Society

Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline. Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching

Lily Allen. Lights! Camera! Hanky! It’s been a vintage year for Twitter’s comedy genius. The needy pub-bore grumblings of Tony Blair. Ditto John Major. Ant and Dec. Even after the drunken prang it’s impossible to tell them apart. The panicky new jargon of weather forecasters, (old version in brackets). Flood warning. (Drizzle). Drought warning. (Drizzle clearing). Zero visibility. (Overcast). Threat to life. (Hail). Hypothermia alert. (Frost). Blizzards expected with a wind-chill of minus 50. (Easterly breezes). Susanna Reid. Why does she let the bloke with the big head do all the talking? The minor Johnsons. One is acceptable but do we need the others? And I don’t buy the ‘good

We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 3: Douglas Murray on the shameful hounding of a distinguished philosopher: Sometimes a scandal is not just a scandal, but a biopsy of a society. So it is with the assault on Sir Roger Scruton, who in recent weeks has been smeared in the media, fired by the government and had his life’s work assailed. Scruton is the latest, though far from the first victim of the modern outrage mob. It is now four years since the Nobel prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt was fired by University College London (among other institutions who were lucky to have

As a lifelong Europhile, I rather liked the love letter to Britain from Frans Timmermans, vice president of the new European Commission. We in this country do love Europe, its people, its culture, its quirks, its diversity. Never has Britain been integrated more closely with the rest of Europe, never have we done more trade, never have more Brits lived in Europe and vice versa. The links between our peoples have never been stronger – and, after Brexit, will become stronger still. The idea of a union of governments, however, was not a model that worked for the UK: that much was decided in a referendum and reinforced in two

Boris as PM can be a joy! He is bold, he has such enthusiasm, he has marvellous and often funny turns of phrase and he often has great instincts.   Take for example his greetings to the Jewish people given just before Christmas on the feast of Hanukkah. It is exuberant, knowledgeable and very moving.   This speech is only two minutes but all my Jewish friends are stunned by it – by his humour, his deep knowledge of their history and his total, positive embrace of their cause.   It was all the more welcome because of what was (and still is) the greatest scandal in the Corbyn led Labour party – its

East Germans had a name for their version of ‘woke’ culture’; it was Zersetzung, or ‘decomposition’ in English. It was a form of psychological warfare deployed against citizens suspected of ‘subversive incitement’. There were several techniques to Zersetzung but probably the most effective was what the Stasi described as the ‘systematic discrediting of public reputation’ by eroding the ‘self-confidence and self-esteem of a person [to] create fear, panic, confusion’. This is now the strategy of the online mob, who have become ruthlessly adept at degrading those they charge with subversion: Toby Young, professor Nigel Biggar, Germaine Greer, Ian Buruma, Placido Domingo, Sir Tim Hunt and Sir Roger Scruton are just a few who

We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 6: Toby Young on Prince Andrew: Like many people, I watched Prince Andrew’s Newsnight meltdown with mounting disbelief. Why had he agreed to do it? It wasn’t as if the general public was clamouring for an answer about what he was doing on the night he’d been accused of having sex with a 17-year-old victim of Jeffrey Epstein. And if he was going to give a television interview, why choose Emily Maitlis? That’s like booking yourself into Sweeney Todd’s for a short back and sides. Emily asked me to do an interview last year when I

Boris Johnson is nothing like Churchill, a view with which my friend Andrew Roberts concurs. But in the 20-odd years I have known Boris, I have often been struck by his similarity to John Wilkes, 18th-century politician, journalist and catnip to women. A wit and a showman, Wilkes, who denounced European entanglements and championed the rights of the electorate over parliament, was the first politician to achieve celebrity status. One of Boris’s endearing traits is that he has never regarded himself as an enticing proposition in the looks department. Wilkes had a squint, but he said: ‘Give me half an hour to talk away my face and I can seduce

The moment of Boris’s victory makes me stop and look back. In the referendum of 1975 — my first vote — I voted ‘Yes’ (i.e. Remain), but I remember feeling a twinge of admiration for Orkney and Shetland, the only area to vote ‘No’. At Cambridge afterwards, I learnt and liked sovereignty arguments from people like John Casey and (when he paid a private visit to avoid the riots which attended him in those days) Enoch Powell. In the early 1980s, I cheered on Mrs Thatcher’s European budget battle. In 1984, attending my first European Council as a reporter, I was shocked by the way of doing business — running