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Society

Tuesday

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

What are Black Lives Matter’s actual policies?

The effect of George Floyd’s death in Minnesota upon Britain has been remarkable. We have had waves of protests, in London but also other large British cities, that look set to continue. Statues have fallen; long-loved television shows have been removed from digital platforms. An assumption has been made by many that the protests have at the very least been necessary. But there is a question few are actually asking about the Black Lives Matter protests in Britain: what do the protestors actually want? Some will say the answer is obvious. The protests are about ending racial inequality in Britain. If so, how do the BLM protests seek to correct

Monday

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

With poet and actress Greta Bellamacina

27 min listen

Greta Bellamacina is an actress and poet, who has published numerous collections and made her acting debut in Harry Potter. On the podcast, she talks to Lara and Olivia about what it was like to be on set for Harry Potter, growing up with four siblings, and why her favourite restaurant is an over-priced Chinese restaurant in Paris. Greta also mentions her favourite restaurant in London – the Indian restaurant Paradise in Hampstead. If you can’t get a takeaway from there, try this recipe for a lamb vindaloo from Olivia’s column The Vintage Chef.

Steerpike Steerpike

Selfridges’ feverish store opening

Non-essential shops across Britain opened their doors for the first time since lockdown today, as the government attempts to breath some life into the UK economy, while avoiding a fatal spike of Covid-19. Retailers meanwhile, face the difficult task of persuading people that it is safe to shop in their stores as the pandemic recedes. So far, the move seems to be working, with long queues reported outside Primark outlets around the country. Selfridges in the centre of Manchester was certainly pulling out all the stops this afternoon, to entice customers back into its store. The department store even hired a singer to serenade those queueing 2m apart, while they waited

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Was it right to jail the man who urinated at Keith Palmer’s memorial?

The wheels of justice have, for once, turned with decent haste and Andrew Banks is now banged up. Banks’s crime? To relieve himself at Saturday’s demonstration just inches away from the memorial of PC Keith Palmer, who was murdered trying to prevent an Islamist terrorist gain access to Parliament in 2017. The contrast between supreme sacrifice and supreme idiocy can hardly be greater. My reaction, like those of many others was repulsion at what looked like a disgusting act of desecration.  Westminster Magistrates’ Court was told that Banks had consumed 16 pints, hadn’t slept, didn’t notice PC Palmer’s memorial and was in London to ‘defend statues’ but he couldn’t say which ones. As a

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Are only one in nine Covid sufferers being tested and traced?

There is little chance of a safe escape from lockdown restrictions unless NHS Test and Trace is picking up most of those infected with coronavirus, and those who have come into contact with them. How is it doing so far? It is early days, but it looks as though only around one in nine of those with the illness are being reached. Here are the numbers that imply too few infected people are being contacted. According to government data, details of around 1,160 people per day were passed to the contact tracers, of whom only 770 were actually contacted. That compares with between 1,500 and 2,000 people per day who

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What school closures are doing to our children

The suspension of schooling has already led to fears of a lasting impact on children’s education, especially among poorer children. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, the Education Endowment Foundation has estimated that a six-month closure of schools could lead to an attainment gap of 36 per cent between children from the best-off and worst-off households. But what about the effect of school closures on children’s emotional development? A team from Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health, warns that deprivation of peer contact among adolescents could have a serious impact on brain development, leading to anxiety, depression

Sunday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Boris’s gender change shake-up leaves Labour with a difficult choice

The Sunday Times says Boris Johnson is going to reject May-era proposals to allow people to “self-identify” changes of their legal gender. Some thoughts: 1. Trust this report. It’s by one of the best-connected reporters around and it’s consistent with public and private signals from inside government in recent months. The organised trans rights groups also failed to distance themselves from the online hate-mongers who do trans people a huge disservice by bombarding dissenting women with obscene abuse. 2. This is a remarkable demonstration of how grassroots politics can still work. When the Gender Recognition Act consultation began in autumn 2018, there was no organisation in existence that was willing or able

Robert Tombs

11 people who should have statues

The Black Lives Matter movement and the ‘Topple the Racists’ campaign have reminded us that monuments in public spaces can make powerful statements, on the rare occasions when we get round to noticing them. If the campaigners’ energy does not slacken, we can expect to have quite a few vacant plinths, and this will give us an opportunity to ‘confront’ (as some like to say) our history, and perhaps educate ourselves about the links between Britain and the ending of the appalling trade in human beings between Africa and the Americas, and between Africa and the Muslim world. Many people will have ideas about this, and indeed have expressed them

John Keiger John Keiger

French statue-topplers make Brits look like a bunch of amateurs

Toppling statues is relatively novel in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world, for whom revolutions, coup d’etats and regime change are a rarity. That is why the Anglosphere is taken by surprise when statue toppling happens, why they do it so childishly and with so little historical maturity. But for the French who have been doing it for centuries it is akin to a national sport. That is why they are more experienced and adult about it and why unspoken rules apply. The French Revolution was by no means the beginning of the French people’s experience of political iconoclasm, but it taught them its excesses and how subsequently to manage it. And they

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A rabbi stabbed, but no hate crime?

A mystery has occurred. In The Affluent People’s Republic of North London, a rabbi was stabbed on the street multiple times by a knifeman. Rabbi Alter Yaakov Schlesinger was rescued by two builders and a Deliveroo driver and is now in hospital, where hopefully he will recover. Apparently no robbery was attempted. The police, however, have said that this was not a terrorist incident, thus suggesting – by extension – it was also not a hate crime. A crime of love, or indifference, then? Who knows? All a mystery. A familiar mystery.

Claire Fox

How a serious issue with racism was reduced to a tick-boxing exercise

Who needs statue topplers when the state will do it for you? Some bright spark in authority has decided the way to defend the statues on Parliament Square is to board them up. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has taken his lead from protesters and started a national trend, with councils setting up posses of the unelected to assess whose statues might survive the great 2020 cull. Meanwhile, the BBC, so terrified of bad PR, has pre-emptively removed from its i-player an iconic episode of Fawlty Towers, written as a satire on Little Englander mentality. Own goals all round. What started out as a genuine, furious, international reaction to the

Anthony Browne

What Britain should learn from Belgium: history can be reappraised

Is it best to erase history, or reappraise history? We haven’t started taking down statues of royalty in Britain yet, but they have in Belgium: statues of King Leopold II were vandalised across the country last week and taken down. It was no surprise – in the bloody history of colonialism, he was one of the bloodiest rulers. He took personal control of the Congo, effectively enslaved everyone, ruled by sadistic brutality (hand and foot removal were a common punishment), killed about half the population, and extracted great wealth. However, the lesson to learn from Belgium is not statue removal, but what they have done to the enormous monument that

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Is toppling a statue an act of performance art?

14 min listen

Has the statue of Churchill been improved by being enclosed in a protective casing? Was Colston’s toppling one of the greatest acts of performance art? Or is this all a sad indictment of the state of British politics? Fraser Nelson talks to The Spectator’s arts editor Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Coffee House contributor and writer Claire Fox.

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

What the cancelling of JK Rowling is really about

Shall we start with an easy question? As a general rule, would it be appropriate for a 15-year-old boy to enter athletic or sporting competitions restricted to children under the age of 12? I fancy that, like most people, you think the answer to this is ‘No’ – just as you accept that it would be wrong to match a heavyweight boxer with a welterweight. A mismatch is all but guaranteed. It is a question of fairness. So let’s ask another, slightly more challenging, question. As a general rule, is it appropriate for people born male to enter women’s sporting competitions? Some people think so, even when those contests are

Steerpike Steerpike

Emily Sheffield replaces George Osborne at Evening Standard

Today, it was announced that Emily Sheffield, founder of ‘This Much I Know News’ and former deputy editor of Vogue, has taken over as editor of the Evening Standard. She replaces former Chancellor George Osborne, who will now become editor-in-chief of the publication. Osborne spent three years at the helm of the paper. Sheffield takes over at an incredibly difficult time for the Standard – the paper normally relies on London’s massive commuter footfall to justify its advertising revenue. It has been reported that the paper’s distribution has almost halved since the lockdown began. Still, one thing remains unchanged: the Cameron-clique still clearly dominates the top rungs of the publication.

William Cook

Germans can laugh at Fawlty Towers, so why can’t Brits?

Now UKTV (owned by the BBC) has removed the classic ‘Germans’ episode of Fawlty Towers from its playlist, this sorry no-platform saga has tipped over from tragedy into farce. Is there really anyone in British broadcasting who doesn’t understand that this comic meisterwerk actually makes a mockery of xenophobia? Surely everyone can see it’s satirising and lampooning pathetic Little Englanders, personified by John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty? Apparently not. First broadcast 45 years ago, this episode, more than any other, has become part of British cultural history, spawning the familiar catchphrase, ‘Don’t mention the war.’ In the 30 years I’ve been travelling around Germany, reporting on that complex country, I’ve never

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Our unseen Queen is more important than ever

Andrew Morton is being a bit previous, isn’t he, in suggesting to the Telegraph that the Covid crisis means that the Queen has more or less abdicated? Or as he puts it: ‘The brutal truth is that her reign is effectively over. Covid-19 has done more damage to the monarchy than Oliver Cromwell. Corona has practically put Charles on the throne.’ And there was the rest of the country thinking the Queen has actually been rather brilliant during the crisis, giving that televised pep talk to the nation and presiding – at a distance – over the VE day celebrations with her very own service hat on the desk beside

John Marenbon

The tragedy of our children’s lost education

When we try to take stock of government choices that have made the Covid-19 epidemic so much more harmful than it need have been, it is hard to know what item will top the list. The failure, shared by leaders worldwide, to keep infected people from entering the country and spreading the disease when the epidemic was still confined to the Far East? The carnage in care homes? The wanton undermining of the economy through an unnecessarily protracted lockdown supported by unaffordable state aid? Education, however, will probably figure, if at all, a long way down the list, because the effects of the failures in school and examination policy are

Sahil Mahtani

The Taleban: an apology

When the Taleban took power in Afghanistan, they embarked on a cultural agenda that we in the West mocked. As it turns out, they appreciated sensitivities that we did not recognise at the time: the threat that cultural history poses to the present. At a time of natural disaster and general upheaval, when out-of-touch elites prioritised cultural protection over basic needs, Mullah Omar’s logic in 2001 was impeccable. The Bamiyan Buddhas needed to be blown up. In our own time of crisis, as statues of Churchill, Gandhi, Queen Victoria, and even Lincoln have been defaced by men with beards (albeit better-trimmed) it is now clear that Mullah Omar was not

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why UK GDP may have fallen by more than a fifth

Is anyone really surprised that GDP fell by 20.4 percent in April? Perhaps we should be. It doesn’t sound high enough to me. We have just been through a great economic experiment in which most shops have been forced to close, all pubs and restaurants been forced to shut their doors and the public ordered to remain indoors except for essential visits. Road traffic at one point was back to 1950s levels. And yet the economy officially shrank only by a fifth – taking it back roughly to the size it was in 2003. I am not sure that these statistics quite pass the smell test. According to the breakdown provided