Society

Monday

Patrick West

The trouble with Labour’s ‘respect orders’

As the Allison Pearson debacle begins to settle down, the lesson being drawn by many is that the police have no business harassing people for voicing opinions that are legal, no matter how offensive or hypothetically damaging they might be. Many of us have been urging as much for years. But taking stock now, surely most can agree that it’s not the state’s role to monitor speech, morality or the way we conduct ourselves in our private lives. ‘Respect orders’ are befitting of Blair’s moralising crusade that begat Asbos If this is indeed a growing consensus, then the Labour government seems to be veering in the opposition direction. On Friday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Those signing the general election petition should know better

Every now and again, a newspaper will run – and portentously headline – a survey on the future of the monarchy. There was a fashion, a few years back, for consulting the public on the question of whether the crown should skip a generation, so that Prince William could take over from his grandmother. The correct response to all such consultations was a heavingly contemptuous Alan Partridge shrug. The whole point of having a hereditary monarchy is that it’s hereditary and that the general public don’t get a say in the matter. If we want rid, it’ll take a bit more than a poll commissioned by the Sunday Times to

Samuel Rubinstein

Why young Brits think the social contract is crumbling

Something is stirring. In WhatsApp groups and Westminster pubs, wherever wonks, spads, and other SW1 types gather, there’s a name on everybody’s lips. It’s like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged or Tyler Durden in Fight Club. It’s at once a wail of despair and a call to arms. Who is this man they whisper of? Who is “Nicolas (30 ans)”? The hard-done-by in society, on this increasingly popular account, are not Barbour-wearing farmers “Nicolas (30 ans)” is the protagonist of “Le contrat social”, a meme posted onto Twitter, as it then was, in April 2020. It was popularised by a French account which goes by the nom de plume Bouli, after an obscure

Sunday

Sean Thomas

How debauchery turns to tragedy in towns like Vang Vieng

I still remember the first time I saw Vang Vieng, in Laos. It was many years ago, before the Chinese began pouring money in (such is the scale of Chinese investment, Laos now has high-speed rail). I was driving one of the very few rentable 4x4s in the country, picked up in the sleepy capital of Vientiane. I was on the main road connecting south and north Laos. When I say main road, I mean a road that sometimes narrowed to a single track, and that single track was commonly blocked by hens, dogs, playing children, and soldiers sleeping on the roofs of their cars under posters carrying the hammer

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Starmer’s disdain for conservatives could be his undoing

Tony Blair spent much of his time as prime minister projecting a persona that most people of a conservative mindset found quite reassuring. But Keir Starmer is no heir to Blair. The New Labour leader removed a commitment to nationalisation from the party’s constitution. He pledged to keep the tax burden under control. And he seemed to put himself on the side of those who were making a success of their lives. Starmer has done none of these things since taking office, alienating Labour voters and making life harder for millions of Brits. It is hard to see Keir Starmer’s administration finding such a path back to electoral safety It’s not

Daniel Rey

The flawed genius of Rafael Nadal

When Rafael Nadal triumphed in the 2005 French Open, he was still just a teenager. The Spaniard won 21 more Grand Slam titles, and became the second most decorated man in tennis history. He retired this week after Spain were knocked out in the quarter-finals of the Davis Cup by the Netherlands. His final match, played in front of a home crowd in Málaga, ended in a loss in straight sets to Botic van de Zandschulp, the world number 80. It was a dispiriting and yet strangely fitting end to his career. If Federer resembled a Renaissance artwork, and Djokovic an acrobat with a racket, Nadal was like a scrappy kid

Saturday

James Macintyre

Gordon Brown’s assisted dying intervention could be decisive

Gordon Brown, who is in the news this weekend having come out against assisted dying, occasionally has a tendency to hold back. He held back from standing against his close friend John Smith for the Labour party leadership in 1992, though that was always an unlikely prospect. More agonisingly, he held back from running against Tony Blair for the same role in 1994, sacrificing his personal ambition for the New Labour cause. He even held back from the No campaign in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, at one point telling a friend ‘They don’t need me,’ until the 11th hour when he tilted the balance and helped save the UK

Damien Phillips

The Laos methanol poisonings shine a light on a deeper tragedy

The death of British lawyer Simone White, 28, and five other tourists as a result of a suspected mass poisoning in Laos has rightly cast a spotlight on the serious methanol problem with which poorer parts of Southeast Asia are grappling. But that shouldn’t be allowed to obscure what was almost certainly another critical factor in this tragedy: the absolutely abysmal condition of the Laotian healthcare system. Laos has been stagnating for almost half a century Those unfamiliar with the country might have wondered why almost all the tourists who were poisoned with tainted alcohol were flown or driven to neighbouring Thailand, delaying urgent treatment by hours, despite falling sick

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris, Joanna Bell, Peter Frankopan, Mary Wakefield and Flora Watkins

38 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: pondering AI, Matthew Parris wonders if he is alone in thinking (1:10); Joanna Bell meets the leader of the Independent Ireland party, Michael Collins, ahead of the Irish general election later this month (8:41); Professor Peter Frankopan argues that the world is facing a new race to rule the seas (17:31); Mary Wakefield reviews Rod Dreher’s new book Living in wonder: finding mystery and meaning in a secular age (28:47); and, Flora Watkins looks at the Christmas comeback of Babycham (34:10).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Is there any escape from Olivia Colman?

I still remember the day when, as an adult in my twenties, I was informed by a well-wisher that Aslan from The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe was really Jesus. As this was before my religious awakening, and I was quite the militant atheist at the time, I became rather irate at this revelation. How dare ‘they’ slip a moral message in amongst all that magic and wonder! Now, of course, I see that compared to the story of Christianity itself, a bunch of talking critters is very pedestrian stuff indeed. Turn on the television, dip into a streaming service or drag yourself out to the cinema and there

Nick Boles

What confronting my own mortality taught me about assisted dying

It was when my newly-implanted bone marrow failed to produce the blood cells that keep all of us alive that I first thought seriously about my own death. It was my second bout of cancer. The first one had been a cakewalk by comparison: a few months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy and, Bob’s your uncle, I was cured. The second, ten years later, was much nastier and involved industrial quantities of chemotherapy culminating in a bone marrow transplant. For several months it looked like the transplant had failed and I confronted the possibility that I would soon reach the end of the road.  If you don’t like the idea of

Friday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The International Criminal Court must fall

The arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant should be the last the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues. The ICC accuses the men, whose nation is embroiled in a multi-front war against enemies sworn to its destruction, of using ‘starvation as a method of warfare’, ‘murder, persecution and other inhumane acts’, and ‘intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population’. Merely to say the charges out loud is to expose their absurdity. Not only is there no evidence that Israel is denying the Palestinians food as a military tactic, there is copious evidence to the contrary: 1.1 million tonnes, to be precise. That

Julie Bindel

The truth about the lesbian pay premium

Some lesbian and gay campaigners might have you believe that life is hard for gay people. Of course, for many it is. But my experience of being a lesbian is that it is mostly a privilege rather than an oppression. Lesbians can avoid the multiple disadvantages of navigating relationships with men, some of whom have absorbed messages of how they are superior to women. There’s another perk, too: what the Financial Times calls the ‘lesbian pay premium’. An analysis of studies from 1991 to 2018 found that lesbians typically earn 7 per cent more than their heterosexual counterparts. The LGBTQ umbrella term can be suffocating for lesbians That life is

Debbie Hayton

Why did Children in Need fund a charity linked to a paedophile scandal?

Last week the BBC announced that the 2024 Children in Need appeal had raised more than £39 million for charity. With such large sums of money, comes great responsibility – which charities are worthy of funding, and which ones should be kept at the end of the proverbial bargepole?  This week, Rosie Millard has resigned as chair of Children in Need, she says, because of an ‘institutional failure’ that led to almost £500,000 being paid out to LGBT Youth Scotland (LGBTYS). Payments only stopped, Millard says, when she alerted Children in Need of the history of the charity it was funding. In 2009, James Rennie – chief executive of LGBTYS from 2003

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why Jaguar’s rebrand is doomed

Jaguar’s disastrous makeover has left many people wondering if it isn’t April Fool’s Day. It’s not, of course. After 89 years of success with pale, stale males, Jaguar – which is relaunching as an electric-only brand – has decided a new clientele is in order. Jaguar is gambling on attracting a younger, urban Progressive customer Its logo, written as JaGUar, ‘seamlessly blend(s) upper and lower case characters in visual harmony’, the company claims. Jaguar’s managing director, Rawdon Glover – who gives his pronouns on LinkedIn as ‘he/him’ – declared that ‘the time for us to take small, conservative steps has gone’. Jaguar wants new customers, who will ‘be younger than before, affluent, urban,

Thursday

David Cohen

Why the Maori are protesting against equal rights in New Zealand 

Around 35,000 thousand demonstrators descended on the capital of New Zealand this week, many of them adorned in traditional native dress amid a fluttering sea of red, white and black ‘Maori sovereignty’ flags. They were there to decry a bill looking to redefine New Zealand’s founding treaty.  The Treaty Principles Bill, introduced earlier this month by one of the National party-led government’s junior coalition partners, has virtually no chance of becoming law. But the bill’s sponsor, the libertarian ACT party leader David Seymour, insists it offers a ‘certainty and clarity’ long missing in New Zealand. He also wants the country’s constitutional arrangement to have an explicitly democratic basis in law. His

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The Wizard of Oz sequel that’s perfect for our gender-obsessed age

To not wholly rapturous reviews, the movie Wicked, the prequel to The Wizard of Oz, is released this week. Tragically, it’s too late for Halloween, so we can expect alienated witches of colour (green) based on Cynthia Erivo to be absolutely everywhere by Christmas. For anyone who loved the Wizard of Oz, 1939 version, this is one to miss. Could there be any narrative more forward looking, more of our time, than this little story of gender transition? But, in a spirit of goodwill, let me put a better idea to Universal, the studio behind the film. They have missed a trick. L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of

Joanna Bell

‘We want to put common sense into Irish politics’: inside Ireland’s new populist party

When the Taoiseach Simon Harris called a snap election for 29 November, Ireland’s electricity board asked political parties not to put election posters on telegraph poles. They might as well have asked them to take the time off on holiday. As I drive through the Irish countryside on my way to County Cork, I notice plenty of posters on poles, but the usual suspects – Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Sinn Fein and Labour – are now joined by a new force in Irish politics – a grouping dedicated to a punchier, more populist, anti-immigration and pro-family agenda. ‘Irish politics is different to British politics and American politics, which are very

The Spectator

Which birds are doing best in Britain?

The last straw Farmers are threatening to strike over the government’s changes to inheritance tax in what is being described as a first in Britain. Besides France, where farmers regularly protest, India witnessed a farmers’ strike in 2020, which was eventually settled after the government dropped proposed new laws. But one of the earliest farmers’ strikes was conducted by the Farmers’ Holiday Association in Iowa in 1932, by farmers protesting at consistently low prices for their products. The idea was that farmers would go on ‘holiday’, refusing to sell any of their produce. Few, however, joined, leading to pickets blocking rural roads with telegraph poles. One policeman was killed, but

The Spectator

Letters: How to support the dying

Life support Sir: If the Terminally Ill (End of Life) Bill is passed into law we will have crossed the Rubicon. As the second reading vote on 29 November approaches, it is astonishing that we are hearing less debate than on the loss of the winter fuel payment. There should be the mother of all debates. The issues surrounding assisted dying are immensely complicated and the arguments for and against are powerful. On the one hand it may shorten and ease a dreadful death and on the other it may put pressure on the dying and be deficient in its application. However, the trite adage that hard cases make bad