Society

Thursday

The Spectator

The Spectator fights back against government excess

Britons used to be able to rely on their parliament to safeguard liberty and their wallets. Those who were sent to the House of Commons came not as petitioners for a larger government and greater state expenditure but as guardians of individual freedom and defenders of private property. It was self-evident to them that those who spent their own money would always spend it more wisely than those who took others’ money and spent it to please whom they may. During those times MPs, including even ministers, regarded restraint on executive power and tight control on public spending as unquestioned virtues, and the nation prospered. The United Kingdom was seldom

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Channel 4 shouldn’t get to decide the next Archbishop

Obviously, it is difficult to defend the leadership of the Church of England, and I am inexperienced in that art; but I do feel strongly that its episcopal appointments should not be controlled by Channel 4 News and Cathy Newman. This, in essence, is what is happening. First went Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, because Channel 4 News was determined to show that he had not reacted vigorously over the John Smyth scandal. (In my view, the Makin report failed to prove Welby’s culpability.) Next was the turn of the Bishop of Liverpool, John Perumbalath, forced out after Channel 4 News reported his alleged sexual assault against an unnamed woman

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Andrew Gwynne sacked, Trump saves Prince Harry and a £30m refund over moths

Home Andrew Gwynne was sacked as a health minister and suspended from the Labour party for making jokes about a constituent’s hoped-for death, and about Diane Abbott and Angela Rayner. Oliver Ryan, a member of the WhatsApp group where the jokes were shared, had the Labour whip removed and 11 councillors were suspended from the party. Asked about 16,913 of 28,564 medics registering to practise medicine in Britain last year having qualified abroad, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, said there was ‘no doubt’ that ‘the NHS has become too reliant’ on immigration. The government issued guidance saying that anyone who enters Britain by means of a dangerous journey will normally

Douglas Murray

Pride in Britain? It’s history

A poll out this week found that only 41 per cent of those aged 18 to 27 are proud to be British. Frankly I’m surprised the figure is that high. After all, if you add together the immigration of recent decades and the concerted effort to demoralise the population that has gone on, that is exactly the sort of result you would expect. It has been achieved in a remarkably short space of time. In 2004, some 80 per cent of young people in the same age cohort said that they felt proud to be British. So within 20 years we have managed to halve our sense of national self-worth.

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

How to stop the government splurging our cash

All too often, the Prime Minister recently lamented, Britain’s public servants are happy languishing in the ‘tepid bath of managed decline’. There is, however, one area in which Britain’s public servants are dynamic, innovative and world–leading: at spaffing gazillions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on wasteful projects which are variously inane, insane and indefensible. The British state makes the average drunken sailor look like a model of frugality. When William Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he earned notoriety for his pursuit of ‘candle end’ economies – no saving was too trivial if he could leave money to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’. His contemporary equivalents in the

Theodore Agnew

My impossible task as ‘minister for efficiency’

I am delighted that The Spectator is launching a campaign to highlight the grotesque levels of financial waste in government. Of course public sectors worldwide have always defaulted towards profligacy – but we are in different territory now. Our GDP per capita is declining: through immigration, the population is growing faster than the real economy is growing. We have no more capacity to borrow – we are already paying 25 per cent more than the Italian government for ten-year debt. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves love to talk bullishly about growth, but they don’t understand that taxing the productive sector more and more and discouraging employment through onerous new regulations

Luke McShane

Luck of the draw

‘Praggnanandhaa rallied to win the playoff’ is what I wrote last week, as though there were nothing more to say. That came after a humdinger of a final round at the Tata Steel Masters in Wijk aan Zee, in which ‘Pragg’ and world champion Gukesh Dommaraju both lost their final games but nevertheless shared first place with 8.5/13. That magnificent tragedy would have been a fitting conclusion to the tournament, but the modern way is to favour a playoff which determines a single winner. Fans want blood and sponsors want gold, so the thinking goes. A few weeks ago, Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi were widely pilloried when they agreed (with the organiser’s

Luke McShane

No. 837

White to play. Gukesh-Praggnanandhaa, Tata Steel Masters tiebreak, 2025. Black’s last move, 35…Qd3-d6 was a blunder. Which move did Gukesh play to exploit it? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 17 February. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1…Rxf4+ 2 Kxf4 stalemate. Not 1…Rd5+ 2 Be5 Rb5 3 Ra4+! Kh3 4 Ra2 and White wins. Last week’s winner Alex Newman, Shalford, Surrey

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: The big move

Competition 3386 invited you to submit poems about the domestic arrangements at the White House. The idea was to inspire some visions of what goes on behind the official scenes – oh to be a fly on the East Wing wall. MAGA hats off to Frank McDonald, Elizabeth Kay, Daniel Pukkila, Nicholas Lee, Tom Adam, Paul Freeman and others, and Basil Ransome-Davies’s final verse seems apt: It’s hard to read a mind in disrepair Or one as shiny and airtight as chrome: Two four-year tenants, signally aware That an official house is not a home. The £25 vouchers go to the winners below. Clean, baby, clean. That place is full

La Jerezana

2690: Resignation

A quotation (in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) runs clockwise around the perimeter of the grid, beginning with the last letter of 20. The apostrophe has to be included where it appears. Five unclued lights are of a kind; one is directly linked to the quotation, the others indirectly. Across 9 Dangerous atmosphere in outskirts of Hackney (5) 10    Criticise extremely burdensome tariff (6) 11    Careless ironworker losing wok by mistake (2,5) 13    Auntie putting end of thumb on buzzer (4) 15    Idiot and old spies regularly billed as ‘potentially connected’ (10) 16    Reportedly joined model, 33, in bath? (8) 20    Footballing great from Lazio once collared by detective (7) 21   

Wednesday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Is even Disney moving away from trigger warnings?

The bonfire of DEI cobblers continues. Disney is reportedly removing its patronising trigger warnings from many of the films on its streaming service, presumably having finally realised that audiences do not like being talked down to, and that Peter Pan, Dumbo and The Aristocats are not actually engines of racist radicalisation, as its more insufferable execs once believed. In 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Disney decided its contribution to the fight against ‘systemic racism’ would be prissily condemning its own films for ‘stereotypes’. Everyone from the Native Americans in Peter Pan to the Jazz-singing King Louie in The Jungle Book led to trigger warnings, warning parents and children

Len Shackleton

Football doesn’t need a regulator

Kemi Badenoch has come out against the Football Governance Bill, and not before time. In November 2021, Tracey Crouch, the former Tory sports minister, led calls for a football regulator in her ‘Fan-Led Review of Football Governance’, and in March 2022, Boris Johnson backed the plans. Once that muddy ball started rolling, even three changes of prime minister couldn’t stop it. Keir Starmer is seemingly as much in favour as his predecessors. The enduring argument for a football regulator lies with the weird economics of professional football, which sees the majority of clubs spending well in excess of their regular revenue in the hope of winning trophies or promotion –

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Is Pope Francis Rory Stewart in a frock?

Imagine living in your own holy fiefdom, with some of the strictest security on earth, and lecturing other nations about how to deal with illegal immigration. That’s Pope Francis for you. There he is in the Apostolic Palace, sentries at every door, wagging his be-ringed finger at Donald Trump’s America for its ‘mass deportation’ of undocumented aliens. Even for a Pope this is some next-level cant. You can’t help but marvel at the sheer sanctimony of Francis’s position The pontiff’s latest bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome came in a letter to America’s Catholic bishops. He said he is watching closely the ‘major crisis’ unfolding in the US, by which he

David Nutt

Why whisky may be worse for you than cocaine

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has hit out at the longstanding US ban on cocaine, in response to Donald Trump’s crackdown on the drugs trade. ‘Cocaine is illegal because it is made in Latin America, not because it is worse than whisky’, Petro argued last week, adding that ‘scientists have analysed this’. He also suggested that the global cocaine industry could be ‘easily dismantled’ if the drug was legalised worldwide. Although I was not consulted directly by Petro, I am one of the scientists he was referring to who have analysed the harms of various drugs. In 2010, I was the lead author of a Lancet paper which argued for the first

Tuesday

Chas Newkey-Burden

Blame vegans for the ‘anti-vegan backlash’

Is the vegan revolution over? An “anti-vegan backlash” has “made Britain fall back in love with meat,” according to the Daily Telegraph. Studies have found that 18-24 year olds in the UK increased their meat intake in 2024, sales of fake meats are falling and vegan restaurants are closing their doors. It’s not just about putting oat milk into your coffee and saying no to bacon Well, if veganism is falling out of fashion then vegans must take a fair amount of the blame. As a vegan myself, I’ve noticed that this ethically rooted movement has begun to focus too much on money and not enough on morality.  I’ve lost count

Niall Gooch

Britain is failing Gen Z

Ask not what you country can do for you, said JFK in his inaugural address in 1961, but what you can do for your country. Kennedy was well-placed to throw down this gauntlet – he had actively sought out dangerous combat service in the second world war when he could easily have avoided doing so. It’s a challenge that has echoed down the decades, especially for conservative-minded people who tend to think about patriotism in terms of individuals’ obligations to the nation and to the state. All the same, there does come a point when it is reasonable for people to turn the question around once again. It is possible

Matthew Lynn

Starmer should split from the EU if it hits back at Trump on tariffs

The European Union has hit back against Donald Trump’s decision to impose 25 per cent tariffs on steel imports. “Tariffs are taxes – bad for business, worse for consumers,” the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has said, adding that the levy “will not go unanswered”. Yet for all the fire and fury, Europe will not be quite as united as it wishes. The British government has made it quietly clear that it will not be joining the fight. The Daily Mail reports that the Prime Minister is poised to split from the EU by holding off retaliating. The PM right: this is a fight from which Britain has little

Peter Sefton-Williams

My false diagnosis exposes a key flaw in the Assisted Dying Bill

Perhaps the strongest argument against the reintroduction of capital punishment is the possibility that mistakes, once made, cannot be rectified. In the 20th century, such errors – even with legal safeguards in place – were not uncommon. Infamous cases, such as those of Timothy Evans and George Kelly, are a testament to that. It is ironic, therefore, that MPs who would strongly oppose capital punishment can, at the same time, enthusiastically support the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill brought before parliament by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater. The same argument applies. If a mistake is made, and a person opts for assisted dying based on incorrect information, that mistake cannot later be rectified.

Thais Portilho

Should Christie’s cancel its AI art auction?

How do you define art? This centuries-old question is constantly brought back to the fore, particularly at times when artists find new ways to create. It was the case with the advent of photography in the 19th century – and it is the case with art where the process is aided or fully executed by AI models today. It displays unforgivable ignorance of the innovative and fascinating ways these artists create with the use of new technology Last week, auction house Christie’s caused a huge stir in art circles, after announcing on social media its first auction offering works exclusively created with AI. Leading the line-up of AI artists are