Society

Thursday

Roger Alton Roger Alton

It’s the fans wot win it – so stop fleecing them

It is always possible to tell the difference between a bunch of Manchester City fans and auditions for the latest Dolce & Gabbana commercial. And in that uproarious packed stand at Brighton on Sunday, there were clearly quite a few folk who hadn’t gone without a meal for some time. But by golly we were a happy, relieved bunch. City supporters have been used to getting kicked in the face at the last moment for so long that no one really celebrated till the result was beyond doubt. ‘Why are you so nervous, you’re 4-1 up?’ ‘I know, but there’s five minutes to go,’ is a joke made for City

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Eton embraces identity politics

‘Repeat after me, gentlemen: “Thank you for not letting me into your Oxbridge college because I belong to the wrong social class and I have been too well taught.’’ ’ I do hope they include this catechism in the new ‘gratitude’ lessons that they’re about to introduce at Eton. They should do because it’s true. Across the country, private school parents who have scrimped and saved about £40,000 a year for fees are increasingly finding that their sacrifice is being rewarded by near-automatic Oxbridge rejection for their blameless offspring. And who is speaking out against this class war-driven injustice? Almost no one. Which is why Anthony Wallersteiner, headmaster of Stowe,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Clearing the air

We are, of course, in the midst of an air pollution crisis which, like every other threat to our health these days, is ‘worse than smoking’. According to the Royal College of Physicians, everyone in Britain is effectively smoking at least one cigarette a day, rising to many more in the most polluted cities. What’s more, as Bloomberg once put it, London has a ‘Dirty Secret: Pollution Worse than Beijing’s’. And London’s air pollution has ‘been at illegal levels since 2010’, according to the New York Times. Serious though the problem may be — I’ll take Public Health England’s word for it that air pollution contributes to between 28,000 and

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Metro Bank was the wrong model for its place and time

This column has long been a fan of the concept of ‘challenger banks’ offering alternatives for personal and small business customers who were mistreated or underserved by the big banks before and after the 2008 crash. Most challengers were internet-based, but Metro Bank — founded in 2010 by US entrepreneur Vernon Hill, whose early career was spent developing sites for McDonald’s — was different. Its model was predicated on an expensive chain of bricks-and–mortar branches (referred to as ‘stores’, open seven days a week, and with 200 planned by 2020) at a time when the likes of NatWest and HSBC were withdrawing from the high street as fast as they

Karen Yossman

Writers blocked

It was Lionel Shriver who saw the writing on the wall. Giving a keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival three years ago in which she decried the scourge of modern identity politics, Shriver observed that the dogma of ‘cultural appropriation’ —which demands no less than complete racial segregation in the arts — had not yet wrapped its osseous fingers around the publishing industry. But, she warned: ‘This same sensibility is coming to a bookstore near you.’ Reader, it has come. Next month a young, Asian-American author called Amélie Wen Zhao was due to celebrate the publication of her debut novel Blood Heir, the first in a three-part fantasy series

Lucy Vickery

Verse and reverse

In Competition No. 3098 you were invited to submit a poem that can be read forwards and backwards, i.e. from the top down and the bottom up.   I worried, as the entries trickled in, that I had set the bar too high, especially given the anguished comments that accompanied some of them. ‘This was one of your really tough assignments,’ wrote one old hand, ‘a combination of mathematics and poetics.’ ‘This challenge almost made me cry,’ wailed another.   But I needn’t have worried. Your submissions — some palindromic — combined technical adroitness with clever content. High fives to the winners below who are rewarded with £20 each. This

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

The United States Senate is dying

Picture a forum where some of America’s most prominent men and women assemble in a healthy, civilised way to discuss and hash out the country’s major issues for the good of the people. This forum, theoretically, was supposed to be the United States Senate, a group of distinguished legislators who would introduce reason into the national debate. George Washington himself called the Senate a ‘saucer,’ a cooling agent to the scalding legislation that came out of the House of Representatives. My how far the Senate has fallen. In the past, being a US senator was a point of pride. You were an elite member of an elite club working in an elite

Ed Husain

The Tories are right to reject the flawed definition of ‘Islamophobia’

As a Muslim, I find the term ‘Islamophobia’ an etymological fallacy. Islam, by the definition of its founder the Prophet Mohammed and its greatest philosophers (al-Farabi, Ibn Tufayl, Averroes), is considered to be a ‘natural way’.  Humans cannot have a phobia against nature. It is the height of moral insanity for an intelligent Muslim to place the word ‘Islam’ and the word ‘phobia’ together in a single phrase. The term ‘Islamophobia’ was lifted from discrimination against homosexuals: homophobia. The parallels do not stand up to serious scrutiny between Islam as an idea, a faith, a civilisation, a motivator for behaviour and homosexuality as a private practice of consenting adults that had led to punishment and

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Ursula Buchan on her grandfather, John Buchan

In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by Ursula Buchan – the author of a hugely involving new life of her late grandfather John Buchan. The book is called Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps (you can read Allan Massie’s enthusiastic Spectator review of it here), and it does as the title promises. Buchan (or ‘JB’ to his family) is known, if he’s known now at all, as the author of the pre-war thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, later filmed by Hitchcock. Yet here was a man of staggering range and energy – diplomat, historian, politician, propagandist, poet, barrister, publisher, and (most important of all) one-time assistant editor of The Spectator. He was

Tuesday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

With Nathan Outlaw

28 min listen

In this episode, Michelin star chef Nathan Outlaw joins Lara and Livvy to talk about his love for Cornwall and seafood, training under celebrity chef Rick Stein, and how he totally didn’t help his ten year old daughter win a baking competition.

Edward Adoo

The Jeremy Kyle problem

Since the early nineties, mid-morning reality TV has been something of an obsession for many Brits. From Jerry Springer to Vanessa, Trisha to Kilroy, our desire to find out who had cheated on their neighbour – or who has a drug problem – has meant these shows have been a consistent fixture on our screens. Now The Jeremy Kyle Show has been suspended following the death of a guest shortly after he appeared on the programme. ITV has wiped the show from its online back catalogue. And there are calls for the programme to be axed for good. The controversy around Jeremy Kyle is nothing new. The shouting and screaming and

Natasha Green

What I learned from Doris Day

Doris Day has died at the age of 97. When I heard this news I wasn’t transported to a scene in one of her movies with Rock Hudson. Instead, I remembered sitting in the dark English countryside during the very first few hours of this millennium, carefully removing a lit cigar from my sleeping brother’s hand as he snored on a chaise longue. Everything changes, but New Year’s Eves never do. They carry the same sense of dreary ennui, the dead-sky-at-tea-time feeling that hangs around the winter months. But I first met Doris Day on New Year’s Day at the beginning of this century, the day when we thought we’d

Jeremy Marshall

What terminal cancer taught me about life

“I’m sorry,” said the doctor, “you have large tumours in numerous places. We can’t operate or cure you. You have 18 months to live”. With those words, I burst into tears. In that mundane hospital room, my life changed. The job I love – I worked as boss of a private bank – was gone. My priorities shifted immediately. Nobody on their death bed wishes they had spent more time in the office. When my time comes, I was determined I would not have that regret. I wanted to make the most of however long I had left. Nearly four years on, I am still alive thanks to my wonderful

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Fact check: is Huawei really contributing £1.7bn to the UK economy?

Huawei is nothing if not inventive in its efforts to land the contract to run Britain’s forthcoming 5G mobile phone network. This morning it has published a report by the Oxford Economics Group which claims that the company added £1.7 billion to Britain’s GDP and accounted for 26,200 UK jobs in 2018. It is an eye-catching figure, but should it really influence government ministers as they weigh up the advantages of giving Huawei the contract against the security risks of handing parts of our telecommunications infrastructure to a company connected with the Chinese government? You have to have a little imagination to get to the figure of £1.7 billion and 26,200

Monday

Allis Moss

Danny Baker’s tweet was wrong. But in time he should be forgiven

More than two decades have passed since I worked alongside Danny Baker on the original BBC Radio 5 breakfast show. I learned a lot from Baker, a presenter who was able to sound so informal on air and generous in drawing whoever was in the studio into whatever was happening. “Joshing”, he called it. As the newsreader I was there every day. His ‘long-suffering sidekick’, as I was once described. Clearly, I am not wholly objective. Working every morning with Danny Baker for several years has left me with a fondness and appreciation for the chap even though it is a long time since we last spoke. Other commentators, including his

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What the government needs to do if it really wants to end the domestic abuse ‘postcode lottery’

Unusually, the government made an announcement today on domestic policy, with Theresa May promising to end the ‘postcode lottery’ for domestic abuse victims by forcing English councils. Still more unusually, this announcement has been welcomed with sincerity by the sector it is aimed at. It must be an unusual feeling for ministers, even on a matter such as domestic abuse that May and her junior colleagues have poured more effort into than many other issues. Yes, the Domestic Abuse Bill is still in draft form and realistically unlikely to become statute under the current Prime Minister, but the non-legislative aspects of the government’s drive to tackle this crime are still

Leyla Sanai

The danger of letting children transition gender too early

Where do you stand on the foster couple who sent their foster son to school in girls’ clothing, aged three, despite express requests from his teachers not to do so, and encouraged him to think of himself as a girl? The same couple had allowed their youngest biological son to do the same age seven, and had taken steps to legally change his – now her – name and passport. However, the child later told a member of staff at school that she did ‘not think life was worth living.’ A third foster child previously in the same couple’s care is also reported as exhibiting ‘gender identity issues.’ The foster

Toby Young Toby Young

Harvard falls to the diversocrats

The failure of Western universities to stand up for free speech is now so commonplace it’s difficult to feel much outrage when another dissenting professor is tossed to the wolves. But on this occasion the university in question is so distinguished we really ought to sit up and take note. And for once, I don’t mean Cambridge. The vice-chancellor of Cambridge has done so much to destroy its global reputation in the last few months – what with the defenestration of Jordan Peterson and Noah Carl, and the decision to investigate the university’s links with the slave trade – that he has allowed himself a few days off. No, the university that has disgraced itself this week is

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: what is Englishness?

The call for poems about Englishness in the style of a well-known poet produced a mostly predictable line-up — from Chesterton, so-called ‘prophet of Brexit’, through Larkin, Betjeman, Brooke, Housman and, of course, Kipling. But it was an American, Ogden Nash, whose pen portrait of us prompted me to set this challenge: Let us pause to consider the English Who when they pause to consider themselves they get all reticently thrilled and tinglish, Because every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz: That to be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is… Philip Machin, Joseph Houlihan and Hugh King caught my eye but were outstripped,

Toby Young Toby Young

The UN’s one million species extinction warning doesn’t add up

Anyone watching the BBC’s News at Ten on Monday would have been surprised to learn that economic growth poses a dire threat to the future of life on this planet. We’re used to hearing this from climate change campaigners, but I’ve always taken such claims with a pinch of salt, suspecting that the anti-capitalist left is distorting the evidence. Apparently not. ‘One million species at risk of imminent extinction according to a major UN report,’ intoned the BBC. ‘It says the Earth’s ecosystems are being destroyed by the relentless pursuit of economic growth.’ So does this mean the Extinction Rebellion protestors are right? I decided to do some digging to