Society

Monday

Andrew Roberts

The sinister attempts to tarnish Churchill’s legacy

Winston Churchill is one of Britain’s enduring symbols. His relentless drive, deep conviction and steadfast leadership means that he remains admired by millions around the globe. Yet for years, the political mainstream has been compelled to defend his memory from spurious attacks from the left, such as John McDonnell calling him a ‘villain’. Depressingly that threat – and the same pernicious desire to denigrate our nation’s greatest hero – can now be found on the right. The aim is not simply to manipulate the public’s view of Churchill, but through his denigration to create the intellectual space for their other pernicious ideas to flourish Spawned from a sinister fringe of

Joanna Williams

There has been no ‘coup’ at the BBC

Readers who woke to Radio 4’s Today programme at around 6:30 a.m. can be forgiven for leaping out of bed in alarm. ‘There has been a coup at the BBC!’ cried presenter Nick Robinson, or words to that effect. Clearly, as we lay snoozing, a hostile takeover of our state broadcaster was underway. ‘These are not,’ Robinson informed us, ‘normal times’. Indeed, they are not.  His monologue began: The boss of the organisation which remains, despite all the rows about bias, the most trusted news organisation in the country – perhaps also across the globe – has quit, along with the head of news, after a row in which the President of

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The BBC’s fake news blindspot

The rot at the BBC is worse than people think. It’s far more serious than the occasional twisting of facts to get one over on a politician the Beeb hates, like Donald Trump – an act of journalistic malpractice for which director-general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness have now resigned. This scandal exposes a great truth of our time – that the elites are often more susceptible to fallacy and hysteria than the rest of us The deeper problem is that the BBC has been so corrupted by faddish ideology that it is now content to burn truth itself in the service of that ideology. It has supped

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The rot at the BBC runs far deeper than Tim Davie

The resignations at the top of the BBC mark a critical juncture for an institution long seen as a pillar of British public life. Yet their departures, while welcome, are insufficient. The BBC’s failure is not confined to the mistakes of individual executives. It is institutional, entrenched, and long overdue for a reckoning. The BBC has repeatedly blurred moral lines on Israel and antisemitism Unlike privately funded media outlets, be it GB News, Talk, The Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, or the Daily Mail, the BBC is funded by coercion. Britons are compelled by law to finance its operations if they own a television, regardless of whether they watch or endorse

Anthony Browne

Why the BBC keeps getting it wrong

The double-decapitating explosion over BBC bias is a gift for commentators, but much of the commentary misses a key central point. It is not just that the BBC is paid for by a compulsory tax on television ownership, which people are sent to jail for not paying. But just as importantly, it enjoys a position of unrivalled, semi-monopolistic power in our national debate. This BBC morning editorial meeting is group think in institutionalised form Some of those on the left often love to complain, normally alluding to one Rupert Murdoch, about concentration of power in the media, and the need for diverse sources of journalism. But Mr Murdoch’s power pales

Sam Leith Sam Leith

I’m a fan of the BBC – but even I’m struggling to defend it

Another Director-General bites the dust. And the number two with him. What a facepalm. What a honking, stupid, first-day-in-the office sort of error to make. What cost Tim Davie his job, and presents the BBC with its latest existential crisis, was not just an error: it was an unforced error of the most wince-making kind. Defenders of the BBC regard this as a confected row, a political hit job, and affect outrage that it cost the top man his job. I’m afraid I don’t think it is Those of us who, in general, think of the BBC as a good thing – and certainly a much better thing than the various privately-owned alternatives – would like to defend it. We’d like to stick up for the rigour of its journalism and its commitment to

Stephen Pollard

Is this the man who can save the BBC?

I’m not going to rehash here the details of the memorandum by Michael Prescott, the former independent editorial standards adviser to the BBC, which has now led to the resignations of both Tim Davie, director-general, and Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News. You’d have to have been in a cave for the past week – or, perhaps, watching BBC News – not to know about the story. The issue now is, rather, what, or specifically who, comes next. If the BBC wants to secure its future and regain trust, it should make Trevor Phillips director-general One of the problems which holed Davie below the waterline from the start was that

Patrick West

Learning French taught me to love English

One of the greatest dangers posed by the government’s curriculum review is that it will result in children abandoning more demanding subjects such as history, geography and languages at GCSE. This is the fear voiced by a number of educationists, including Baroness Spielman, the former chief of inspector at Ofsted, who said that scrapping the English Baccalaureate would be a ‘death blow to secondary languages teaching.’ Learning to read, write and speak a foreign language is not only a ‘skill’. It’s about learning how to think differently and think better This, alas, merely reflects a longer-term malaise: teaching the adults of tomorrow how to speak – and think – in

Sunday

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Why Prevent doesn’t work

Our state counterterrorism strategy ‘Prevent’ is overwhelmed. This is the strand of our national plan, ‘Contest’, to defeat extremism. Prevent is charged with spotting and stopping tomorrow’s terrorists, but the official data on its operation over the last reporting year, released yesterday, paints a picture of mission creep and distraction and an organisation and that can’t do this job. Far from identifying people who want to kill for ideas, Prevent has become a repository for vulnerable and often dangerous young people who have been failed by every other state agency. Its net is cast so wide that very bad people have fallen through it and into atrocious crimes. There have

John Nichol

Remembrance Sunday is about more than just the two world wars

At 11 a.m. today, much of the nation will fall silent in remembrance of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of our great country. For some, thoughts will focus on the enormous death toll of the two world wars. But many of us will be reflecting on losses from more recent conflicts. During the 1991 Gulf War, I was shot down, captured, tortured and paraded on TV. My war back then was both short and unpleasant, but I was fortunate enough to return home to my family. Others have not been as blessed, so I will be thinking of countless RAF friends who have died both

James Innes-Smith

David Bowie was no starman

No one has a bad word to say about David Bowie, but it’s about time they did. The pop star’s legion of fans depict him as the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Few dare to question the awesomeness of His Grace, the Thin White Duke. Almost ten years after his death, the cloying adulation for David Jones – could he have had a less cool name? – shows no sign of abating Almost ten years after his death, the cloying adulation for David Jones – could he have had a less cool name? – shows no sign of abating. This week marks another

Ross King

What the Romans did for the English language

‘Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?’, asks the leader of the People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s 1979 film Life of Brian. The appearance on the left (sinister) side was considered an ill omen, hence our modern word ‘sinister’ We, too, might think of the Rome’s legacy largely in terms of infrastructure projects such as roads, sewers and public baths. But there’s an even more obvious and ubiquitous bequest: the words we speak and the context and concepts that gave birth to them. Almost a third of English

Saturday

Rory Hanrahan

Britain has imported Ireland’s sectarian strife

At times, I still hear my late father, Sean O’Callaghan’s, voice echoing in my mind. Sean died in 2017 but there’s no doubt what he’d make of Britain today: that the sepsis of sectarianism is slowly, but surely, poisoning our bloodstream. We’re entrenching extremes and sidelining moderates. Northern Ireland’s lesson is stark: entrench extremes, and moderation dies; let sectarianism fester, and democracy becomes zero-sum The ugly scenes outside Villa Park this week as pro-Palestinian and Israeli protesters faced off are a shameful reminder of how British politics is changing for the worse. Britain’s new Islamo-socialist alliance is gaining ground: from Corbyn’s Your Party, to pro-Gaza independents. Voters are prioritising religion

Alan Allport

No, Elon Musk: we Brits aren’t hobbits

‘When Tolkien wrote about the hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of the English shires, who don’t realise the horrors that take place far away,’ Elon Musk wrote on X in response to the news of the fatal stabbing of Wayne Broadhurst in Uxbridge. ‘They were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility,’ Musk explained, ‘but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.’ ‘When Tolkien wrote about hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of the English shires,’ Elon Musk said The billionaire X owner was employing this literary allusion, he said, to propose a new breed of Tolkienesque ‘hard men’ – he

Friday

Danny Scott

Is Labour trying to make life harder for poor kids like me?

Bridget Phillipson and I have a lot in common. Like the Education Secretary, who started life in a council house in Tyne and Wear, I grew up on a tough estate. Mine was in Selston, a rural East Midlands mining village. Home life was hard; my mam was blind and illiterate. But against the odds – like Phillipson – I achieved outstanding results at my local state school. Decades on, I’m still proud that my grade As in physics, maths and English were O-Levels, not wishy-washy GCSEs. Labour’s mooted education review would almost certainly kick the ladder out from under kids like me Yet while our backgrounds are similar, I

David Spencer

When will the prisons minister face up to the jail crisis?

The latest episode in the rolling farce that is His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service was this week revealed to be yet another foreign-born sex offender released in error. Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, an Algerian sex-offender, was let out by mistake from HMP Wandsworth over a week ago. He was only recaptured today after nine days on the run. What steps has the Prisons Minister, Lord Timpson, taken following this most recent incident? But now that one of the big questions in Westminster doesn’t concern the whereabouts of the latest pervert erroneously released by the Prison Service, attention is turning to what steps the Prisons Minister, Lord Timpson, has taken following this most recent incident? Before this

Debbie Hayton

Why has Martine Croxall been censured by the BBC?

Martine Croxall’s eyes spoke louder than her words when she corrected the clumsy and unnatural use of ‘pregnant people’ on her autocue earlier this year. As a result, the newsreader found herself slap bang in the middle of the toxic dispute over the language of ‘inclusion’. Despite being congratulated at the time by viewers who were relieved that at least one person at the BBC still knew that women give birth to the next generation, Croxall has now been censured by Corporation’s Executive Complaints Units. Her facial expression, it was ruled, expressed a ‘controversial view about trans people’. 🚨In June, a BBC teleprompter instructed presenter, Martine Croxall, to say ‘pregnant

Robert Taylor

Sports are finally giving up on virtue-signalling

Thank heavens for that. English football clubs will no longer have a minute’s silence for tragedies like floods, earthquakes and volcanoes across the other side of the world. Of course, it’s lovely for players and fans to show solidarity with their fellow human beings. But the whole thing has got out of hand, is horribly inconsistent and achieves next to nothing. In September 2023, all English clubs held a minute’s silence in memory of the victims of an earthquake thousands of miles away in North Africa. But following the attacks by Hamas on Israel a month later, which led to the murder of 1,200 people, the FA chose not to

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

When the oldest hatred came to Villa Park

‘Scum’ barked at a Jewish man for the crime of taking a small Israel flag from his bag. ‘Get the f**k out of my city’ hollered at Jews. Masked men hanging signs saying ‘Zionists not welcome’. Posters inviting the public to phone the anti-terror hotline ‘if you see a Zionist’. ‘Baby killers’ yelled in the faces of Jews, as if it was the 1200s all over again and Jews are once more seen as the murderous drainers of innocent blood. That Villa Park was overrun by frothing keffiyeh-wearers wishing death on the army of the Jewish state and damning peaceful Jews as ‘baby killers’ is a scandal Can we ditch

Stephen Pollard

Hatred was the winner in Maccabi Tel Aviv’s game against Aston Villa

On the field, last night’s losers were Maccabi Tel Aviv, beaten 2-0 by Aston Villa in their Europa League match. Off the field, however, the story was rather different. For one thing, the Maccabi Tel Aviv team arrived in and departed from Birmingham with their heads held high. Despite the attempts of hate campaigners to render the match unplayable – the initial focus was on barring the Maccabi supporters, but swiftly moved to attempting to bar the team and then to making it impossible for the match to go ahead – the Jewish, Christian and Muslim players of Maccabi Tel Aviv braved the hate, did their job as footballers, and