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Society

Tuesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Summer flu is now more deadly than Covid

We are, of course, in the middle of a deadly pandemic of a novel infectious disease. It’s just that it is not, at present, killing remotely as many people in England and Wales as that boring old disease which no-one seems ever to worry about: the summer flu. Winter flu, yes – sometimes we worry about that overwhelming the NHS. We take the precaution of vaccination the elderly and other vulnerable groups. But the summer flu? It hardly registers. Yet few seem to have noticed, while we fret about whether reopening schools, bars and so on will cause a second wave of Covid-19, that flu (and pneumonia) appears to be

Sebastian Rushworth

How dangerous is Covid? A Swedish doctor’s perspective

I want to preface this article by stating that it is entirely anecdotal and based on my experience working as a doctor in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals in Stockholm, and on living as a citizen in Sweden. As many people know, Sweden is perhaps the country that has taken the most relaxed attitude towards the Covid pandemic. Unlike other countries, Sweden never went into complete lockdown. Non-essential businesses have remained open, people have continued to go to cafés and restaurants, children have remained in school, and very few people have bothered with face masks in public. Covid hit Stockholm like a storm in mid-March. One

Monday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

With Annie Gray

37 min listen

Annie Gray is a historian, cook and writer who specialises in food from 1600 to present day. On the podcast, she tells Lara and Olivia about a childhood of eating ‘frisbee-like’ omelettes, why male hares are inedible, and how an episode of Antiques Roadshow nearly jeopardised the release of her new book. Annie Gray’s Victory in the Kitchen: The Life of Churchill’s Cook, is out now.

Samuel Hughes

Scruton’s housing vision is finally being realised

The government’s white paper on planning reform makes frequent reference to Roger Scruton and his Building Beautiful Commission – on which I worked as Scruton’s research assistant. If Scruton had lived to read the white paper, he would have found much to like, especially its commitment to building the homes the country needs. But he would have insisted that the proposed reforms can only succeed if the government gets the details right in its plans to win the consent of local people. Consent based on drastically raising the aesthetic standards of new buildings and by enabling communities to share in the benefits of development. The starting point of the reform proposals

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How many years of life did lockdown save – or destroy?

It’s official – lockdown will eventually have a greater impact on our lives and health than Covid-19 itself. That, at any rate, is the conclusion of a study by the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), which was published quietly on 15 July.  The study uses a measure known as quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), which takes into account the age, health and quality of life of people prior to their death – if a young child died in an accident, for example, it would result in a loss of around 80 QALYs, on the basis that they might otherwise have been expected to live a full and healthy life; if

Sunday

Matthew Reynolds

My fellow teachers need to get a grip

At last, the government is doing something sensible. Amid the anxiety surrounding a putative ‘second wave’ of Covid-19, the Department for Education is standing firm in its commitment to re-open schools for all year groups come September. Reassuringly, the schools minister Nick Gibb is making this a non-negotiable priority. ‘Thank you Nick Gibb’ is not something I thought I would ever say. As a member of the maligned teaching profession, I have had my fill of Tory education initiatives over the past decade: accountability, performance-related pay and exam reforms. Such distractions are now a distant memory in the dystopian world of Covid. Teaching is a stressful job, with a poor

Saturday

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley, Lionel Shriver, Andrew Doyle and Jeremy Clarke

27 min listen

On this week’s edition, Joanna Lumley recalls her meeting with Mongolia’s former champion wrestler – now the country’s president – and reflects on the joys of eating birdseed (01:14). Lionel Shriver argues that the true novelty of coronavirus is just how scared it’s made us all (07:14). Andrew Doyle suggests that the SNP’s hate crime bill could lead to the criminalisation of the bible (15:34). And Low Life’s Jeremy Clarke shares his sadness at seeing an old neighbour and friend moving on (20:14).

Nigel Lawson

What we can learn from Sweden

It is a particular pleasure to be returning to the columns of The Spectator, more than half a century after I became editor. The paper has been part of my life for a very long time. When I was at school, more than 70 years ago, we were all told to read Harold Nicolson’s column every week, to learn the art of essay-writing. I like to think that it was still a good paper in my time, but it is a much better one now. Fraser Nelson and his team are doing an excellent job. Our lives remain dominated by the plague, aka Covid-19. The government’s handling of it —

Martin Kulldorff

Herd immunity is still key in the fight against Covid-19

Open or close? Open the schools and close the pubs? Open bowling alleys but not skating rinks? Allow open restaurants but not wedding receptions? Britain is playing musical chairs with different services and businesses, but the whole game is misguided and without any scientific epidemiological basis. To open society gradually is certainly wise, but how do we pick one over another? Covid-19 is a terrible disease, and the primary goal should be to minimise deaths. How is this done? The key is age. The risk of Covid-19 mortality varies more than a thousandfold between the oldest and youngest members of society. The pandemic will not be over until we reach

Friday

Carl Heneghan

The real Covid-19 threat

Daniel Kahneman called it anchoring; I call it tunnel vision. It’s when we depend too heavily on our pre-existing ideas and first pieces of information – the anchor – to inform our judgments. How a problem is perceived, how it is described, how it makes us feel alongside our individual experience and expertise shapes the decisions we make. Anchoring ensures emerging evidence is ignored. Even in the face of this new contradictory evidence, we refuse to change our early decisions. In the week ending the 24th of July, 8,891 deaths were registered in England and Wales (161 fewer than the five-year average). This is the sixth week in a row

Thursday

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Forever Family and the problem with the Met’s selective policing

Until relatively recently I was under the impression that preventing people breaking the law was the primary job of a police officer. But is this always the case? Or is tackling crime sometimes substituted for a form of morality-based policing? The protest for reparations in Brixton last Saturday – and the reaction of the police – is an excellent example of what morality policing looks like in practice. The event – a gathering of considerably more than 30 people in an apparent breach of the Health Protection (Coronavirus) regulations – was not, it would seem, authorised by the police. It was instead a planned protest with an arranged policing plan and conditions on

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Cancelling Kindergarten Cop is a step too far

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s late-Eighties to early-Nineties comedies have not gone down in history as great triumphs. Films like Junior and Twins – in which he played a pregnant man and Danny DeVito’s unidentical twin respectively – are movies only arch nostalgists could love. But now we learn that Kindergarten Cop, another product of that strange period, is not just a bit crap, but basically white supremacist, too. This is the news that Northwest Film Center (NWFC) in Portland, Oregon, has pulled the 1990 action comedy from its summer drive-in series after woke complaints. In it, Schwarzenegger plays a cop who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher to apprehend a drug dealer.

Toby Young Toby Young

The proof that free speech in universities is in peril

About 18 months ago, I attended a debate at Policy Exchange, the think tank founded by Nick Boles, Francis Maude and Archie Norman, on whether there was a free speech crisis at British universities. One panellist, Professor Jon Wilson of King’s College London, vigorously denied that any such problem existed. Various people pointed to examples of right-of-centre academics being no-platformed — Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Linda Gottfredson — but that was scarcely conclusive. It was anecdotal evidence, not hard data. The same cannot be said any more. This week, Policy Exchange published a paper by three academics — Remi Adekoya, Eric Kaufmann and Tom Simpson — which proves beyond reasonable

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I tell my neighbours I forgot to feed their cat?

Q. We invited two friends to supper in London. As they came in they said they should order their taxi home before we began to drink as they now had to pre-book. They then discussed the booking time between themselves and agreed on 11.30 p.m. But Mary, we wanted them to leave at 10.30 at the latest. How could we have conveyed this without making them feel unwelcome? — Name and address withheld A. You can pre-empt overstaying in future by outlining a time scale as you issue the invitation. For example, you could say to them: ‘Could you possibly come early, e.g. 7 or 7.30, as we have to

Dot Wordsworth

Why must we ‘live with’ coronavirus?

T.S. Eliot adopted a method of criticism that I am not aware of any other writer using: he imagined what it would be like to live with the bust of a poet. A bust of Byron on one’s desk would be impossible, with ‘that pudgy face suggesting a tendency to corpulence, that weakly sensual mouth, that restless triviality of expression’. Sir Walter Scott presented a different prospect: ‘Were one a person who liked to have busts about, a bust of Scott would be something one could live with.’ These days we are urged by some to learn to live with the coronavirus. It’s not quite a bust of Byron, but

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Local lockdowns, busy beaches and an explosion in Beirut

Home Some 2.7 million people in Greater Manchester and parts of Lancashire and West Yorkshire, where many Muslims live, were put under tighter restrictions on the eve of Eid al-Adha. Wedding receptions, gambling in casinos and eyebrow-threading continued to be banned when the government decided to ‘squeeze the brake pedal’ to control coronavirus, in the words of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister. Aberdeen was put back into lockdown. People would have to wear masks in church from 8 August. The sudden actions came after new cases rose from a probable 2,800 to 4,200 a day, according to a survey by the Office for National Statistics, based on 116,026 swab tests

Peter Jones

Mixed messages about body weight are nothing new

Tackling obesity is the latest government initiative, universally condemned as nannying. Ask a Spartan. From an early age, Spartan children were taught not to be fussy: to eat up their food, and not to fear the dark or being left alone. At the age of seven, boys were taken from their homes and lived together in ‘herds’, exercising bare-footed and often naked, keeping fit and learning obedience. Food was sparse, because ‘overeating produces a broad, squat frame, and laboured breathing’. Lean features ‘defined the body’s true shape’, unlike obese ones. Competitive games were fostered, winners encouraged and a proud mental resilience developed. Now that’s nannying: the full Rees-Mogg. Other Greeks

The Spectator

Letters: How to slim down the nation

Peer review Sir: A neat solution to the levels of inactivity of some members of the House of Lords (‘Peer pressure’, 1 August) might be annual self-assessment against national minimum standards: record of attendance (including duration), contributions to debates, questions asked, involvement in legislative procedure, notable achievements, charitable works. Any peer falling short should be shown the ornate door, as should any caught popping in just to claim their £300.David EdwardsNorton sub Hamdon, Somerset Matrix of success Sir: It is agreed that the purpose of the Upper House is to employ its wisdom and experience to improve draft bills emanating from the Commons. The present occupants of the Lords hardly

Joanna Lumley

The joy of eating birdseed

Rather like unpacking after a holiday, when you take unworn clothes from the case still neatly folded because the occasion to wear them didn’t arise, unshown film sequences from my travel programmes are carefully edited and stored. The cancellation of this year’s long trip along the Spice Route made us look at these stories again; with not much prompting we have made three whole programmes from them. In the few years since we made these series the world has changed. The champion wrestler in Mongolia, the softly spoken Mr Battulga, for example, has become president of that country. He told me of his plan to build an eco-city on the