Society

Monday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Farage, flags and the forgotten English

The flag-raisings in towns and cities across the country are an inevitable consequence of elites’ seeming preference for every flag but England’s. High-status flags: Ukraine, Palestine, Pride. Low-status flags: Union Jack, St George’s Cross. It is possible, of course, to favour multiple flags. Although a Scot, I am quite partial to St George’s Cross, a simple emblem that stirs up a thousand years of English history – of blood and bravery, trial and triumph – in a crisp, snapping flutter of its folds. The Ukraine flag is the banner of a people who, rather than surrender their homeland, have chosen to fight to the death for it. However you feel

Patrick West

Leave bad manners to the public, not the police

Most people deplore bad behaviour in public and gratuitous breaches of etiquette and manners on trains and buses. Few would disagree with comments made yesterday by the shadow transport secretary, Richard Holden, that ‘inconsiderate and obnoxious behaviour blights the lives of the travelling public’. Yet many, contrariwise, would disagree with his proposal to remedy this scourge, namely for ‘swift justice for those who make people’s lives a misery’ through on-the-spot fines. Under Holden’s plan to tackle the modern malaise of passengers having to ‘endure somebody else’s choice of crap music blasted through a speaker’, he wants to restore a railway bylaw – one that has fallen into abeyance – forbidding

Andrew Tettenborn

Starmer is dodging the real asylum battle

The government is badly rattled on immigration. It knows that its perceived inability either to curb rampant asylum abuses or smartly deport those who ought not to be here amounts to an electoral threat. Over this Bank Holiday weekend the Home Office announced yet another scheme to deal with the matter. Currently anyone refused asylum or faced with removal can appeal to a court, namely the Immigration and Asylum division of the First-tier Tribunal, and from there (with permission) to another court, the Upper Tribunal. Even the first appeal can take over a year; and since, with a few exceptions, a person cannot be removed while an appeal is pending,

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Angela Rayner’s not-so-scandalous ‘third home’

Angela Rayner, it’s reported, has bought a ‘third home’. The three-bedroom seaside flat on the south coast that she has just acquired for a sum slightly more than £700,000 adds, the Mail on Sunday reports excitedly, to her ‘burgeoning property empire’. Pre-burgeoning, be it noted, her property empire consisted of a single house in her constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne. The Candy Brothers, even post-burgeoning, she is not. Papers get to call it a ‘third home’ because she has the use of a ministerial apartment – ‘grace and favour’, obviously, to make it sound extra posh – in Westminster, but she’s not exactly going to be flipping the place in Admiralty House

Juliet Nicolson

What publishing a book has in common with childbirth

‘Are you ready?’ a kind but optimistic friend asked me a few weeks ago with a look of genuine concern. But I am not on the verge of moving house, getting married, starting a new job or having a baby, all of which might have merited her anxiety. Instead, my friend was cautioning me to prepare for the scrutiny involved in publishing a book. The analogy is often made between childbirth and the moment of a book’s emergence into the world after a period of largely private gestation. But the unconditional applause given to the parents of a much longed-for newborn, wrapped in a soft blanket, is not guaranteed for

Matthew Greetham

Why you shouldn’t wait for the ‘right time’ to have children

Fertility rates in Britain are in freefall. The average number of children per woman is now 1.44, the lowest in recorded history. Among millennials, childlessness at 30 is no longer unusual but expected: half of UK women born in 1990 were still childless by that age, twice the rate of their mothers. Many couples will eventually have children, but later and fewer. We’re heading for a future without enough young people; a slow-motion societal collapse triggered by labour shortages, economic stagnation, declining public services and social isolation. It is a gloomy prospect, but a realistic one. Children blow your old life to pieces. Your weekends are no longer yours. But

Sunday

Adrian Hilton

The rise of ‘censory smearing’

Every now and again a new phenomenon emerges in human communication or social behaviour which everyone recognises but none can name, because there is no term for it. There’s a sense that a word or phrase needs inventing. ‘Virtue signalling’ was one such development, and it came in the pages of The Spectator in 2015 from James Bartholomew. ‘Luxury beliefs’ is another, coined by Rob Henderson in the New York Post in 2019.  I watched Peter Kyle MP being interviewed recently by Wilfred Frost on Sky News about the Online Safety Act, and the name of Nigel Farage came up (quite a lot) because he had announced that he would repeal the act in

Edward Davies

The statistic that explains why white working class children do so badly

Another year of GCSE results has prompted another bout of soul searching about the underachievement of white working class pupils. No lesser figure than Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has led the mourning this week, risking the ire of her colleagues with some bravery. It’s not hard to find declining marriage at the heart of almost every domestic challenge we face Yet the grim truth is that this is not, ultimately, an education issue. Plenty of children in exactly the same schools will do just fine: same facilities, same teachers, same exam papers, better results. Nor is it a poverty issue as we are so often told – some ethnic groups

Matthew Wilcox

The Norman Conquest wasn’t a disaster for England

For a certain kind of amateur historian there is a moment, fixed in the imagination, endlessly revisited: it is still not yet late on that bright October afternoon in 1066, the shield-wall locked and braced, the hill still theirs, the horses floundering on the slope below, Harold upright, the sun sinking but not yet gone, the field not yet lost. You can stop it there if you wish: it is all still possible, still unspoiled, the arrow not yet loosed, the shadow not yet crossing the light. England unbroken, the language uncorrupted. All of it, still possible. And then – a shadow descends from the blue sky. Nearly a millennium

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is the ‘sixth mass extinction’ a myth?

Are our scientific institutions being colonised by activists less interested in pursing objective truth than in spinning a political narrative? It is worth asking given an extraordinary spat which is developing among evolutionary biologists as to whether life on Earth is experiencing a ‘sixth mass extinction’. The trouble with all these extrapolations is that they are being made from a tiny number of extinctions which have occurred so far In April a paper by John Wiens of the University of Arizona and published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution argued that while the Earth is ‘on the brink of a major diversity loss’ which would be ‘catastrophic’, there was

Saturday

Patrick West

Britain’s sickness is plain to see on the streets of London

The appearance of vigilantes on the streets of Bournemouth certainly represents a worrying development. What is less widely-known is that civilian law enforcers have also started to appear on the streets in London. London is now exhibiting much the same problems that have been in incubation elsewhere for years I only became aware of this on Monday when walking up Tottenham Court Road. There in the afternoon I spotted two personnel clad in orange patrol vests emblazoned with the words ‘Street Warden’ (deployed, as it explained at the dorsal base, by the Fitzrovia Partnership, an organisation that works with local businesses) questioning three youths who, to judge by the expression

Alex Burton-Hargreaves

‘Fly-camping’ is killing our national parks

All across the United Kingdom, from Dartmoor to the Dark Peak, a troubling trend is emerging: the destructive, disruptive and disrespectful activity known as fly-camping. Often confused with the responsible pastime of ‘wild-camping’, fly-camping refers to unauthorised, irresponsible overnight stays where groups pitch large tents by roadsides or in beauty spots, bringing items such as generators, mini fridges, sound-systems and even portaloos, while leaving behind litter, fire-scars, damaged landscapes and disturbed wildlife. Recent reports describe an ‘epidemic’ of fly-camping, with groups leaving trails of destruction, including abandoned tents, beer bottles and fire pits Unlike traditional wild-camping, which adheres to the principles of ‘leave no trace’ – arriving late, departing early, and

Lana Hempsall

The truth about PIP

Britain’s health and disability benefits bill is ballooning out of control – yet still Keir Starmer refuses to face reality. The number of people applying for these benefits has doubled since 2019 and the bill is predicted to hit £100 billion within a few years. The situation is close to breaking point – and also deeply flawed, as I found for myself when I filled out a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) form. Much of the information online appears to be aimed at helping people without disabilities game the system PIP is one of the fastest-growing area of welfare spending: a strong signal, perhaps, that something in the system is not

Friday

Chas Newkey-Burden

The tide is turning against firework displays

News headlines about a Labour council banning fireworks to avoid upsetting baby pandas are certainly eye-catching. It’s true that Edinburgh city council has banned fireworks in nine neighbourhoods between Halloween and November 9, after the death of a baby red panda and its mother in Edinburgh Zoo last year were linked to the din of fireworks. The Edinburgh bans are an overdue acknowledgement of the long-term consequences of short-term thrills But it’s also true that Edinburgh originally banned fireworks in four areas in August last year, months before the pandas met their maker. The council has now voted to extend the bans in those areas and introduce a set of

Patrick West

Why is the state so obsessed with speech crimes?

A new phrase to have arrived in earnest this year has been ‘two-tier’ justice, relating to the perceived government and judicial approach to crime based on someone’s politics or background. But it’s worth bearing in mind another parallel approach to justice that’s been with us even longer: the growing eagerness to prosecute people for what they have said, and a decreasing willingness to prosecute miscreants for what they have done. This week alone we have been reminded of this dual approach. As reported in the Daily Telegraph this morning, prosecutions for posts on social media judged to potentially stir up racial hatred have soared in the past decade. In 2015 just

Fin de Pencier

Meet the man putting hundreds of England flags up around York

Over the last few weeks, Brits across the country have been adorning streetlights and roundabouts with Union Jacks and St George’s Crosses. This is perhaps one of the most benign demonstrations of national pride possible – yet it is being treated by some as a revolutionary act. A recent BBC piece felt it necessary to state that ‘both flags have been used as emblems for far-right political movements,’ as if a country having a flag is far-right. This bizarre self-loathing is one of the reasons the movement has spread like wildfire. Moulton and his team have since bought more than a thousand flags and raised tens of thousands of pounds for more Joseph

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Svitlana Morenets, Michael Simmons, Ursula Buchan, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Richard Morris & Mark Mason

37 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Svitlana Morenets says that Trump has given Zelensky cause for hope; Michael Simmons looks at how the American healthcare system is keeping the NHS afloat; Ursula Buchan explains how the Spectator shaped John Buchan; Igor Toronyi-Lalic argues that art is no place for moralising, as he reviews Rosanna McLaughlin; Richard Morris reveals how to access the many treasures locked away in private homes; and, Mark Mason provides his notes on bank holidays. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Kristina Murkett

GCSE English language isn’t fit for purpose

Today is GCSE results day, and as ever that is cause for celebration: one in five entries got at least a grade seven (equivalent to an A). However, despite all the headline photos of smiling faces, proud parents and carefully open envelopes, the GCSE pass rate for English and Maths has hit a record low: only 58 per cent of students achieved a four or above in Maths, whilst only 60 per cent did in English.  GCSE English Language is a strange subject. To understand why so many people fail it, you need to understand that it isn’t really a test of English Language How have we ended up in

Paul Burke

Ad-land’s diversity obsession is seriously backfiring

There was a time when people of colour were not adequately represented in British TV commercials. For many years, despite the UK’s growing black and Asian population, there were too few people matching that description in the commercial breaks. Advertisers’ commitment to diversity has quite often been a commitment to discrimination In the programmes surrounding those breaks, it was the same. Even in the late 1990s, when so many British corner shops were owned by Asians, the one in Coronation Street was owned by Alf Roberts in his white grocer’s coat. British advertisers, quite rightly, decided to correct this imbalance. Trouble was, they all did it – or overdid it – at exactly

William Moore William Moore

Putin’s trap, the decline of shame & holiday rental hell

50 min listen

First: Putin has set a trap for Europe and Ukraine ‘Though you wouldn’t know from the smiles in the White House this week… a trap has been set by Vladimir Putin to split the United States from its European allies,’ warns Owen Matthews. The Russian President wants to make a deal with Donald Trump, but he ‘wants to make it on his own terms’. ‘Putin would like nothing more than for Europe to encourage Ukraine to fight on… and lose even more of their land’. But, as Owen writes, those who count themselves among the country’s friends must ask ‘whether it’s time to choose an unjust peace over a just