Society

Thursday

Melissa Kite

The truth about Surrey’s obsession with horse masks

A saloon car pulled up opposite our fields and a man sat there looking at the horses with a bewildered expression. I had noticed this car meandering along the farm track, driving between the horse fields and stopping every time he came alongside a horse, sitting there for minutes on end. Then he would start driving again. Then he would stop alongside another horse. For quite a while he was parked by the grazing fields above where the builder boyfriend and I have a smallholding, and was stopped staring at our friends’ horses, I realised. When he got to our fields, he pulled up again and began peering into our

Wednesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The Christian mental health crisis

34 min listen

Is the mental health of Christians beginning to collapse under the strain not just of Covid and its effect on worship but also the bottomless contempt of progressive ideology for religious belief? This week’s Holy Smoke is a conversation with theologian Dr Gavin Ashenden about a crisis of morale that is robbing some Christians of the will to live. One former churchgoer told me last week that he’d be perfectly happy not to wake up the next morning – and I knew exactly how he felt. But in conclusion Gavin suggests a way of breaking out of this existential nightmare. So, as they say on the BBC, if you’re affected

Leo McKinstry

Judge Ollie Robinson on his cricket skills, not his tweets

Ollie Robinson, who made his Test debut for England at Lord’s last week against New Zealand, is an outstanding cricketer with both bat and ball. But that ability apparently counts for little. His performance was overshadowed by the discovery of some incendiary, tasteless tweets he had sent almost a decade ago as a teenage professional. An abject apology was not enough to save him. The England Cricket Board promptly banned Robinson from the next Test match, and a full inquiry has been launched into his conduct. Quite rightly, sports minister Oliver Dowden has called the penalty ‘over the top’. But that intervention has not helped Robinson. This row marks a

Tuesday

Mary Dejevsky

In defence of the foreign aid cut

It says something for the persuasive powers of former international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, that he mustered enough potential votes to inflict defeat on Boris Johnson’s government, if only his amendment had been permitted and a vote had been held. Mitchell’s consolation prize, awarded by the Speaker in recognition of the strength of feeling in the Commons, is an emergency debate on what would have been the substance of his amendment: to reinstate foreign aid at 0.7 per cent of GDP from next year, rather than the reduction to 0.5 per cent that was set in the Budget.  The rift this row has exposed among Conservative MPs could embarrass the Prime

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

With Craig Brown

24 min listen

Craig Brown is an awarding winning critic, satirist and former restaurant reviewer. His most recent book One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. On the podcast, he talks to Lara and Olivia about the horrible food at Eton, his utter failure to bake a cake, and proposes that one of the least important things to him when he was reviewing a restaurant was the food.

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

How much trouble is the government in over foreign aid?

13 min listen

After the government cut the UK’s foreign aid budget a group of rebellious tory MPs bound together to try and reverse the decision, will it come to a head this week?‘This cut has caused some resentment amongst other nations’ – Isabel Hardman And has the culture war spread to cricket after the suspension of Ollie Robinson for decade old racist remarks?‘I think there is a broader question in society about how do we allow people to make up for youthful errors?’ – James Forsyth And with Portugal moving to the amber list, just how limited will the options be for our summer holidays? ‘The government now, it’s aim is to

William Atkinson

Oxford’s petty war on smokers

Life is about to get even more miserable for smokers living in Oxford. Oxfordshire county council has announced plans to make the region ‘smoke-free’ by 2025. Smokers will be prevented from having a puff outside cafes, pubs, and restaurants, while employers will be asked to impose smoke-free spaces in workplaces. Hospitals, schools, and public areas will be urged to ban smoking, and lighting up will be discouraged in homes and other private spaces. In short, Marlboro retailers hoping to ply their wares anywhere between Banbury and Henley are going to be out of luck. I’m not a smoker and I have no desire to be. The combination of a wheezy grandfather and

Sunday

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

The problem with the New York Times’ Gaza coverage

While war raged between Israel and Gaza, the New York Times published a powerful montage of 64 minors said to have been killed in the conflict so far. Under its famous motto ‘All the news that’s fit to print’, and with the headline ‘They Were Just Children’, America’s paper of record informed us that ‘they had wanted to be doctors, artists and leaders’, and invited us to read their stories. It was impossible to look at those innocent faces without feeling deeply distressed. This was the human cost of the Israeli war machine, brought directly to your breakfast table, in a way that the vicious Turkish assault on the Kurds

Saturday

Chris Daw KC

Chris Daw, Lionel Shriver and Sam Russell

21 min listen

On this episode: Chris Daw QC on the blame game that surrounds the Hillsborough disaster and why it’s time to move on (01:00); Lionel Shriver suggests we should just give Scottish nationalists what they want and watch the chaos unfold (07:40); and Sam Russell, the Spectator’s new broadcast producer, talks about how book lovers are turning TikTok into a book club (16:25).

Robin Aitken

More northern accents won’t save the BBC

It seems that the BBC has finally acknowledged the truth of George Bernard Shaw’s aphorism. Demonstrating his inherent anti-Englishness, the old Fabian snob declared:  ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.’  And the barb hurts because to an extent we must accept that it is partly true.  Sticking a few more regional accents in front of a microphone doesn’t begin to address the real problems the BBC faces In our defence, it is also true of people other than the English. Every European country, and probably every country in the world (including Shaw’s Ireland) has its own bumpkin

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Does Google really understand racism?

Opponents of the new racial extremism typically object that it vilifies white people in much the same way that classical racism does black people or other minorities. While this ideology does retail racist theories about white people (collective racial privilege, heritable racial guilt), when progressives want to get really racist, they invariably turn to another target: Jews.  Kamau Bobb was, until a few days ago, Google’s head of diversity strategy. The Washington Free Beacon uncovered a blog Bobb penned in 2007 in response to Israeli actions against Hamas in Gaza. It wasn’t your standard progressive plea for Israel to stop making such a fuss and let those nice Islamists drive

Friday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Stonewall’s dystopian attacks on gendered language

Today brings yet more proof that Liz Truss is dead right to want to withdraw government departments from Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme. The Telegraph reports that one way institutions and companies can rise up Stonewall’s ‘Workplace Equality Index’ is by ditching words like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ and using more ‘gender-neutral’ terms instead. Apparently, words like ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ are too ‘gendered’ and thus they might offend trans people. So if you want those precious brownie points from Stonewall, and if you want to be beatified as a ‘diversity champion’, you’ll have to stop using these loving, everyday terms that the entire population understands and instead parrot the gobbledegook of woke

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Does the Indian variant increase the risk of hospitalisation?

Is the Indian variant really more like to land you in hospital? That is the claim being widely reported this morning, based on Public Health England’s technical briefing 14. The briefing claims that the Indian (or Delta variant) is associated with a ‘significantly increased risk of hospitalisation within 14 days of specimen date.’ If you are infected with the Indian variant you are 2.61 times as like to require hospitalisation within 14 days, relative to the risk if you are infected with the Kent variant. And you are 1.67 times at greater risk of having to seek A&E treatment or be hospitalised. It is only when PHE tried to adjust

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Broken Trust: the crisis at the heart of the National Trust

33 min listen

On this week’s podcast, we start with Charles Moore’s cover story on the failings of the National Trust. Why is the Trust getting involved in culture wars, and can it be fixed? Lara speaks to Charles, a Spectator columnist and former editor of the magazine, and Simon Jenkins, who was chair of the Trust between 2008 and 2014. Simon says that it’s ‘very odd’ for the organisation to become embroiled in controversy over Britain’s colonial past and contested history. ‘The National Trust’s relationship with the British Empire, let alone with slavery, is pretty tenuous. I don’t take this accusation against the Trust terribly seriously. This is just currently what I

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why the vaccines should prevent a deadly third wave

Among the scientists and medics calling this week for caution in the government’s reopening of the economy was Dr Lisa Spencer, a consultant in Liverpool and honorary secretary of the British Thoracic Society, who warned on the Today programme on Tuesday that the country was covered with a series of ‘mini Covid volcanoes’ which ‘could explode and send a massive gas plume across much more of the UK.’ Her reasoning was that a quarter of adults could still be susceptible to Covid-19, either because the vaccine didn’t work for them or because they refused to have the vaccine at all. She suggested that 10 per cent of people might refuse

Debbie Hayton

The sinister attacks on the LGB Alliance

Lesbian and gay rights are still not secure in the UK. This week the LGB Alliance – a group used to being smeared and misrepresented – came under further attack. With astonishing impudence, the LGBT+ Consortium, Gendered Intelligence, the LGBT Foundation, TransActual, and the Good Law Project ganged up with Mermaids UK in a staggering appeal to strip the LGB Alliance of its charitable status. The legal action is being brought in the name of Mermaids UK, a controversial charity that works with transgender-identified children. If it wasn’t such a serious attack on a legitimate charity, the appeal would be laughable. It’s clear from their submission that Mermaids doesn’t much

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Will the new breed of retail investors cash in – or crash out?

‘Feed the ducks when they’re quacking’ sounds like advice from a foie gras farmer — but let’s leave gastronomy till last and focus first on stock market activity. The saying actually comes from Wall Street and means that if investor demand is strong, it’s best satisfied with ample supplies of new stock. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, if the investors understand risk and the offerings are sound. But is that what’s happening in the current retail investment craze on both sides of the Atlantic? Probably not. From its low in March last year, the FTSE 100 index has risen 40 per cent. A hectic London market in new issues since the

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Taking charge: it’s time to buy an electric car

As a wise colleague once said: ‘Yesterday is a great time to buy a computer, because you have already enjoyed it for a day. Alternatively, buy a computer tomorrow. The computer you buy tomorrow will be both faster and cheaper than the computers available now. On no account, however, should you ever buy a computer today.’ One factor delaying our adoption of electric cars is that experience has taught us it pays to wait when buying anything with a plug. There is a huge impetus to buy property because, over time, your options get fewer and dearer. But when contemplating the purchase of an electric car we assume every year

Dot Wordsworth

Are we overusing ‘overhaul’?

Last week, John Lewis and Marks & Spencer were overhauling their stores. Football clubs were madly overhauling teams and we women were overhauling wardrobes, if you can believe what you read in the papers. There was a clear danger of over overhauling. What do we mean by it? Overhauling implies change. But that sense has only dominated in the past 150 years. Before that, the usual meaning was to inspect or audit, in a naval context. ‘To-day I over-haul’d the Powder, and told the Lieutenant that I had twenty-three half Barrels in Store,’ wrote the Royal Navy gunner John Bulkeley in 1740. His ship, the Wager, was wrecked in remote