Society

Thursday

Mark Palmer

Durban Notebook

No one likes uncertainty and in Britain we’ve got more than our fair share. But spare a thought for South Africa, where the uncertainty is in danger of morphing into national paralysis. ‘What are your plans for the future?’ I ask a friend who lives near Durban. ‘We have no plans. We might be packing up next year and heading out.’ A lot rests on next year. The general election appears to be set for May and with every day the pressure on President Cyril Ramaphosa increases. The 65-year-old millionaire is stuck between the rock of his more militant ANC supporters and the hard place of those impatient for root-and-branch

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Good news – now everyone can be a victim

We are terribly remiss in our coverage of women’s sport in The Spectator, so I thought I would try to put this right a little by drawing your attention to last week’s 2018 Maste rs Track Cycling World Championship — in particular the sprint category for 35- to 44-year-old women. The gold medal was won, in Herculean style, by the Canadian Rachel McKinnon. Her appearance on the podium provoked some discussion. It wasn’t simply that Rachel was quite obviously a man, but that she hadn’t even the grace to disguise herself very much. Usually when men transition, they put a bit of effort into it — maybe some lippy, a

Cosmo Landesman

Virtuous vice

It hasn’t always been easy being a progressive-minded man who prides himself on his sensitivity to issues of race, gender, feminism and sexual exploitation — and still gets to walk on the wild side. Political principles tend to get in the way of politically incorrect passions. You like to watch porn, but as a good feminist man you know that porn exploits women. You like to take cocaine, but it exploits poor Latin American farmers and enriches corrupt drug cartels. And maybe you have a secret passion for prostitutes, but you hate the idea that you’re paying for sex with some underage Albanian who’s been trafficked for your gratification. No

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why I’m boycotting ‘Davos in the Desert’

The current stock-market correction has been steaming down the track since August and I claim no wisdom for having predicted it: the FTSE100 dipped below 7,000 at the start of the week, having shed all of the 10 per cent it had gained since it began to surge in April. Weaker UK growth forecasts from the EY Item Club, reflecting the impact of the Brexit impasse on business and consumer confidence, are just one factor in the autumnal mood. But let’s cheer ourselves up with a round of applause for our veteran investor Robin Andrews, whose ‘Faangs to Banngs’ trading idea I offered you on 1 September. His proposition was

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Hell hath no fury like an irate teenage girl

Something troubling is happening to our girls. I noticed it again most recently at this year’s Battle of Ideas — the annual festival of free speech staged at London’s Barbican by Claire Fox. It’s a wonderful event, where ex-revolutionary communists like Claire rub shoulders with Thatcher-ite radicals like me and we’re reminded how much we have in common. I feel right at home among the bright, engaged, friendly crowds and when I speak I generally get a warm reception. But there are always exceptions, aren’t there? On this occasion the trouble came from a bloc of teenage girls in the audience for my panel. Judging by their accents and dress

Lynn Barber

On being sacked

It was a shock but not really a surprise. I came back from holiday at the beginning of August to find an item in the UK Press Gazette saying that Decca Aitkenhead had just been appointed chief interviewer at the Sunday Times, and an email from the Sunday Times magazine editor, Eleanor Mills, saying we needed to meet. It was not difficult to put two and two together. Eleanor suggested we meet at the Flask in Highgate — which was kind because it’s near my home — and when I arrived she was already sitting there with a glass of red wine lined up for me. Such unprecedented thoughtfulness made

Lucy Vickery

Mary, Mary…

In Competition No. 3070 you were invited to provide a poem with the title ‘When I Grow Up I Want to Be [insert name here]’.   Performance poet Megan Beech was so incensed by the abuse heaped by Twitter trolls on her idol Mary Beard that she wrote a poem called ‘When I Grow Up I Want to Be Mary Beard’ (‘an academic and a classy lady to boot’). Which is what gave me the idea for this challenge.   Another classicist, the esteemed Peter Jones, was the object of W.J. Webster’s affection. Otherwise it was an eclectic entry that ranged from the Dalai Lama to Donald Trump. Commendations to

Wednesday

Debbie Hayton

Not all transsexuals think ‘trans women are women’

When equalities minister Penny Mordaunt launched the consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act she declared that “trans women are women”. Whether anyone really believes this remains to be seen. Yet our political leaders are willing to endorse this Orwellian thinking, and when it comes to the transgender debate, objective truth plays second fiddle to political expediency. For me, the discussion about gender identification is personal. Not only as someone who firmly believes in the concept of birth-sex as a fact of nature (as a science teacher, I have no choice there) but as a transsexual myself, having undergone a meaningful gender transition supported by medical interventions. Despite what some might think,

Tuesday

Toby Young Toby Young

Free schools top the league tables – again

According to data released by the Department for Education today, free schools have topped the league table when it comes to Progress 8. This metric, introduced three years ago, tells you how much progress children have made in a particular school between the ages of 11 and 16 relative to the progress other children have made with similar starting points. It’s a way of controlling for the fact that children enter secondary school with varying levels of prior attainment. If you just look at raw GCSE data, those schools that get the best results might not be the most effective; it could be that they’re attracting children of above average

Hate-crime laws are making us all victims

Now that the Government has asked the Law Commission to investigate whether new groups should be added to those already covered by hate-crime laws, the UK’s culture of grievance and victimhood has finally reached peak absurdity. Ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, religion, and transgender people already have protected status, but now it is possible that age and gender will also be added. Crimes against women may be considered to be motivated by misogyny, those against men could be driven by misandry, and offences against people over 60 the result of ageism. Persuading parliament to classify your minority group as the victim of an oppressor group is only useful so long as

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Delays to Universal Credit won’t fix its fundamental flaw

It’s rare that a government pauses the implementation of a flagship policy. There’s so much ego involved in these matters that to do so is to admit a failing, rather than merely being sensible. But the government has had little choice but to further delay the roll-out of Universal Credit while it sorts out some of the problems with it. The plan had originally been that a further roll-out to four million people would start in January, with more claimants moving in July. But today the Work and Pensions department confirmed that the July deadline has moved to November as a result of fears across Parliament that those who are

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can Parliament really end its toxic culture of bullying and harassment?

How could the sort of bullying and sexual harassment detailed in Dame Laura Cox’s report on the treatment of House of Commons staff really have gone on for so long? There were policies in place for dealing with complaints, and on paper everything looked as though it was working well to prevent the rise of the ‘serial offenders’ that Cox refers to. This was the very defence initially mounted by the parliamentary authorities themselves when the allegations first came to light in the press earlier this year, but Cox’s report shows how structures and cultures can be very different indeed. The problem, she writes, was largely one of culture so

Sunday

Craig Sergeant

What Britain can learn from America’s bathroom battles

James Kirkup’s article (‘The march of trans rights’) discussed many of the complexities created by the issue, and rightly so. It also briefly mentioned the ‘bathroom battles’ in the United States. Such episodes illustrate the practical problems with legislating against such societal developments — new laws often do not solve but escalate the issue. In North Carolina in 2016, legislation was introduced to prevent transgender individuals from using particular bathrooms. The policing of this law presented practical issues. It would be impossible to guard every gender-specific public bathroom in the state. Either it would require a significant increase in police numbers, or be up to the business to enact the

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: These are a few of their favourite things (snowflakes’, vice chancellors’, premier league footballers’…)

The idea for the latest challenge, to provide a spoof version of the song ‘My Favourite Things’ for the constituency/demographic of your choice, was prompted by my discovery of a reimagining of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic recast as it might have been sung by an elderly Julie Andrews (‘Maalox and nose drops and needles for knitting,/ Walkers and handrails and new dental fittings…’). It seemed to go down well, drawing an entry that ranged far and wide, from Basil Ransome-Davies’s fetishists (‘Dildoes and butt plugs that tirelessly tingle,/ Electrical probes and Ben Wa balls that jingle…’) to Max Gutmann’s Fox News viewers (‘Gawking at lovely harassable females,/ Daily reminders

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Let’s talk about how the Turkish government deals with dissidents abroad

The indignation over the disappearance of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has taken an interesting turn now that Donald Trump has promised to inflict ‘severe punishment’ on the Saudi government should it turn out that he was in fact tortured and killed in the Saudi embassy in Ankara – though not obviously to the point of cancelling US military contracts with the kingdom. And the indignation is entirely justified. For agents of a foreign state to infringe the human rights of its subjects in another country is a calculated insult to the country in question quite apart from the unpleasantness of exhibiting abroad the behaviour visited on critics at home.

Friday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Pope Francis was wrong to shower praise on Cardinal Wuerl

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who is under intense pressure to explain what he knew about his disgraced predecessor, the sex abuser and ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Wuerl had asked to resign. He knew his position was untenable: not only is there widespread scepticism about his claim that he didn’t know McCarrick routinely assaulted seminarians, but he’s also under fire for alleged mishandling of abuse cases when he was Bishop of Pittsburgh. His departure hasn’t come as a surprise: he is past retirement age anyway. But many Catholics are disconcerted – to put it mildly – by the Pope’s letter to Wuerl,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Shrinking pizzas and pies isn’t the way to tackle obesity

From 30 March next year, of course, we will no longer be subject to all those silly EU laws on bent bananas (which was genuine, not a myth), toasters, balloons and all the rest. Instead we will be able to concentrate on passing our own good old British silly laws. Even the European Commission never came up with the idea of limiting pies to 695 calories. So bravo, then, to Public Health England for having the imagination to out-Brussels Brussels. Today, the quango unveils its latest strategy in fighting obesity: regulating portion sizes. As well as regulating pies, the proposed rules include a maximum calorie count for pizzas of 928

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Andrew Roberts on Churchill

In this week’s books podcast I’m talking — this time in front of a live audience at Daunt Books — to Andrew Roberts about his new biography of Winston Churchill. Could even as deft a historian as Andrew find anything new to say about this most written-about of politicians? He says yes. We discuss whether Churchill was a man of principle or an opportunist, talk about the tricky question of whether he was a racist, about whether he was, as widely thought, an alcoholic and a depressive, and of course about his magnificent wartime oratory and his remarkable mix of character traits. 

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Will the Tories have the wit to save Universal Credit – and themselves?

The row over Universal Credit is a reminder that reforming welfare is the toughest job in politics. The question, right now, is whether it’s too tough – and whether the government, distracted by Brexit and unable to defend its own successes, might give up on – or ‘pause’ – its flagship welfare reform. The UK benefits system governs the lives of millions, and its failures meant that a million people were out of work for every one of the Labour boom years. We ended up with a system where those trying to move from welfare to work, or escape low pay, were keeping just 10p of every extra £1 they