Cornish; in the winter live lobster flown in from Canada will have to do. Buying — and then boiling — live lobsters is a sure way of getting children

Robert Tombs

‘Wokeness’ and the collapse of intellectual freedom in the West

When observing the state of our academic life and public culture, I have an uneasy feeling of déjà vu. When I started life as a historian, going to France to do a PhD in the 1970s, French universities were held in a tight ideological grip. The subject I was working on — the Paris Commune of 1871 — turned out, to my naïve surprise, to be a hot topic. Two older French academics who became my mentors were both convinced (I think with reason) that their careers had been blighted because they had written things that the then mighty French Communist party disapproved of. The Commune was the party’s pride

Friday

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

The problem with the Met’s morality policing

Ah, the last days of summer. Long evenings, sunny weekends, and crusty Extinction Rebellion hippies blocking arterial traffic lanes to the audible grinding of teeth from the police officers tasked with standing by and politely watching their sub-art-school amdram productions, rather than getting on with the business of giving them a much-needed hosing down with Boris’s water cannons. As Charlie Peters has pointed out for the Mail, the impression of police impotence has nothing to do with the willingness of the bobby on the beat to break out a truncheon and apply it liberally to the thorax of middle-class graduates enjoying their day off by making everyone else late for

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Prison island: when will Australia escape its zero Covid trap?

39 min listen

On this week’s episode, we’ll be taking a look at the fortress that Australia has built around itself, and ask – when will its Zero Covid policy end (01:00)? Also on the podcast: is it racist to point out Britain’s changing demographics (14:35)? And is trivia just another way for men to compete (27:00)? With former Australian High Commissioner, Alexander Downer; chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus, Layla Moran MP; Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver; York University’s Dr Remi Adekoya; Spectator contributor Mark Mason; and QI elf Anna Ptaszynski. Presented by Lara Prendergast. Produced by Cindy Yu and Natasha Feroze.

Debbie Hayton

Ofcom is right to leave Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme

Ofcom has joined the exodus from the Stonewall Diversity Champions programme. The explanation came in a carefully worded statement yesterday in which the communications regulator explained that their, ‘commitment to supporting the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ+ people is as strong as ever.’ So it should be, but we are living in strange times. Sex has been conflated with gender, transsexual with transvestite (we are all transgender now), and support for anything LGBTQWERTY has been conflated with complying with what Stonewall think. Ofcom seem to agree; their statement concludes: ‘We will continue to participate in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index, which is widely recognised as a strong benchmarking tool for

Rakib Ehsan

Britain’s problem with illegal Islamic private schools

While some in Britain are understandably anxious about the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan and the prospect of the Central Asian country becoming an international jihadist training ground, long-standing domestic problems concerning religious radicalism continue to persist. The issue of unregistered private schools in British Muslim communities is one of them. This has been thrust into the limelight yet again after a headteacher was warned that she faces a prison term after continuing to run an illegal Islamic private school – in defiance of a previous conviction. Nadia Ali, 40, ran the Ambassadors High School in Streatham, South London, for over half a year after being sentenced to community service

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Natural immunity is stronger than vaccination, study suggests

At times this summer, the government has been accused of fighting Covid-19 with an undeclared strategy that concentrates on vaccinating the old while allowing the young to build up herd immunity. The effort that the government has put into persuading young people to have the vaccine suggests this is more conspiracy theory than reality. Nevertheless, might it be a good strategy? The preprint of a yet-to-be-published Israeli study comparing the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine with immunity gained through natural infection suggests that the latter may be more effective and longer-lasting. Double-jabbed, previously uninfected people are 13 times as likely to get Covid compared with the naturally immune The team,

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Would you want London to be overrun with Americans like me?

PODCAST: Lionel Shriver discusses this column with Dr Remi Adekoya in our The Edition podcast. Listen here.  The Afghans the Home Office is scrambling to resettle in Britain present one of immigration’s most sympathetic cases: translators and other support workers for allied troops whose lives are potentially imperilled by Taliban revenge against collaborators. Councils are searching for big, many-bedroomed properties to rent or repurpose, as fleeing Afghan families can have a dozen members. The Home Secretary has offered to resettle 20,000 Afghans in due course. Yet if history serves, we’ll soon see many more than 20,000 Afghans land on British shores, all of whom won’t necessarily have worked for Nato and few

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Rishi’s stamp duty gimmick did little but help greedy builders

The Hundred — some sort of pimped-up cricket tournament, I gather — passed me by entirely, but I’ve been admiring the spin bowling of the Clayton, Dubilier & Rice team in another big contest, namely the bid battle for Morrisons. When CD&R made its initial 230p per share offer in June, there was much talk of the ruthless financial wizardry this New York private equity firm might apply to the supermarket group to extract maximum profit within a short timescale. But there was no more than a passing mention of the role as CD&R’s adviser of the former Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy. Now the offer has been raised

Toby Young Toby Young

My eye-opening mini-break in Hull

Given how difficult it is to arrange an overseas holiday, I thought I’d take Charlie and Freddie, my two youngest, to the north-east for a mini-break. Admittedly, not the most glamorous of locations, but we had a reason to be there: QPR were playing two away games on the spin, the first in Hull, the second in Middlesbrough. We planned to take the train to Hull in time for Saturday’s match, hire a car, drive along the coast, stopping at Scarborough and Whitby on the way, and arrive in Middlesbrough for Wednesday night’s game. Then it would be back to London the following day. Seeing a less affluent part of