Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Indian variant goes up, Santander goes down and pubs reopen

Home The government made noises about having to delay the lifting of coronavirus restrictions on 21 June in some parts on account of the Indian variant, which appeared more transmissible. ‘The race between our vaccine programme and the virus may be about to become a great deal tighter,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said on television. The gap between first and second coronavirus vaccinations would be cut from 12 weeks to eight for over-fifties and the clinically vulnerable. The army was sent to help with testing in Bolton and Blackburn. By the beginning of the week, 37 per cent of the adult population had received both doses of coronavirus vaccination;

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 22 May 2021

We all know the importance of making a viable plan before we play. If a contract is poor and seems to have little chance, we must mentally place the cards where we need them to be and plan the play on that assumption. But if a contract seems solid we should imagine the worst possible layout of the cards and see if we can cope with that. The second part is harder; partly because we’re thrilled to be in a good (easy) contract and partly because of something which is known in the business as… laziness. There are no lazy players on Simon Gillis’s team — winners of this year’s

Taki

I can finally spill the beans about Halston and Princess Margaret

New York Already on your idiot box via Netflix is a mini-series about a man who also used one name, but burned out rather early due to an outsized ego and too much coke. His name was Halston, and his fame was based on the fact that he designed a pillbox hat that Jackie Kennedy Onassis wore at her hubby’s inauguration. Yes, fame is tricky, especially in America, where self-creation was invented and where superciliousness and sleekness pass for gravity and depth. I knew Halston, he was a friend of my then sister-in-law, but we had zero in common. In fact, he thought I wasn’t important enough to greet in

Wednesday

Julie Bindel

Stonewall and the silencing of feminist voices at universities

This week a game-changer of a report released by Essex university led to its Vice Chancellor abjectly apologising for the university cancelling two feminist academics for their views on gender identity and sex. Both professors Jo Phoenix and Rosa Freedman have views which accord with our current laws on gender identity, and yet they had a number of talks cancelled by Essex university and Freedman was potentially rejected from a job after they were labelled ‘transphobes’ by a mob of intolerant academics and students. Now Essex has been forced into issuing a humiliating apology and admitted that its treatment of the professors infringed on their freedom of speech. So how

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Pimlico Academy and the politicisation of the playground

The strange tale of Pimlico Academy, the central London school roiled by ‘anti-racist’ protests, shows us that the culture war now consumes all before it. No institution or arena of life can carry on unmolested by our overheated discussions about race and identity. The politicisation of absolutely everything has, perhaps inevitably, reached the playground. Daniel Smith was, until this week, headteacher of Pimlico Academy. He resigned yesterday following months of student and staff protests over the school’s uniform policy, traditional ‘kings and queens’ curriculum and, most scandalously of all, its flying of the Union flag. All this, pupils and teachers said, reflected a cruel, provocative and even racist ethos on

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

British cops shouldn’t support Palestine – or Israel

Picture the scene. A female police officer — hi-viz police jacket, regulation black hat, facemask slipping from her nose — punches the air, proclaiming: ‘free, free Palestine!’ Her words are met with cheers from the crowd at the anti-Israel rally in central London that she was supposed to be policing. Actually, you don’t have to bother picturing the scene. Just watch the video clip below to see a perfect symbol of the toxic blend of state authoritarianism and hard-left politics that is creeping across British institutions today. After I posted the video on Twitter, the Metropolitan Police said it was ‘reviewing the footage’ and would provide an update ‘shortly’. One

Tuesday

Dominic Green Dominic Green

Has liberalism gone too far?

27 min listen

In this week’s episode of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator’s world edition Dominic Green meets the author Sohrab Ahmari for a chat about his new book, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering The Wisdom Of Tradition In An Age Of Chaos. In it, Ahmari, a writer and New York Post op-ed editor, makes a compelling case for seeking the inherited traditions and ideals that give our lives meaning, via 12 fundamental questions that challenge our modern certainties. Among them: Is God reasonable? What is freedom for? What do we owe our parents, our bodies, one another? Exploring each question through the life and ideas of great thinkers, from Saint Augustine

Esther O'Reilly

Richard Dawkins’s views on Down’s syndrome aren’t a surprise

Irish radio host Brendan O’Connor is not interested in having an emotional discussion. He’s just curious: if a man of science claims that it would increase the sum total of the world’s suffering to bring a child with Down’s syndrome into it, what evidence does he have for that claim? In a viral clip, O’Connor — whose daughter has Down’s syndrome — maintains his professional poise as he asks Richard Dawkins to comment on an old tweet offering advice to a woman torn over what she would do if pregnant with a Down’s syndrome child: ‘Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world

Monday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Lisa Keogh and the myth of campus censorship

The next time someone tells you campus censorship is a myth, made up by right-wing tabloids and leapt upon by a Tory government keen to wage a ‘culture war’ against the left, tell them to Google ‘Lisa Keogh’. Keogh is a 29-year-old law student at Abertay University in Dundee. She is currently being investigated by the university for the crime of saying that women have vaginas and men are stronger than women. For all the naysaying on the left, campus censorship is now apparently so extensive that stating widely accepted facts is a risky business. Campus censorship is now apparently so extensive that stating widely accepted facts is a risky

Saturday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Study: AstraZeneca vaccine highly effective in India

Does the Indian variant of Sars-CoV-2, B1.617.2, have the capacity to escape vaccines? Is it really more transmissible than the Kent variant, and by how much? Those are the urgent questions which government scientific advisers are going to have to try to answer over the next week or two – and the answers will have profound consequences for life in Britain over the next few months. If the reopening of society and the economy is to be stalled, or even reversed – as some doctors, including the BMA seem to want – it will suppress an economic recovery, and depress an extremely large number of people who had been led

Oliver Johnson

Has South Wales reached herd immunity?

Few topics during the Covid pandemic have caused more controversy than the Herd Immunity Threshold, the level of immunity at which the virus can no longer spread through a population even once social distancing is relaxed. Confident past predictions that Sweden or India had reached this have been swept away by sizeable second waves, and certainly we cannot tell from graphs of falling cases alone that herd immunity has been achieved. However, considering the latest data, I believe it is worth asking whether parts of the UK have passed the Herd Immunity Threshold. The answer may be ‘not quite yet’, but it can be useful to think why. Essentially, herd

Leo McKinstry

Leo McKinstry, Emily Hill and Daisy Dunn

19 min listen

On this week’s episode, Leo McKinstry starts by arguing that having to sell the family home to pay for social care is not an injustice. (00:50) Then, Emily Hill reads her piece. She’s not looking forward to the return of hugging. (08:00) Daisy Dunn finishes the podcast by examining the underappreciated art of asparagus. (12:30)

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The infuriating truth about Harry and Meghan’s activism

‘Why do you lot hate Harry and Meghan so much?’ It’s a question the formerly royal couple’s supporters often ask whenever the pair trend on Twitter, as a clip of the Sussexes’ latest pronouncement, or news of their latest corporate deal, goes viral. They think they already know the answer of course: it is sexism, racism or probably both. Meghan is a woman of colour who dares to speak out about equality and this infuriates gammons and ‘anti-woke’ commentators alike. But the answer is actually very simple, and has nothing to do with Meghan’s skin colour or sex. Harry and Meghan are profoundly annoying. They are virtue-signalling made flesh. They

Friday

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Revealed: How Israel tricked Hamas

I received a message from a trusted contact in Israel yesterday telling me that no ground offensive was planned in Gaza. This was despite the fact that heavy armour and infantry reservists were massing on the border. I decided to hold the story and break it in the morning. Within hours, however, the official Israeli army Twitter account had suggested to the world that ground troops had gone into action. ‘IDF (Israel Defence Force) air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip,’ it said. Nobody noted the careful ambiguity. Within minutes, the news had spread across the world. ‘Israel goes in,’ screamed the MailOnline, the world’s biggest

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Could the Indian variant slow unlocking?

So is the ‘irreversible’ lifting of lockdown really irreversible after all? There is a grim echo of what happened last year in the sudden panic over the Indian variant of SARS-CoV-2. Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that he ‘rules nothing out’, following a meeting of the Sage committee over how to respond to the variant. Next month’s proposed reopening of society must now look in doubt. Monday’s relaxation, which will allow indoor hospitality for the first time this year, will for the moment go ahead, but we have seen how quickly these things can change — and with what little notice. Is the Indian variant really more transmissible, or vaccine-evading,

Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

Batley Grammar and the dilemma for trainee teachers

Should a teacher show a picture of the prophet Mohammed in the classroom? In the wake of the ugly scenes recently at Batley Grammar school when one teacher did just that, there are few questions more relevant to the work of a teacher right now. But when one trainee student at Manchester Metropolitan university contacted his course leader to ask whether they would support someone who did show such an image in class, the response was not the one he expected. The university’s reaction was telling: it did not initially respond to the trainee’s email request for advice. Instead it contacted him a month later saying he must attend a

Mark Johnson

The UK risks becoming a world leader in online censorship

The emergence of a free and open internet was one of the greatest achievements of liberal democracies. The creation of a decentralised web allowed ordinary citizens in countries all over the world to share and receive information. Now, fears about crime and moral panics about disinformation mean that many liberal democracies are making the web a smaller place for everyone. On Wednesday, the Government published its Online Safety Bill, a piece of legislation designed to make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to go online, and the best place to start and grow a digital business.’ Omitted from this description is that the proposed Bill would also make

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The great pretender: Nicola Sturgeon’s independence bluff

31 min listen

In this week’s podcast, we talk to The Spectator‘s editor Fraser Nelson and associate editor Douglas Murray about the challenges facing a freshly re-elected SNP. What next for Nicola Sturgeon – full steam ahead for IndyRef2? Or have neither Scotland or Number 10 the bottle for an all-out battle for independence? [01:02] ‘When you look at the practicalities, the case for independence really does fall. Nicola Sturgeon is selling it in the abstract: “Do you feel Scottish”?’ – Fraser Nelson Meanwhile in matters of social etiquette, the new post-pandemic era looms, complete with new modes of social interactions and conversational topics. In this week’s magazine, Rachel Johnson lays down the

Julie Bindel

What’s the problem, ladies and gentlemen?

Picture the scene. You’re on a train when the following message comes over the tannoy: ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.’ Are you offended? One passenger travelling on a London North Eastern Railway (LNER) train was. ‘So as a non-binary person this announcement doesn’t actually apply to me so I won’t listen,’ the commuter wrote. Remarkably, LNER didn’t simply ignore or dismiss this complaint. It apologised: How scared of the trans mob must LNER be to act so swiftly? ‘I’m really sorry to see this, Laurence, our Train Managers should not be using language like this, and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. Please could you let

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why the legal harassment of today’s Christians is the last legacy of the Soviet Union

33 min listen

Today’s Holy Smoke podcast is about the increasingly brutal bullying and silencing of people – especially Christians – who hold the ‘wrong’ opinions on controversial topics. A culture of censorship is becoming ever more deeply embedded in public institutions not just in Britain but also throughout Europe. In London last month we witnessed the nasty spectacle of John Sherwood, a 71-year-old Christian pastor, being dragged off the street and surrounded by policeman for public preaching against gay marriage. In Finland, former interior minister Päivi Räsänen, an Evangelical Lutheran, faces a jail sentence because she tweeted out the same view. The authorities took offence, rooted through all her previous statements on