Society

Thursday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

School’s out: the true cost of classroom closures

35 min listen

Schools have been closed for almost three months – what is the true cost of these closures on pupils (1:00)? Plus, have Brexit negotiations started looking up (13:15)? And last, are the statue-topplers of Rhodes Must Fall going about their mission the wrong way (22:45)? With teacher Lucy Kellaway; the IFS’s Paul Johnson; the Spectator’s political editor James Forsyth; the FT’s public policy editor Peter Foster; journalists Tanjil Rashid and Nadine Batchelor-Hunt. Presented by Cindy Yu.

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Andrew Neil on why The Spectator is returning furlough money

Earlier this month, The Spectator‘s chairman Andrew Neil announced that we would be handing back the government furlough money. He wrote, ‘Instead of depending on furlough money from taxpayers, I have tasked the editorial and management teams to grow sales of The Spectator to 100,000 as quickly as possible.’ Reader response was phenomenal, with thousands signing up to a Spectator subscription.  Earlier this afternoon, Andrew spoke to Sky’s Ian King to explain the thinking behind the move. You can watch the clip above. And to those who have yet to subscribe, well, you can sign up to a free trial here…

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Far-right thugs embolden SNP illiberalism

Scenes of disorder in Glasgow city centre on Wednesday may be a glimpse of the future as the radical right grows emboldened by recent race-related unrest. So far six men have been arrested on suspicion of what Police Scotland described as ‘minor public order offences’ and Scotland’s justice minister Humza Yousaf has described the behaviour as ‘racist thuggery’. Peaceful demonstrators from No Evictions Glasgow had come to Glasgow’s George Square to campaign for better treatment of asylum seekers but were met by members of the National Defence League, who professed to be there to protect statues. The NDL had earlier posted a message on social media, reading: ‘Another attempt by the

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 20 June 2020

I am so useless in defence it’s embarrassing. My partners all say the same thing: slow down and think. I say: ‘I don’t know what to think about.’ In the 2-card ending, I unerringly play the wrong card, which brings on the annoying response: ‘You knew Declarer had a heart and a spade left.’ Well, funnily enough, I didn’t know or I would have got it right. And don’t get me started on when to cover and when to duck. Which is why I make no apology for today’s hand, which features me getting a defence right. We have been playing the ALT invitational tournaments online since lockdown. Eight teams,

Luke McShane

Chequered histories

As statues are scrutinised, the tensions that existed within historical figures are thrown into relief. You can admire Churchill’s leadership and criticise his imperialism. Beyond politics, whether one can or should separate the art from the artist is a well-trodden critical minefield. How to appraise the work of sculptor Eric Gill, whose corporeal forms can hardly be detached from the unspeakable sexual behaviour which came to light decades after his death? Bobby Fischer must be the most prominent chess player to inspire deeply conflicted feelings. His views were repugnant, and his games were sublime. But even if they are related, in that a passionate hatred fuelled his maniacal drive, it

Luke McShane

No. 609

White to play. Tolush–Aronson, Moscow 1957. Strangely, this quick win was once wrongly attributed to Alekhine. How did White exploit the exposed position of the Black queen? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 22 June. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1…Bg2! 2 Bxh8 Qh3 and mate follows on h1. No better is 2 g4 Bxf3, or 2 cxb7 Rh1+! 3 Kxg2 Qh3 mateLast week’s winner William Geddes, Macclesfield

Cheesecracker

2462: Over and Out?

The seventeen entries with definition-only clues are to be treated according to a symmetrically disposed theme which has to be highlighted. Other clues are normal; all enumerations are of entry lengths. Across 1 Bothers about losing, initially, eight pounds (6)7 Help senior NCO when cutting hair (6, two words)11 Wallop maker (10, hyphened) 13 A salt (5) 14 One fetching (5) 15 It, beer, runs over slacks (7)17 Recess (7) 18 One races by whichever French province (6)19 The beginning (4) 22 E.g. Co-op (6, two words) 24 Checking in, and again, interrupting Queen briefly (9, two words)25 Thumbs-ups about Queen Elizabeth’s tunes? (5)26 Remove, e.g., foil section of lunar

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Statues, steroids and support bubbles

Home Britain went into a frenzy of iconoclasm. The statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was hidden by the Mayor of London in wooden crating. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said: ‘It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk of attack by violent protestors.’ The next day he accused right-wing protestors of ‘racist thuggery’ when they gathered in London to take on supporters of Black Lives Matters, but, failing to confront them, attacked the police instead. A man seen urinating next to a memorial for PC Keith Palmer at the railings of parliament was sent to jail for two weeks convicted of outraging

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The grand names on Huawei’s payroll

Why is it wrong, some ask, for senior British businessmen, former civil servants etc to work for Huawei UK? After all, it is a major company which needs business experience and advice here. Even now, despite the government’s apparent U-turn, it is not certain it will be excluded from our 5G contracts. Surely the answer is that if a director were to explain frankly to the public how Huawei works, he would have to admit that — whatever its formal ownership structure — it is controlled by and furthers the aims of the Chinese Communist party regime. He would also have to concede that these aims have now become hostile

Melissa Kite

My organ donation opt-out hell

Opting out of organ donation was one of the hardest things I’ve done in a while. I don’t mean the decision was hard. There’s no way I’m donating my body parts to the state. The hard bit was completing the online form and getting the NHS to accept my decision. If you didn’t notice, the law changed on 20 May so that everyone over 18 must fill out a form if they do NOT wish to be carved up after death. If you don’t submit this form, your organs automatically become the property of the state and, once they’ve taken the bits they need, your relatives get to bury what’s

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I accept a party invitation when I don’t know who’s going?

Q. I know it is rude to ask, when invited to a dinner party, ‘who else is coming?’ I assumed, therefore, that it would have been equally churlish to ask, when invited to a private piano recital to be staged in the garden of a large country house, ‘what is the repertoire?’ And so I just accepted. Now I am dreading being served up, for example, one of the atonal later works of Schoenberg or Webern, which would be torture to me. What to do if this happens again?— Name and address withheld A. The best line to take is to immediately gush that you would have loved to come

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

More drug than nutrient: KFC drive-through reviewed

Drive-through restaurants were invented so Americans could spend more time in their cars. I don’t blame them. American cars are wonderful if you like cars with fins; so, in theory, is fast food, which is more accurately called fast death, even if they did not know that in 1947. There is a contradiction to the drive-through method of collecting food, a puzzle: if you drive, you have time to wait. But such things are not designed to be sensible. I wonder what other services could be made drive-through: lawyers and podiatrists, but my preference is for libraries and, possibly, sex. These restaurants have thrived in pandemic, which again contradicts the

Dot Wordsworth

Was Priti Patel really ‘gaslighting’ MPs?

Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity’, as the OED defines it. Last week saw it change meaning. In parliament, Florence Eshalomi asked Priti Patel whether she understood the ‘anger and frustration felt by so many people’ involved in Black Lives Matter protests. In reply Miss Patel gave some of her experiences of racism, such as being called a ‘Paki’. (Some news reports blanked out Paki.) Next day 32 black and ethnic-minority (BAME) Labour MPs declared in an open letter that the Home Secretary had ‘used your heritage and experiences of racism to gaslight the very

Jeremy Clarke

Is left the new right?

I took a table on the terrace of the reopened bar and ordered une pression from the waitress. ‘Back to normal, thank goodness,’ I ventured to the chap sitting alone at the next table. He was staring at the centimetre of lager remaining in the bottom of his glass. The cheapness of his clothes and the loneliness enveloping him like a caul was contradicted by his youthful glamour. ‘Normal?’ he said. ‘Normal doesn’t work. You can shove your old man’s normal up your backside.’ My sociable, celebrant spirit recoiled from the aggression. ‘I only meant that it was good to see the bars and shops open again,’ I said lamely.

Taki

The death of free speech

Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyper-feminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone with the Wind is now off limits and Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond is unlikely to remain standing (I give it a week at most). And over here poor old Winnie is also in the you-know-what. Why didn’t anyone tell me Churchill was a Nazi? The Cenotaph also has to go; those guys it honours were racists. Two weeks ago in these here pages Douglas Murray said it all about a US import we can do without. Alas, when Uncle Sam sneezes, the British bulldog gets the flu. The scenes may

Toby Young Toby Young

The antibody test that proved my wife wrong

Back in April, The Spectator ran a feature in which the partners of regular contributors wrote about what it was like being stuck in quarantine with the likes of us. What Caroline had to say was not very flattering: ‘Toby spent the first week of lockdown in bed convinced he had coronavirus. He didn’t. He is a complete hypochondriac at the best of times and this pandemic has sent his anxiety levels through the roof. He was so worried about catching it that the stress led to a bout of shingles, which is what actually laid him up.’ Ever since then I have been trying to prove to her that

Andrew Doyle

We are living through a frenzy of conformity

Reality seems thinner these days. As I walk along the high street, passers-by drift apart as though afraid of crossing auras. Three months of lockdown has made this repulsion of human contact a matter of instinct. I can’t help but see this tendency reflected in the escalating intolerance and hostility on social media. So at the start of the week I decide to spend a few days away from Twitter. It’s not the ideal forum for civilised debate at the best of times, but even some of those I respect are now behaving like poorly socialised children who’ve just learnt some flashy new expletives. J.K. Rowling is bombarded for holding

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Cars weren’t invented for transportation, but conversation

When I first heard Abba’s magnificent 1982 swansong ‘The Day Before You Came’, I’d never come across the Americanised use of the verb ‘make’, meaning ‘reach’. So the line ‘I must have made my desk around a quarter after nine’ baffled me. Given the Swedish obsession with self-assembly furniture, I even wondered whether Björn was using the word conventionally, and Ms Fältskog was in fact kneeling on the floor aligning Tab A with Groove C, while looking for the elusive Allen key with which to attach the castors. On the other hand, if you are British, the lyrics to the Beach Boys’ song ‘Little Deuce Coupe’ are like the poem

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Was Baden-Powell a Nazi sympathiser?

Police were no match for the Black Lives Matter mob that pulled down a statue of Edward Colston last week and threw it in Bristol harbour. But the Scouts are evidently a force to be reckoned with. No sooner had Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council announced that it was planning to take down a statue of Lord Robert Baden-Powell on the harbour front at Poole than the Scouts had mobilised themselves to defend it, setting up camp at its base. The council decided to board it up instead, to protect it from protestors. The ‘Topple the racists’ website had identified Baden-Powell among its targets, claiming that the creator of the