Society

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The closing down of debate worries me most

The Eastern Orthodox Church has decided that yoga is incompatible with Christianity. This is an enormous problem for me, as I am a regular practitioner of this interesting meditative calisthenic technique, but also someone who judges the sagacity of a person by the length of his beard and the mournful extravagance of his hat. So I must change my daily regimen somehow. I fretted a while — but then it dawned on me that modern Britain might come to my aid. The other evening I was required to ‘clap for carers’ while simultaneously going down on one knee in apologetic homage to an oppressed person who was walking past my

The Spectator

2458: Bardicarum solution

The unclued lights Across are Shakespearean LORDS and the Down ones are LADIES. (The plant ‘lords and ladies’ is an ARUM.) First prize Giles Cattermole, Orpington, KentRunners-up Norman Watterson, Hillsborough, Co. Down; Terry Lavell, London E17

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Who would want to come to Britain for a holiday now?

All logic suggests that the 14-day quarantine for arrivals from abroad really is, as Michael O’Leary of Ryanair put it, ‘a political stunt’. The best explanation is that it was conceived in Downing Street — with minimal consultation, unless someone rang Armando Iannucci, writer of The Thick of It — as a sop to focus-group xenophobia and parental anxiety, as well as a show of grip after the Dominic Cummings debacle. Its absurdity is highlighted by news that the West Indies cricket squad is now quarantined, while 122 high-goal polo players were reported to have beaten the deadline by slipping in last Saturday on a charter flight from Buenos Aires

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

What should you charge for a virtual conference?

From time to time, every industry must adapt to some inconvenient technological advance. Suddenly, some part of what you offer can be reproduced or distributed in a new form. The temptation is to ignore the issue and hope it goes away. But if you don’t act, eventually some competitor, existing or new, surely will. Reinvention is a painful process. Hollywood’s reaction to the advent of television followed the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The same emotions played out in the response of the music industry to the arrival of digital downloads and streaming. Churches will have noticed that online congregations are larger than physical ones In

Robin Oakley

Horse-racing has made a triumphant return

Horse racing, it turns out, wasn’t the first sport back in post-lockdown action: that distinction went to pigeon racing when some 4,400 birds took to the air and raced from Kettering to Barnsley. Nor did the first Classic, the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket, provide the hoped-for tonic headlines about a new super-horse to succeed the great Frankel. Pinatubo, a scintillating winner of all his six races as a juvenile and the highest-rated two-year-old since 1994, ran a perfectly respectable race to finish third, but the high hopes that the hot favourite was going to prove to be something truly special were dashed. It seems that the bigger, rangier types caught

Mark Palmer

The quarantine debacle could cripple Britain’s travel industry

The government’s battle cry in the fight against the pandemic is ‘Follow the science’. But it is hard to see the science behind the disastrous and potentially crippling 14-day quarantine rule which came into effect on Monday — or, rather, failed to come into effect in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s not been made available or published anywhere, and even the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, politely refrained from giving the ruling his endorsement, saying it was a matter for the politicians: ‘They make the policy, and they make the timing decisions.’ There’s nothing remotely logical about closing the door on visitors to Britain when it’s

Julian Glover

Is it too late to save Britain’s ash trees?

Once we wrote poems when we lost our trees. Now we just watch them rot. In 1820 John Clare was moved to mark the end of a single tree he had loved: ‘It hoples Withers droops & dies.’ In 2020, so many English trees are dying that it would take a library of Clares to record the casualties. This year, locked-down in Derbyshire, I have been watching skeletons amid the green, hoping that they will return to life. Almost all have. The last of the great field ashes are only just coming into leaf, scarred by late frosts and drought. A row of oaks I ride by most days has

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Normality won’t return until schools do

From Monday, you will be required by law to wear a face covering on public transport. Paradoxically, this is a sign that the government wants life to return to being as normal as possible. Ever since the start of the pandemic, there has been debate about whether the government should tell people to wear masks in public. The argument in favour was that it would help stop the spread of the virus by making it harder for people to pass on the disease. There were two main arguments against it. The first was that urging people to wear one could lead to a shortage of the medical-grade masks that health

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The dying need real conversation, not false cheeriness

A nurse friend recently finished six weeks in a Covid intensive care unit where she witnessed many deaths and always ensured that nobody died alone. She sat holding a hand, listening, reassuring. Now on leave, she is writing down some of her experiences with the dying. A wise priest I knew said that no matter how strong your faith, your view of what happens at death and ‘the life of the world to come’ should be an agnostic one. But he still recounted some remarkable things he witnessed when sitting with the dying, and my nurse friend described similar experiences. Unbelievers, whose one certainty is that we are snuffed out

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Marching against racism is too easy

When I first saw the footage of George Floyd being asphyxiated by a policeman’s knee on his throat, my reaction was pretty standard. My eyes bugged. I stood up. I exclaimed something like: ‘Bloody hell!’ We’ve all seen the video dozens of times now, but it’s worth clinging to that initial shock, the better to appreciate that America’s spontaneous collective revulsion in response to such grotesque abuse of power was genuinely commendable. Yet the nationwide marches a fortnight ago had a clear goal: the culprit’s arrest. If late in the day — had a civilian choked a policeman to death, he’d have been handcuffed faster than it takes to say

Luke Sheridan

Rhodes must not fall

Anyone walking down Oxford’s High Street could be forgiven for missing Oriel College’s statue of Cecil Rhodes. Of limited aesthetic merit, small, and at a substantial height on Oriel’s north-facing building, he looks as if someone asked Willy Wonka to sculpt a caricature of a Victorian. As recent events have reminded us, however, he is far from forgotten. I went up to Oriel at Michaelmas 2015, and the original Rhodes Must Fall rallies were the backdrop to my first four terms at Oxford. They ranged from the mundane to the marvellously musical, and I remember eating late breakfasts at my window as protesters took turns directing poetry at the closed

Wednesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why aren’t broadcasters scrutinising Neil Ferguson’s claims?

Resigning in disgrace has come to take on a very different meaning than it did in the days when John Profumo withdrew from public life and dedicated himself to Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in east London. Now, it seems to mean a few weeks in the sinbin before you are allowed to creep back to doing pretty much what you were doing before. It is only five weeks since Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College was forced to resign from the government’s SAGE committee after it was revealed that he had twice broken lockdown by entertaining his married lover at his London home. Yet twice in the past fortnight

Alistair Haimes

Lockdown and the R-number: is Neil Ferguson right?

Earlier today, Prof Neil Ferguson told a parliamentary committee that the UK death toll would have been halved if the UK had locked down a week earlier. A claim certain to generate headlines – but how confident can we be in his figures? I’m a financial strategist, and like many people whose day-job is analysing complicated data I have been watching – open-mouthed – at how estimates have been dressed up as fact during this epidemic. Imperial College’s hypothesis is not difficult to explain. Before lockdown, Covid was growing with a reproduction number of about 4. So: every infected person gave it to four others, each of whom gave it to four others etc. If

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The madness of censoring shows like Little Britain

Cancel culture is out of control. Over the past 24 hours Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen and Chris Lilley’s brilliant comedy shows have been shoved down the memory hole by Netflix and the BBC. Why? Because the kangaroo court of correct-thinking has found these comedy classics guilty of offensiveness. Punish them, purge them, cast them out into the wilderness of ‘problematic’ culture. The speed with which the justifiable, righteous anger over the police execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis has turned into yet another culture war against offensive art is staggering. And terrifying, to be frank. One minute people are taking the knee in solidarity with a black man murdered

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Boris Johnson needs an alternative vision for Britain

In the run up to December’s election, many on the Left and in the media sought to present Boris Johnson as a ‘Far Right’ politician. His support for Brexit was the foundation stone of this absurd mischaracterisation, built on fragments of his quotes ripped from their wider settings in old newspaper columns he had written and his passing physical resemblance to Donald Trump. In his dogged pursuit of the mainstream cause of Brexit, the PM retains a capacity to do things that turn the modern British establishment into a rolling Bateman cartoon. But as he has shown by his choices on economic issues, such as public spending, and social ones,

Benedict Spence

Liverpool University shouldn’t cancel William Gladstone

After the fall of the statue of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol, it was only a matter of time before attention turned, once again, to England’s other great slave-trading city of Empire, and the figures behind it. William Gladstone is one of Liverpool’s most famous sons. One of the great Liberal politicians of the age, he was prime minister on four separate occasions in the mid to late 1800s. There are a few reminders of this dotted across the city today, but the most notable are the halls of residence that bear his name, belonging to the University of Liverpool. The university has now announced that it will rename the

Tuesday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Why does Labour ‘welcome’ school closures?

This will come as little surprise to anyone who has followed my writing over the last few years, but I have accepted that I simply do not understand politics at all.  On Tuesday, the government announced that it was no longer urging primary schools in England to get all children back to school for some teaching before the summer holidays. There are many reasons for this announcement and its consequences are probably being overstated in some places: the government doesn’t have any effective power to compel headteachers to reopen, but merely issues guidelines and sets expectations. Some schools will likely go ahead with whatever opening plans they had in place.

Emma Webb

Sadiq Khan’s statue review is a mistake

What should we make of the clamour for more statues to meet the same fate as Edward Colston’s? One thing to say is that the toppling of monuments is rarely historically literate. During the French revolution, Parisians destroyed twenty-eight statues of biblical kings from the west façade of Notre Dame Cathedral. In their zeal, it didn’t matter that the 500-year old statues didn’t actually portray the kings of France. Countless pieces of art, books and historical artefacts have been lost to this kind of ideological erasure. Finding themselves in the illustrious company of the Taliban and Islamic State, it is wrong to describe this weekend’s iconoclasts as mere vandals. Even

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Gavin Williamson needs to stand up to the teaching unions

So, the Government has abandoned plans to bring all primary school pupils back before the summer holidays, in addition to the two cohorts who have already returned. The opposition of teaching unions and some regional authorities and mayors have seen to that. As for secondary schools, only two of their year groups are returning; no plans for the rest. You do realise what that means, don’t you? It’ll be nearly six months off school by the time the remaining pupils get back at the beginning of September. It’s a long time, isn’t it? And as I’ve mentioned previously, it’s an especially long time if you haven’t had any actual lessons.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Bergamo and the enigma of Covid-19

There seems to be only one certainty with Covid-19: that every day we will be bombarded with fresh evidence and scientific opinion that is contradictory and leaves us a long, long way from understanding this disease. Just when it seemed that antibody tests were indicating infection rates of no more than 10 per cent in the worst-affected countries and no greater than 20 per cent in the worst-affected cities, along comes a study which points to vast numbers of infections. This morning, the public health agency in the Northern Italian city of Bergamo – the epicentre of the Italian outbreak in March – reports that a random sample of 9,965