Society

Saturday

Douglas Murray

My entry to the Martin McGuinness poetry prize

In these winter months, we must find our amusements where we can. And like many people I was amused to learn recently that the ‘Martin McGuinness Peace Foundation’ has announced a poetry competition in honour of the late IRA leader. As Ian Acheson has noted here, there will be those who think that the last years of his life, when McGuinness entered government in Northern Ireland, are the years to be commemorated in rhyme. A certain type of leftist even tends to tut at any mention of the earlier, bloodier phase of McGuinness’s career. The Green party MP Caroline Lucas did just that to me some years ago when we

Julie Bindel

Why are women treated so badly when it comes to murder?

The case of Anthony Williams, convicted of the manslaughter of his wife Ruth and sentenced to just five years in prison, reminded me of the early days of Justice for Women – a feminist law reform campaign I co-founded in 1991. Two days after domestic abuse victim Sara Thornton lost her appeal against her murder conviction for killing her violent husband, another defendant, Joseph McGrail, walked free from court. McGrail had kicked his wife Marion to death while she lay unconscious but was found guilty of the lesser offence of manslaughter on the grounds of ‘provocation’. While listening to McGrail’s tales of woe, the judge sympathised and said, ‘This lady

Friday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Can the United States be transported back to Christendom?

26 min listen

This week’s Holy Smoke examines the fragmentation of American Catholicism following the election of pro-choice Catholic Joe Biden. It focuses on the strangest current of thought among the many conservative Catholics calling for an urgent change of approach in order to confront what promises to be an authoritarian liberal administration. It’s called integralism, a label previously attached to distinctly un-American European Catholic reactionaries such as Action française and General Franco’s Falangists. In its US incarnation it’s less nationalist but in some ways equally extreme. Its proponents want to turn the United States into a nation in which, in the long run, only Catholics will be full citizens eligible to hold

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Britain’s battle to prevent ‘green protectionism’

The UK’s commitment to get to net zero by 2050 is going to require some difficult political choices. But it will be impossible to maintain public support for the policy if people think that climate action at home is simply leading to work moving abroad and no great reduction in the amount of carbon emitted globally. This, as I say in the Times today, is going to become an increasingly big problem in years to come. There is mounting concern about it at the top of government. If you can’t address ‘carbon leakage’, to use the rather grim technical term, you can’t deal with climate change. For Britain, the situation

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Does this Israeli study support Britain’s one-dose strategy?

Is the British approach of prioritising first doses of Covid vaccines and not promising a second dose until 12 weeks later compromising our ability to fight the disease? It is not a moot point, with several EU figures asserting that it is a risky route to take. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, as far as the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine is concerned, what evidence we have supports the practice of delaying a second dose until 12 weeks after the first one; the vaccine is more effective that way. However, a question mark has continued to hang over the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. There is limited data on the most effective

Matthew Lynn

The problem with the Supreme Court’s Uber ruling

They are monitored by the firm. They don’t have the option of working for other companies. And they are entitled to all the protections that come with being an employee. The Supreme Court today potentially blew up Uber’s business model, and the model of many other fast-growing ‘gig economy’ companies as well, with a ruling that drivers for the app operator are not self-employed after all, as the company likes to claim, but staff, and should be treated as such. In truth, you can argue the case for or against that decision, as the lawyers have just done expensively in court. But in reality, this is a hugely important verdict

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Suzanne Moore Edition

44 min listen

Suzanne Moore is a journalist. On the podcast, she tells Katy about interviewing to work for Marxism Today, feeling out of place at The Guardian, and standing to be an independent MP.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Power jab: the rise of vaccine diplomacy

44 min listen

How are China and Russia getting ahead in the great game of vaccine diplomacy? (00:50) Has the US press lost its way? (11:30) Why is Anglo-Saxon history making a comeback? (27:20) With The Spectator‘s broadcast editor Cindy Yu; journalist Owen Matthews; Harper’s publisher Rick MacArthur; The Washington Post‘s media critic Erik Wemple; journalist Dan Hitchens; and Sutton Hoo archaeologist Professor Martin Craver. Presented by Lara Prendergast. Produced by Max Jeffery and Matt Taylor.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Covid cases have collapsed

Last month, Imperial College’s React study claimed that new cases of Covid were static or even rising slightly. This contradicted the figures for confirmed new cases, obtained through the Test and Trace system, which had shown a sharp fall in new cases from the second week of January onwards. Given that React tests a randomised sample of the population to arrive at an estimate for prevalence of the disease — and is therefore not capable of being skewed by the number of tests being performed — some were more inclined to believe that this, and not the number of confirmed cases, showed the genuine picture. However, February’s React study, published

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Of course there’s a free speech crisis on campus

A free speech crisis on campus? Apparently, it’s a myth, concocted by right-wing commentators and latched on to by a Tory government desperate to talk about something other than Covid. That, at least, is the unconvincing take being echoed across social media at the moment, as the campus wars erupt once again. When the government announced this week that it wants to toughen the law around free speech on campus, the National Union of Students dismissed the very premise. ‘There is no evidence of a freedom of expression crisis on campus’, it said. ‘Students’ unions are constantly taking positive steps to help facilitate the thousands of events that take place

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Unionists should work with the Irish Taoiseach

Sinn Fein is not a normal political party. Don’t take my word for it, the charge is laid by the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, in his frequent clashes with the party’s leader Mary Lou McDonald in the Irish parliament. The Shinners smell power in the South. According to the latest polls they are the most popular party in the Republic of Ireland. Meanwhile the Irish political ruling class have long disdained Sinn Fein, a party that sees itself as the authentic inheritor of the 1916 uprising that ejected Britain from most of Ireland. But Sinn Fein shouldn’t be let off the hook for their unrepented and inextricable links to the

Peter Jones

How a Roman emperor would handle Navalny

A Roman emperor would consider the tyrant Putin’s treatment of Alexei Navalny’s supporters as foolish but, looking at Russia as a whole, would not see Navalny as a danger to Putin’s tyranny. The emperor took a largely eirenic view of angry mobs. If they were asking for e.g. food in a shortage, he supplied it. Keeping the people happy was his job. In cases of sedition, as Seneca said, one punished only as a last resort. So when bakers rioted in Ephesus, the governor threatened imprisonment, but in the event just reprimanded them. No one wanted a bloodbath. So there is no record of emperors being removed by citizen protest,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The unintended consequences of the Macpherson report

Sir William Macpherson of Cluny has died. His obituaries praise him for his 1998 inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence case. His report did indeed shed light on the failure of the police to catch the young man’s killers. It has had, however, a profound and bad effect on our law. The report’s recommendations redefined a racist incident: ‘A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.’ This definition means that absolutely anything in the world could be a racist incident, because it relies wholly on what a complainant ‘perceives’. The definition’s use of the word ‘victim’ also implies acceptance that

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Why is my 87-year-old mother emailing me risque jokes?

Q. My mother, aged 87, has taken to forwarding me by email slightly risqué jokes. Her carer is the recipient of the jokes and reads them aloud to my mother, who then suggests she forwards them to me. I think this is an exercise in connecting but it has had the reverse effect as, due to the inappropriate content of these jokes, I am not sure how to react. Mary, what should I do?— C.D., Lavenham, Suffolk A. Next time you speak to the carer, apologise for not having acknowledged these communications. Sadly your computer is oversensitive to anything that seems like spam and puts it straight into the junk

The Spectator

Letters: Immunity passports are nothing new

Too many bishops Sir: As a former Anglican clergyman, I have been following your articles about the current state of the Church of England with interest and sadness. I note that the recent article by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York is strong on modish phrases, such as a ‘mixed ecology church’, but it ignores two of the large elephants in the room (‘A Christian vision’, 13 February). The number of bishops over the past century has more or less doubled, in spite of the diminishing number of worshippers and parish clergy. Likewise, while archdeacons used commonly to run their own parishes in addition to their archdiaconal duties, they are

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Salmond, Sturgeon and why The Spectator went to court

Did Nicola Sturgeon lie to the Scottish parliament? A Holyrood committee into the now infamous Alex Salmond affair has been looking into what she knew and when she knew it. In its possession is Salmond’s explosive written evidence, which contradicts her account. So who is telling the truth? This SNP-chaired inquiry has been in no rush to find the answer. Last month, it made the extraordinary decision not to publish the Salmond submission at all — blaming legal problems. There’s a risk, it said, that his account might identify some of the women who complained against him, thereby defying a court order to protect anonymity. Without the key evidence, its

Toby Young Toby Young

My advice for the next ‘free speech champion’

I was delighted to hear the government plans to appoint a ‘free speech champion’ to the board of the Office for Students. His or her responsibility will be to make sure universities in England do everything that is reasonably practicable to uphold freedom of speech within the law, including preventing external speakers from being no-platformed by student activists. This legal duty has been on the statute books since 1986, but there is no enforcement mechanism. That’s why this announcement is so important. The new free speech tsar will have the power to fine universities that don’t uphold the law. Theresa May’s government took a dummy run at this when it

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The City is losing its battle with Brussels and Amsterdam

No sign of progress towards a workable deal with the EU for financial services, on which news is due next month. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned in unusually frank terms this week that although the UK has granted ‘equivalence’ to the EU in some financial activities, ‘the EU has not so far done likewise to the UK’ and seems unwilling to do so by reference to a ‘common framework of global standards’. Instead, Brussels is seeking to apply to the UK ‘a standard that the EU holds no other country to’, amounting to ‘rule-taking pure and simple’. Given the importance of financial services to the UK economy, that’s

The Spectator

Do gender studies departments have a gender problem?

Target practice The government hit its target of giving a first Covid vaccine to 15 million of the most vulnerable people by the middle of February. Some other government targets which have been met (sort of): — 100,000 Covid tests a day by the end of April. The government did claim to have achieved this — but did so by counting testing kits which had been posted out and not necessarily returned. — There was a rise of 7,600 people applying for teacher training courses last year, which meant that the government hit its target for secondary school teachers to the tune of 106% and primary school teachers by 130%.