Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Leicester has a history of lockdowns

Leicester lockdowns Leicester was forced to impose the first local lockdown, in response to a reported surge in cases of coronavirus. — The city was last locked down from the rest of the country on 30 May 1645, when a 10,000-strong royalist force led by Prince Rupert and Charles I himself besieged the town and demanded it to surrender. The parliamentarians, who consisted of 480 garrisoned soldiers, 900 townsmen and 150 volunteers from the rest of Leicestershire, were heavily outnumbered. Moreover, the city’s medieval walls had mostly gone, and had to be hurriedly replaced by earth banks. Even so, the parliamentarians inflicted large losses on the royalists as they breached

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Boris does press-ups, pubs reopen and Leicester locks down

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he was ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’ and did press-ups to prove it, as he announced infrastructure initiatives to counter the economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus outbreak. With a slogan ‘Build, build, build’, he made a speech in Dudley promising £1.5 billion for hospital improvements and planning changes to make loft extensions easier. Pubs were allowed to open from 4 July, after a fashion, with table service, as were restaurants. Churches could hold services without singing and newlyweds were told to wash their hands after exchanging rings. The government was poised to announce that from 6 July British travellers to

Peter Jones

Tiberius and the ‘phantoms of liberty’

Word has it that ministers already do not bother to argue their corner with the government’s inner ring, while a slimmer, streamlined cabinet office threatens to disempower them still further. Ministers could soon resemble senators under Rome’s second emperor Tiberius (ad 14-37). The historian Tacitus painted an extraordinary picture of Tiberius’s early days in office. The fact was that his stepfather Augustus had exercised autocratic power after he ‘restored’ the republic that had collapsed in 31 bc. The question for senators, therefore, was what change to expect under the new man in power. Their experience suggested precious little. They already knew Tiberius as a cryptic, devious and heartless character, whose

The Spectator

Letters: Police must focus on deterring crime, not responding to it

Deterring crime Sir: Rod Liddle is right to highlight the politicisation of the police as a source of their inadequacies, but I think he misses the crucial point (‘Defund the police’, 27 June). We simply do not have bobbies on the beat to even feel sympathy for, and this means that constructive relationships between a recognisable police officer and their community are a rarity. As Kevin Hurley describes, many black youths in our cities have nothing but hatred towards police officers, and this cannot be a surprise when the only interactions they have with them are being forced to empty their pockets after being suspected of criminal activity. Mr Liddle

Paul Mason

Why Rebecca Long-Bailey had to go

Do you remember where you were when the BBC showed a rerun of Bowie’s Glastonbury set? When we ask each other that in future, the answer is always going to be: ‘At home, recovering from a day of Zoom calls.’ It’s 100 days since lockdown and as we slowly emerge it’s hard to keep a sense of proportion about the events in between. I remember pricking my finger for a trial antibody test; I remember my delight at discovering that an old-time cockney butcher still exists on a nearby council estate; I remember the absolute stillness of the air as a sparrowhawk circled over south London. Best to fix these

Leo McKinstry

The caution that almost cost us the Battle of Britain

The Battle of Britain, which began 80 years ago this week, occupies a unique place in our island story. Its epic moral quality, representing the triumph of freedom over tyranny, continues to resonate to this day. The RAF’s victory marked a crucial turning point in the war; it was the first time the Nazi machine had suffered a defeat. If the Luftwaffe had gained the mastery of the skies over southern England in September 1940, the Germans might well have been able to launch a vast, seaborne invasion across the Channel. Beaten in the West, the Reich had to turn eastwards, to Russia, with disastrous consequences. What makes the tale

Douglas Murray

What a leaked NHS memo tells us about White Fragility

Of all the people who have made cash in the past month, few can have raked it in like Robin DiAngelo. Since the death of George Floyd, the white American academic and author of White Fragility has been absolutely milking it. A term I probably shouldn’t use, since Peta last week declared milk a symbol of white supremacy. I might say she is absolutely creaming it, though by the time you read this ‘cream’ might be racist too. In which case it will join the British countryside, which was designated as racist by the BBC’s Countryfile last week. A fact that I learned after opening Google’s homepage, where I was

Conrad Black

If Boris wants a New Deal he needs to end the lockdown

The invocation of Franklin D. Roosevelt by Boris Johnson is welcome, but the conditions that greeted Roosevelt when he was inaugurated US president in 1933 and those in the UK today are very distinguishable. Roosevelt inherited a collapsed financial system; the stock and commodity exchanges and almost all of the banks in the country had been closed for up to two weeks. Almost a third of the country was unemployed (the states compiled the figures and they were not entirely reliable), and there was no direct relief for the jobless. For the first time since the Civil War there were machine-guns at the corners of the great federal buildings in

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why Boris Johnson’s ‘New Deal’ won’t save us

John Maynard Keynes looks down and smiles, recalling his own perhaps too-often quoted remark that ‘when the facts change, I change my mind’. Boris Johnson’s £5 billion ‘New Deal’ of school and hospital projects to stimulate the pandemic-torn economy is pure Keynes, as well as a conscious reference to Franklin Roosevelt. And like the totality of the Treasury response to Covid, it represents a 180-degree change of mind from the modern Conservative belief in squashing state spending while letting the private sector drive. But in dire circumstances, most commentators accept it’s right to park ideology and try anything that looks like it might work. And for a while — I’d

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The pandemic’s invisible victims

I sometimes pick up some food at Tesco for an 86-year-old pensioner who lives a few streets over. At the weekend, I brought him milk and cornflakes. He opened his front door; I put the bags down, retreated the required two metres, but when I looked up he was in tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’m just so lonely at the moment.’ Should I have moved closer, put my arm around him? At the moment the risk of passing on the virus is low in London. I’ve had the bug (I think) and I used hand gel after leaving the supermarket. It’s been said of the recent protests that

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

To understand the past, you need to inhabit it for a while

‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling by the hour, the glass will fall forever, But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.’ The first poem I ever heard was ‘Eenie, meenie, minie moe, catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go’, etc. I found it mystifying. How would one catch a tiger by its toe? And do tigers ‘holler’? ‘There is something about this poem they’re not telling me,’ I thought, full of worry, my nappy beginning to chafe.

Alexander Pelling-Bruce Alexander Pelling-Bruce

The Black Lives Matter movement is re-racialising society

Every day I thank God for the British Empire. Without it I wouldn’t exist. My Gold Coast-born mother would never have met my English father. She herself is the descendant of a Scottish merchant called Bruce. Now she lives happily in rural Perthshire. She’s the only black in the village. Growing up in the 1990s, I faintly remember debate over whether non-whites could be British. Certainly the question had receded by the time Monty Panesar made his England cricket debut midway through the following decade. Meanwhile, however, Britain quickly became one of the best places for cultural entrepreneurs to promote the pernicious fallacy that we are best understood through the

Howard Jacobson

The bluff and bluster of Boris’s bland boy Brexiteers

From the balcony where I take my daily exercise there is a view of the commercial centre of London that is so susceptible to changes of the light you feel you are in a different city every day. When the dying sun is reflected in its glass towers, the city looks like Las Vegas burning. Under a dark sky it could be Pittsburgh. The other day was so louring that I saw Moscow. ‘I’m looking at the Kremlin,’ I shouted in to my wife. She’s been worrying about me. She thinks it’s time I relaxed the promise I made myself not to go out until the virus has gone and

The Spectator

2461: Hot off? solution

  The unclued lights include the name of a British daily newspaper; 3/26A, 9/35, 12, 24, 28/31D and 34/21. First prize Susan Hay, Old Perton, Staffs Runners-up Alison Gillam, Knotty Green, Bucks; Laurence Pearce, Lympstone, Devon

Lucy Vickery

Poems about picnics

In Competition No. 3155 you were invited to supply a poem entitled ‘The Picnic’. This challenge was prompted by a tweet from picnic-hater @edcumming inviting people to nominate their single worst picnic item. Suggestions included stale warm dry carrot batons, hummus with a skin, supermarket Scotch eggs and gin in a tin that’s been slowly boiled by the sun. So as we face a summer of outdoor socialising, should we all just face the fact that picnics are much nicer in the imagining? There are clearly fans out there, judging by the entry, which was large and tremendous. The winners, especially tricky to choose this week, take £25 each. Oh

Wednesday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Mock the Week’s real problem is nothing to do with sexism

Is Mock the Week sexist? It’s a question that has haunted the BBC’s topical comedy panel show for much of its 15 years. And one of its most prominent female former panellists has just reignited the debate by claiming the show practises a kind of ‘pedestal feminism’, giving a few female comics a go to deflect criticism of its otherwise manifest sexism. ‘I had to stop doing it’, said Canadian comic Katherine Ryan, who has clocked up seven MtW appearances, on her podcast recently. ‘I knew that every time I was booked I was taking a job away from one of my female peers… I couldn’t do it anymore because

Konstantin Kisin

I don’t support BLM and neither should you

Most of us have remained largely silent as we watched the scenes of disorder and destruction around the country in recent weeks. Driven by the desire to be clear in our opposition to racism, we turned a blind eye as protestors abused and injured police officers, chasing them around the streets of London with impunity. We stood aside as they defaced key symbols of our history and bowed cowardly institution after cowardly institution to their will. We watched spokespeople for this movement declare a cultural revolution and pretended we did not know what that meant. We can no longer afford to maintain this façade of ignorance and docility. Do I

Zoe Strimpel

Black Lives Matter’s anti-Semitism blind spot

Charles Dickens was not a nice man. He was horrid to his family, remarking on the birth of one of his sons that ‘on the whole I could have dispensed with him.’ When he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress 27 years his junior, he threw his long-suffering wife out, and sent her only three letters in the 12 remaining years of his life. Despite having one of the best imaginations in English literature, his depictions of women alternated between terrible crone (Miss Havisham) to simply prone (Esther in Bleak House). Ah well, we used to say: terrible man, brilliant books. Funny old place, the past. Well, times

Patrick West

The rise of Britain’s new class system

Television chef Prue Leith believes that snobbery is still rife in Britain, and that it’s keeping working-class people in their place. Speaking to the Radio Times this week, Leith described Britain as ‘the most unbelievably class-ridden country’. She is right, but not for old-fashioned reasons we associate with that Frost Report sketch with John Cleese and the Two Ronnies. Snobbery no longer emanates from the landed gentry or the social-climbing bourgeoise. The most overt snobbery today can be found coming from some on the liberal-left and that minority of Remainers who like to deride ‘gammons’. These are the people who for over three years – in the Guardian, on Radio