Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: More defence spending, more migrant arrivals and more Jenrick stunts

Home The government said that the armed forces had to move to ‘warfighting readiness’ and accepted the 62 recommendations of the Strategic Defence Review headed by the former defence secretary and head of Nato, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. But the funding of the plans remained in doubt as the government insisted that a rise in defence spending to3 per cent by 2034 remained an ‘aspiration’; yet Nato was expected at this month’s summit to insist on a level of 3.5 per cent. The government committed £15 billion to its nuclear warhead programme; £1.5 billion to build six new munitions factories; an extra £1.5 billion for repairs to military housing;

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Have I unmasked Cambridge’s bike bandit?

The Cambridge bike bandit emerged. I watched the rough, smiling face of the old man who came slowly from his bungalow and urged me to join him around the back; he didn’t look like a thief. We entered his grassless yard filled with bikes, tyres and tools. ‘This Raleigh, £80,’ he said, withdrawing a creaky frame from the pile. ‘I just changed the tyre. You see? Not heavy. Made in England. Nottingham. You can try a little bit. Try it for ten minutes. I don’t mind.’ A source had told me about the bandit, a man who openly shifted stolen bikes from a suburban Cambridge home, so bad and unpoliced

David Hare

Satire is nothing without contempt

On 30 April, the solicitors Mishcon de Reya asked me to join a panel commemorating the 25th anniversary of the High Court trial in which David Irving unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier. Deborah was there, alongside her lawyer, Anthony Julius. Irving’s anti-Semitism had a particular purpose. Postwar, the chief obstacle to restoring the ideas of Adolf Hitler was what happened to the Jews. If their genocide could be denied, fascism could be rehabilitated. For the occasion, I prepared a list of the 16 principal characteristics of fascism which I take to be: 1) Exploitation of historic grievances 2) Frequent resort to states of emergency 3)

The Spectator

This is a dangerous moment for free speech

Britain without blasphemy laws is a surprisingly recent development. Blasphemy was abolished as a common law offence in England and Wales only in 2008 and in Scotland in 2021. But that was the final burial of a law dead for much longer. The last execution for the crime was in 1697; the last imprisonment in 1921; and the last successful trial in 1977 – Mary Whitehouse’s prosecution of Gay News for publishing a poem about a centurion’s rape of Christ’s corpse. Even if 11 local councils banned Monty Python’s Life of Brian two years later, the trend since has been towards trusting that the Almighty is big enough to fend

Wednesday

Madeline Grant

It didn’t take Starmer long to morph into Brezhnev

It has taken Sir Keir Starmer just under 11 months to enter his Brezhnev era. Portly, autocratic and reliant on past glories, the Prime Minister began today’s PMQs by reading a list that would make Borat proud of the infrastructural benevolences to make benefit glorious region of Red Wall. In Sir Keir’s world, there is no decay or decline: the economy is booming, pensioners and children are well cared for and the streets are safe. Notable by her absence was the Deputy Prime Minister: those windows of Downing Street won’t measure themselves The praesidium – sorry, Front Bench – lapped this up. Or those who turned up did. Absent was

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Badenoch’s ‘chaos’ attack on Starmer will be less effective than she hopes

Fists flew at Prime Minister’s Questions. The party leaders sprang from their corners and bashed each other repeatedly in the face. It was fun to watch. Kemi Badenoch accused Sir Keir Starmer of performing so many U-turns that ‘his head must be spinning.’ Two weeks ago, he panicked and cancelled his decision to withdraw the winter fuel allowance. ‘The Chancellor is rushing her plans,’ she said, ‘because she’s just realised when winter is.’ Kemi sprang her trap. She leapt to her feet, glittering with triumph Sir Keir shrugged this off. ‘I’m glad to see she’s catching up on what happened two weeks ago.’ Kemi delivered a booby-trapped question disguised as a

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Terrorist prisoners should be kept on a military base

The murder of a prison officer on duty is closer now than at any time in the last 25 years. That was the inevitable conclusion I reached after the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick commissioned me to look into the threat posed by terrorists inside our high-security prisons and the safety of front-line staff in across our chaotic and dysfunctional penal estate. The impetus was a number of atrocious attacks in what ought to be our securest facilities – allegedly carried out by extremists using improvised weapons to maim and murder officers. Violence against prison staff has evolved from an occasional occupational hazard to an atrocious normality without parallel in

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

It’s time to ban the caravan

The French government has banned smoking at the beach, a performative gesture for a government that’s incapable of doing anything about a €3 trillion deficit, uncontrolled borders and lawlessness. As it’s in the mood for banning things at the beach, it should listen to me and ban caravans. Here in the Deep South of France, just by the interchange of the A9 motorway and the departmental route 13, is a sprawling prairie containing thousands of dead, rotting caravans and camping vans. The only good caravan is a dead caravan. Unfortunately, as one dies, another is born It’s like an abandoned suburb of Dante’s inferno. It’s the Hotel California for these

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Greta Thunberg’s pathetic Gaza voyage

When we consider child stars through the ages, the girls generally age better than the boys; Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Billie Piper all made the seamless switch from winsome cuties to gifted entertainers. The same cannot be said of Greta Thunberg, though she’s certainly remained consistently irritating. Neither a singer nor a thespian, she is a professional tantrum-thrower, more comparable to the fictional horrors Violet Elizabeth Bott and Veruca Salt than the trio of troupers listed above. Was there ever such a show-boating crusading numpty as Greta? For some reason she reminds me of him from East 17 who somehow managed to run himself over with his own car And

David Abulafia

The strange attempt to find Muslim Vikings

A charity called the Brilliant Club offers support to disadvantaged pupils in non-selective state schools to enable them to aim high and gain places at leading universities. No one can quarrel with that. But guidance provided to the charity’s tutors raises concern about the way the scholars are being taught. They are being encouraged to believe that the Vikings were very diverse, were not all white northern Europeans, and that some of them were quite probably practising Muslims. Decolonising the Vikings is, admittedly, a difficult task. They were very good at colonising other people’s lands Decolonising the Vikings is, admittedly, a difficult task. They were very good at colonising other

Tuesday

Andrew Tettenborn

Brace yourselves for more Quran-burning trials in Britain

You might well have felt slightly repelled if last February you had passed someone ineptly trying to set fire to a copy of the Quran on the streets of London, while simultaneously using some remarkably fruity language about Islamic doctrine and its effect on believers. The man was Turkish dissident Hamit Coşkun: much to the disgust of a passing Muslim, he was burning the book outside the Turkish consulate as a demonstration against the excessive Islamification of Turkey under Recep Erdoğan. The effect on free speech of this judgement is very concerning But whatever your distaste, you should be very worried about the fact that this man has now been

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Get your Pride month Kevin the Carrot, while stocks last

Please consider this a sort of public service announcement. I mention it because sadly, you may have been unaware of what a special month this is at the supermarket Aldi. You still have time to buy a ‘Kevin the Carrot’ toy from Aldi for £3.99. Kevin is on sale all year round, of course – but in June, for a limited period, you can buy him dressed in the rainbow Pride colours, to celebrate Pride month. You can also buy a rainbow Pride beach towel to show your support. It seems to me a shame that following the supreme court ruling Aldi did not take the opportunity to portray Kevin as

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who needs a break

Twenty years on from its spectacular revival it looks like Doctor Who might not be returning to our screens again in the immediate future. I haven’t actually watched Doctor Who for a long time, but because I wrote an awful lot of it for years – on TV, but also books, comics, radio plays, yogurt pot labels, you name it – people always ask me what I think should become of it. My answer? I’d cancel it and flee for the hills. Doctor Who was born in an age when we didn’t need to rabbit on about our ‘values’ Twenty years is an incredible run, almost equalling its original marathon

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Hamit Coskun’s life will only get harder now

Hamit Coskun has been found guilty of a ‘religiously-motivated public order offence’, after he burnt a Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in London. This is Britain’s first formal capitulation to Islamic blasphemy laws. Not only does it suggest that Islam deserves special protection against sacrilege, and shielding from the freedom to offend, but it also rewards the radical Muslims for exercising violence against expressions of irreverence. In accordance with the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Public Order Act 1986, Coskun was found guilty of disorderly behaviour ‘within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress,’ motivated by ‘hostility towards

Monday

John Ferry John Ferry

Why is the SNP resurrecting full fiscal autonomy for Scotland?

John Swinney’s strategy for retaining the office of first minister after next year’s Holyrood election was fairly straight forward. All he had to do was sit back and watch a combination of the rise of Reform and Labour’s growing unpopularity split the opposition vote and the SNP would once again emerge as the biggest party in parliament. No rocking the boat with radical policy announcements – and definitely no campaigning for another referendum. The SNP had asked for full fiscal autonomy as part of the new fiscal settlement put in place after the 2014 referendum As Alex Salmond had done in the run-up to the 2011 Scottish election, the constitution,

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Should we feel sorry for nepo babies like Ella Mills?

Is sympathy finite? The Rolling Stones suggested that we might extend this tenderest of emotions towards ‘Old Nick’ himself, but I’m not so sure. Can we really just keep feeling sorry for people infinitely, and expect it never to run out? How about empathy – that favourite buttonhole bloom of the slippery self-adoring? Are we required to have empathy with every delicate little flower who claims victimhood or may we sternly put our judgemental hat on and decide ‘No, you’re an over-privileged self-pitier – back of the queue!’ Is it better for nepo-babes to be nice and in denial, or brazenly revelling in it and therefore more honest, but also nastier?

Bartek Staniszewski

What Karol Nawrocki’s triumph means for Poland

Karol Nawrocki – the Law and Justice candidate – is the winner of Poland’s 2025 presidential election following a dramatic turn of events. Despite the final exit poll declaring Civic Platform’s Rafał Trzaskowski to be the winner by a margin of 0.6 percentage points, as the votes started coming in over the night, it was Nawrocki who ended up ahead with 51 per cent of the vote. The Law and Justice candidate managed to overcome the odds to become President, but the result will likely be a political standstill that will leave both sides unhappy. The two parties have been at each other’s throats History does not repeat itself, but

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why are NHS staff refusing to be vaccinated?

Some wise person – I have a strong sense it may have been our own Christopher Fildes – once offered a compelling theory of the cyclical nature of financial crises. They happened, he argued, shortly after the last person at the bank to remember the most recent crash reached retirement age and cleared his desk.   For NHS staff, I think there’s a pretty strong case to be made – given their constant contact with lots of immunocompromised people – that being vaccinated should be a condition of employment At this point, he said, the buccaneering young things who came after started to imagine that the recent period of stability and

Sunday

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

The Limitless Pendant is an uncool trip into the tech nerd future

The problem with the future is it is very obviously no longer being created by cool people. Instead, it belongs to autistic nerds who want nothing more than to be a computer. Cool people invent things like surfboards, Ray-Bans and Triumph Spitfires. Nerds make profoundly uncool things like cars that drive themselves and the absurd Limitless Pendant device that I have been attempting to wear. The Pendant records everything you say, and everything anyone near you says Let me start this review by stating I hope the Pendant – yours for $199 – fails very hard. It is an awful and life-negating device that subjugates any human stupid enough to

Andrew Doyle

Is the ‘woke’ movement really over?

‘I was with some doctors last week who said there is no such thing as biological sex.’ It sounds like the rambling of a madman or a drunk, but these words were uttered last week at the Charleston literary festival in East Sussex by Lady Brenda Hale, former president of the Supreme Court. Personally, I would avoid doctors who lack this rudimentary knowledge of the human body. They might start asking me about the regularity of my menstrual cycle. Wokeness has destroyed lives. Children who are gender nonconforming have been persuaded that they are ‘born in the wrong body’ The ubiquity of wokeness has meant that we have grown accustomed