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Society

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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.

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

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

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

Why is the Labour left so averse to Winston Churchill?

It has become a ritual almost as traditional as the Changing of the Guard. During a weekend of mostly peaceful protests, Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square was once again vandalised. The first recorded defacement of Ivor Roberts-Jones’ imposing rendition of Churchill took place during London’s 2000 May Day anti-capitalist protests. A strip of grass placed on the statue’s head gave the impression it sported a Mohican haircut. James Mitchell, a former soldier in his twenties, also sprayed its mouth with blood-like red paint. Mitchell said he did this because: ‘Churchill was an exponent of capitalism and of imperialism and anti-Semitism. A Tory reactionary vehemently opposed to the emancipation of

In pictures: the lower-profile protests

Today’s newspapers show several pictures of angry protests, with vandalised statues and zero social distancing. They tell a story: of demonstrators who seemed to be alienating potential supporters and risking re-igniting the virus that is destroying the very lives they rightly claim matter. But that’s not a fair picture of what happened at the weekend. The vast majority of those demonstrating did so while respecting social distancing and without violence or destruction. I was at just such a demo. It might not have grabbed the headlines, but what happened in Tooting Common is far more representative of what happened. I’m a councillor in Queenstown in Battersea (home to the US

Steerpike

Watch: Tory MPs clean Churchill’s statue

Yesterday, protestors at a Black Lives Matter demo in London vandalised the statue of Winston Churchill which stands in Parliament Square. The protestors spray painted Churchill’s stone plinth so it read ‘Churchill was a racist’ and sellotaped a Black Lives Matter sign to the former prime minister – the man who led Britain against the Nazis during the second world war. In response, several Tory MPs decided to take matters into their own hands to restore the statue today. Taking inspiration from members of the Household Cavalry who scrubbed a memorial clean on Whitehall following protests last week, MPs from the Blue Collar faction of the Conservative party headed to

Fraser Nelson

The Spectator, war and slavery: a note on our history

The Spectator is the world’s oldest weekly, so we have quite a history to defend. But what sets us apart from other long-running magazines is that our values have not changed much since we were founded in 1828 – or, indeed, since the The Spectator appeared in its original form in 1711. When I made this remark a short while ago, it aroused some teasing: surely, some asked, a magazine needs to change with the times? But the values I refer to – cherishing diversity of opinion, being unafraid to go against the grain – don’t age. I’ve written before about the ways in which the values of the 1711

Stephen Daisley

Mob justice is no justice

It doesn’t matter how good your intentions are, it’s your process that counts. The push to topple a statue of Edward Colston did not begin at the spur of the moment this weekend. Campaigners have argued for years that the Bristolian slave trader was not a man to be lionised. You don’t have to be especially woke to wonder why a monument to a man who made his fortune off the brutalised backs of human beings was still standing in a British city in 2020. Reconsidering those we memorialise and whether they ought to be honoured seems a timely task. But the just and proper way to go about it

James Kirkup

JK Rowling and the road to terfdom

The tale of JK Rowling, finally revealed as a modern-day witch guilty of wickedness over sex and gender, is one of those stories that captures just about everything bad about this issue and about public conversation conducted via, and shaped by, social media. Rowling’s crime was to tweet that biological sex is real and should not be subordinated to the subjective concept of gender. ‘My life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so,’ she wrote. ‘If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. ‘If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.’ Cue firestorm. If you haven’t seen this

Brendan O’Neill

Toppling Colston’s statue was an act of intolerance

As they tore down the statue of the 17th-century merchant and slaver Edward Colston in Bristol yesterday, protesters were behaving like a woke Taliban. Just as Taliban extremists smashed huge carvings of Buddha that offended them, and just as Isis nutters took hammers to ‘idolatrous’ monuments in the cities of Palmyra and Nimrud, so British protesters are now waging war on historical statues that they claim are ‘hurtful’ to ordinary people. It was the glee with which they tore down Colston’s statue that was most unnerving. They yanked him down and started cheering and screaming as they stomped on his head. He was then taken to the nearby harbour and

Why Edward Colston’s statue should have stayed up

Edward Colston sleeps with the fishes. A mob of Bristolians has toppled the statue of one of their city’s founding fathers, Saddam-style, and lobbed the poor fellow into the docks. Other footage on social media shows protesters kneeling on his brass neck, as if he had something to do with modern-day police brutality in the United States. What on earth has caused this madness, which looked like violent scenes from the English reformation? As is obvious, it’s not really much to do with George Floyd, the man suffocated to death by police last month in Minneapolis. The controversy around Colston has been raging for years in Bristol. A mega-rich philanthropist