Society

Tuesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The limits of Covid death statistics

As is often said, choose your statistics carefully and you can use them make just about any point you want to. But rarely does the Office for National Statistics put out two releases on the same day whose statistics point in totally opposite directions. If you listened to the BBC midday news, you may have heard that overall deaths in England and Wales, while they have fallen, are still running at 5.9 per cent above the average for the time of year. This was based on an ONS release entitled Deaths Registered Weekly in England and Wales. However, poke your nose in another release put out an hour or so

Annabel Denham

Covid won’t kill the office

The rapidity and willingness with which workers have adopted and adapted to remote working has led some – including Rory Sutherland in this week’s Spectator – to hail a home-working revolution. But there are convincing reasons why the office won’t be another Covid casualty. First, while it is not inconceivable that coronavirus could accelerate the pre-existing home working trend for office workers, it is bordering on Panglossian to think that we could broaden this out to most people in Britain.  Recent research from the Institute of Economic Affairs has revealed that headline statistics on full-time home workers are misleading. The bulk of the 13.7 per cent of the labour force

Dr Priyad Ariyaratnam

The drugs that can help us defeat Covid-19

Covid-19 is here to stay. Whether it flickers in wait or rages like wildfire, it will remain part of our lives for the foreseeable future. As the vast majority of people who contract the SARS COV-2 virus recover after mild flu-like symptoms then, the onus should be on finding ways to reduce the mortality in the minority who suffer the worst, rather than keeping society as a whole under draconian restrictions. Anti-virals and anti-inflammatories are potential strategies for this. Death from the virus is invariably due to the direct damage it causes in the lungs or from the intense inflammatory response leading to multi-organ failure: The lung damage occurs when

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The return to ‘normal life’ is going to be fiendishly complex

Welcome to C Day – where the ‘C’ stands for the ‘complexity’ of living with coronavirus. Because when the prime minister announces the return to something like normal living today, our revised way of life will feel anything but normal, and also bloomin’ complicated. For example, we’ll be able to have friends or family inside our houses again. But NOT friends and family from different households at any one time, just those from one household at a time. And we won’t be allowed to hug, and we can continue to socialise with up to five people from different households if we are outside. And if we live alone and we

Monday

Andy Shaw

With Leo Kearse

29 min listen

Leo Kearse is a Scottish comedian and writer. On the podcast, he talks to Ben and Andy about the irony of alt-right protestors making Nazi salutes in central London; the difficulty in pinning down the changing definition of a ‘racist’; and why Patrick Hutchinson, the BLM protestor who carried a man out of a protest getting violent, was his man of the month. Presented by Andy Shaw and Benedict Spence.

Daniel French

Could an underground church now emerge in Britain?

Coronavirus and the fallout from it could have been a chance for the Church of England to talk about the grand vision of Christian hope and mortality. The Bible warns us of plagues and pestilence. It tells us that we live in a broken world. It makes it clear this pandemic is far from unprecedented. Yet it also has a message of good news. Instead, too many of the Church’s senior figures have ditched this vision, choosing rather to scare us or play politics when it comes to coronavirus. This missed opportunity, sadly predictable, uncovers a deeper Anglican crisis than push button issues like gay bishops, transgender liturgies, or declining

Sunday

Anthony Browne

A tale of two lockdowns

In all the reporting on the impact of the pandemic on employment, one important factor has gone unnoticed. It is the private sector that is taking the entire hit, with public sector jobs almost untouched. That 25 per cent drop in GDP over the last six months is overwhelmingly contraction of the private sector. Throughout the pandemic I have been talking every day to people in the public and private sector, and there is a complete difference in attitude. It is like two different worlds. Private sector workers are grateful if they still just have a job, aware that so many are losing theirs. Entrepreneurs have been desperately struggling to

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Lockdown to be eased from 4 July

Matt Hancock: Lockdown to be eased again from 4 July This morning the Health Secretary Matt Hancock spoke to Nick Robinson, who was filling in for Andrew Marr. Robinson asked about the government’s plans to ease the lockdown after it was announced yesterday that the UK’s alert level was being downgraded from level 4 to level 3, which indicates that transmission of the virus is no longer rising: MH: This week, we will announce further details of the measures we can take to relieve some of the national lockdown measures… [from] July 4th… That’s part of the plan that we’ve been working through… and the plan is clearly working. Police

Douglas Mcwilliams

Fact check: are Britain’s wealthiest really paying just 20 per cent tax?

Since the turn of the century the share of income tax paid by the 1 per cent with the highest incomes has risen from 21 per cent to 30 per cent. Despite this, some academics claim that the rich avoid tax. A study released last week is a case in point. ‘Wealthiest in Britain paying just 20 per cent tax rate,’ said the Independent. A fair summary: the London School of Economics and Warwick University did indeed argue that the ‘average person with total remuneration of £10 million had an effective tax rate of just 21 per cent: less than the rate that would be paid by someone on median earnings

Leo McKinstry

Is Attlee really more worthy than Churchill?

As the toxic furore over statues continues, a number of left-wingers yearn to see the monument to Winston Churchill in Parliament Square replaced by one to Clement Attlee. In their eyes, the austere, long-serving Labour leader is far worthier of veneration than the cigar-chomping imperialist. To them, Attlee is the man who not only helped win the war by taking charge of the home front but also created the socialist New Jerusalem in its aftermath. ‘Let’s have a statue to Attlee. He is the really great figure in our history,’ tweets one enthusiast. ‘He did more to build up the future of our country than Churchill,’ says another. But this

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Oxbridge colleges are terrified of paying reparations

Behind the cowardice and hypocrisy which many institutions are showing as they give obeisance to Black Lives Matter about any connection with the slave trade lies a dread word — reparations. Activists seek to claim actual financial liabilities payable to existing human beings for alleged, centuries-old wrongs. The institutions — Oxbridge colleges, for example — are terrified. They hope to deflect attention by babbling about ‘decolonising’ the curriculum and by ‘taking the knee’. Glasgow University promised last year to pay £20 million. It won’t work. Those who grovel will be made to grovel much, much more. Jesus College, Cambridge, has tried to handle these matters quietly. One of its greatest

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Farewell, Uncle Ben

The mini cultural revolution unleashed by the Black Lives Matter movement, this campaign of cleansing society of any reminder of a more racist past, has been remarkable in its speed and scope. Statues have been toppled. Sitcom episodes have been memory-holed. Actors have been forced into grovelling apologies for once playing a non-white character. Now, perhaps inevitably, they’ve come for the rice products. This is the news that beloved rice brand Uncle Ben’s is set to scrap its brand character – the eponymous fictional rice farmer – for some reason or other to do with Black Lives Matter. The reasoning behind this will be curious to most. After all, Uncle

Jamie Blackett

Beware the rise of US beef

‘Oh man, US farmers would never put up with all this crap!’ said the young American cowgirl. She was doing an internship on my farm last year and was shocked that we have to tag all our animals at birth and then record every antibiotic administered throughout their lives to ensure the complete traceability of British beef. I remember the look of incredulity on her face as I pointed out the grey hairs on my head caused by mislaid cow passports. This cultural difference between the two countries is partly why a US-UK trade deal isn’t straightforward. Last month, parliament voted down an amendment to the Agriculture Bill, tabled by

Friday

Greene King and Lloyd’s are wrong to pay slave trade reparations

Brewers Greene King is to make a ‘substantial investment to benefit the BAME community’ to make up for the compensation paid to its founder after slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833. Lloyds of London has made a similar announcement. The underlying assumption is that everyone classified today as black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) descended from a victim of slavery. No such assumption can be made by anyone whose mind is open to the facts of the historical record. At the very least, the truth is more nuanced, and in full daylight we can see that portraying all BAME people as victims can only be sustained by

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Suicide by secularisation: how the churches are dying

31 min listen

Today’s episode of Holy Smoke exposes the extent to which ordinary Christians have been betrayed by their own bishops. This is a process that began decades ago – but it is only this year, during the coronavirus pandemic, that we’ve seen just how corrupted church leaders have become by secularisation. The need to close churches for public worship during the lockdown meant that, for the first time in many decades, Anglican and Catholic bishops were able to exercise a small but significant degree of secular power – something they desperately crave. In doing so, they displayed a mixture of ruthlessness, vanity, hypocrisy and stupidity that will accelerate the decline of

Douglas Murray

A solution to the JK Rowling trans row

Since the whole world is in crisis, a crisis in the world of publishing might seem like a niche issue. But something that has been going on at the publishers Hachette is worth noting. Not least as it may be a portent of worse things to come elsewhere. Earlier this month the publishing house was thrown into turmoil after its most famous author, JK Rowling stirred up the most demented people in our society. Rowling – whose Harry Potter series was all published by Bloomsbury – has written a number of books for Hachette, most recently a scheduled book for children called ‘The Ickabog’. But earlier this month, Rowling objected

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Churchill once challenged BBC intolerance

Winston Churchill: hero or villain? That was the question the BBC asked on its website on 10 June. It caused outrage in some quarters, but was Auntie taking its revenge for the humiliation it suffered at Churchill’s libertarian hands during the second world war? In the summer of 1940, a movement was launched in Britain called the ‘People’s Convention’, which brought together a disparate alliance of Marxists, socialists and pacifists. Among its most prominent backers were Robin Page Arnot, Harry Pollitt, and Willie Gallacher, all veteran communists. The Convention held its inaugural rally in London on 12 January 1941, attended by over 2,000 delegates, and one of them, a Mr

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Did slavery really make Britain rich?

‘It’s a sad truth that much of our wealth was derived from the slave trade’, said London’s mayor Sadiq Khan. Others agree: for Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, ‘Britain was built on the backs, and souls, of slaves’. But there is a problem with this analysis; it’s wrong. Just like the story told of an island nation standing alone since 1066, it’s a myth that the monstrous evil of the slave trade made Britain the wealthy country it is today. Slavery and sugar did not provide the sinews of finance that drove industrialisation. Total profits from the slave trade, had they been invested entirely in Britain, would have accounted for about

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Joanna Trollope Edition

29 min listen

Joanna Trollope is an award-winning novelist, whose books have sold more than eight million copies worldwide. She’s known best for her novel, The Rector’s Wife, which was adapted into a TV series. On the podcast, she talks to Katy about the expectations on her as a girl growing up in the 40s, how stay at home mums can still be feminists, and how, as she gets older, she finds she gets her way more.

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.