Society

‘You can’t change sex – biologically, that is impossible.’ That, by most people’s standards, is a simple observable truth. But by the standards of campus activists, it is tantamount to hate speech, deserving of merciless retribution. The quote above is from Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. And for daring to express what most other people in this country would take to be common sense, she has been marginalised and threatened. Today the Telegraph reveals that she has been assigned two bodyguards to accompany her to all of her lectures for the rest of the year, after threats were made against her and circulated

Is Jeremy Corbyn attempting to foment the abolition of the House of Lords? His recent peerage nominations suggest so. Corbyn has put forward a former Speaker mired in bullying allegations who facilitated a parliamentary revolution. A failed apparatchik under investigation for her handling of anti-Semitism. And Tom Watson. The former Labour deputy leader is perhaps the most reprehensible choice given his role in the Carl Beech affair. Beech, known as ‘Nick’, made multiple false allegations of sexual assault and murder, which led to the destruction of the careers, livelihoods and reputations of several men who truly served the nation. But there is nothing inevitable about Watson being elevated to the

Roger Scruton’s funeral takes place in London today, and he’ll be in the thoughts and prayers of his admirers worldwide – many of them in Poland. We Poles owe him an unusual debt, one he mentioned in his Spectator diary last month when he wrote about his journey to Warsaw. Andrzej Duda, the Polish president, presented him with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit in recognition of his ‘extraordinary efforts in supporting the democratic transformation in Poland and for developing Polish-British academic and scientific exchange’. In his Spectator diary, he wrote about how he also met men that day who had been imprisoned for 20 and 30 years

In case you were in any doubt, the Prime Minister and his chief aide, Dominic Cummings, more than give a damn about who runs the BBC and intend to have a significant influence over the appointment of a new director-general. The current chairman of the BBC board, David Clementi, showed acute political sensitivity in persuading Tony Hall to stand down as director-general earlier than he would otherwise have done. The point is that Clementi’s own term of office ends in just over a year. And had Hall stayed in post longer than that, Johnson and Cummings would have selected a new chair to replace Clementi with the express purpose of

I write a lot about transgenderism. I do so for several reasons. Among them: because politicians still aren’t doing their job and assessing policies and representing concerns properly. Because politics fails if groups of people are silenced and ignored. Because the way some women are abused, threatened and silenced on this topic makes me angry. Because other journalists (mostly male ones) who know that this stuff matters still aren’t covering it. And because language, our ability to give form and expression to our thoughts, is important. George Orwell is probably the most over-quoted author in the language. That’s true even if you exclude all the people who cite things he

One of the great myths of Scottish higher education is that it’s free. Outside observers can be forgiven for making this error because Nicola Sturgeon asserts it so very often. She has boasted that ‘one of this government’s proudest achievements is the restoration of free higher education’, claimed to ‘stand for universal services, such as… free education’, and argued, naturally, that independence is ‘the only way to protect the advances that Scotland has made with devolution through the social contract, which has delivered vital universal benefits such as free university education’. Now Audit Scotland, the public spending watchdog, reports a 185 per cent increase in loans authorised by the Student