Society

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

Melanie McDonagh

Relaxing Sunday trading laws is an abominable idea

You’d think that any measure that would help to get people out spending would be all to the good, wouldn’t you? Well, not so. The government’s latest genius idea for rebooting the retail sector is to abandon Sunday trading laws for a year, at least in the case of the larger supermarkets. Those laws at present mean that Brits cannot actually spend the entire day of rest shopping; just six hours of it. Rishi Sunak and Dominic Cummings are both said to be all for the idea, which, I suppose, makes it a shoo-in. Personally I think it’s an abominable idea. For starters, the likelihood that at the end of

Ross Clark

How can ‘test and trace’ stop a virus spread by the asymptomatic?

The government has placed a lot of hope in its test and trace system, but even disregarding teething problems with the smartphone app and reports of some of the 25,000 contact tracers being left idle, is it even possible for it to achieve its objective? The problem with Covid-19 all along, and the reason it has managed to evade the efforts of containment which had worked with previous novel viruses such as SARS and avian flu, is the sheer number of people who seem to be infected but who show no symptoms. Some studies have shown that 80 percent of cases might fall into this category. Worse, there is plenty

What the response to London’s young graffiti cleaners reveals

Further Black Lives Matter protests took place yesterday in the UK, in response to the death of a man at the hands of a Minnesota cop a fortnight ago. So far the tally from the London protest includes not only the now traditional mass-breaking of the government’s Covid guidelines, the graffiti-ing of the Cenotaph, the statues of Sir Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, but also the injuring of 27 police officers in what the BBC nevertheless persists in calling ‘largely peaceful anti-racism protests’. Which brings to mind something important that has been too little discussed in the days since the last London protests, four days ago. That is the video

Robert Peston

Can Britain avoid a second lockdown?

What comes next, now that the transmission rate and prevalence of Covid-19 have fallen significantly? (Before you shout at me, yes I know there is frustration and some bemusement among scientists that illness incidence and numbers of deaths have not dropped faster in the UK, but they have nonetheless reduced significantly, if not uniformly, everywhere). There are detailed plans from the government for when and how to restart certain businesses and social activities in the coming six weeks. But there is not a clearly articulated strategy for how we are expected to live and work between now and the end of the year (and beyond). So I’ve tried to piece

John Lee

Science, doubt and the ‘second wave’ of Covid

In taking a position on an issue, most of us like to think that we accumulate evidence, consider the pros and cons, and then rationally come to a view that we’ll be willing to change if and when the evidence demands it. But it turns out that this is very much a minority way of going about things. The psychological evidence is very clear. What most people do is take a position very soon after being presented with an issue, and then accumulate evidence and reasoning to justify that position. This goes some way to explaining the increasing polarisation of views about coronavirus, which have been hardening over the last few

Katy Balls

Professor Sunetra Gupta interview: There’s not enough diversity of opinion on Sage

This week, the government has come under criticism from a number of its scientific advisers for easing the lockdown too quickly. Meanwhile, both chief medical officer Chris Whitty and chief scientific officer Patrick Vallance have emphasised the need to move cautiously at this point in the lockdown easing. However, not every scientist takes this view. On the latest Women with Balls podcast, I’m joined by professor Sunetra Gupta to discuss her career – and her assessment of coronavirus.  The professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford is the lead scientist behind the Oxford study, which in March that offered an alternative view to Imperial College’s dire coronavirus predictions. It suggested that the

Tom Slater

Lego, George Floyd and the politics of playtime

Time was that toys would be recalled, removed from sale or quietly had their advertising pulled if they were covered in lead paint, defective, or in the case of Disney’s hilariously misjudged 1999 ‘Rad Repeatin’ Tarzan’ doll, appeared to be masturbating. Today all it takes is for them to be potentially perceived by someone, somewhere, as insensitive. The Culture War has so seeped into every corner of modern life that Lego has actually pulled marketing of its police and White House toys – presumably in an effort not to stoke more civil unrest – in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Amid the protests and riots that continue to roil