Society

Thursday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Forget the ‘Beatles’: here’s what happens to most British jihadi suspects

What happens to Brits who’ve returned from fighting for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq? Most would expect that they’d immediately fall into the criminal justice system, and wouldn’t then emerge for a very long time. Today it emerged that Home Secretary Sajid Javid had dropped Britain’s blanket opposition to the death penalty so that two Isis fighters from the group dubbed the ‘Beatles’ could be sent to the US. But in most cases, the question isn’t where someone will face justice, but whether they can face justice at all. We know that there are hundreds of people who have returned from fighting for Islamic State. But what is less

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Don’t blame the Tories for a Brexit ‘no deal’

Remember when leftists and liberals were against capitalists throwing their weight around in the political sphere? ‘Just because you’re filthy rich doesn’t mean you should have more clout than the rest of us’, they might say. No longer. Now they love it when the boss class tut-tuts about democracy and wonders out loud if we should just ignore the little people and shape politics so that it suits us, the moneyed and powerful. Consider the glee with which some leftish Remainers have lapped up Amazon’s dire warnings about a no-deal Brexit. According to the Times this morning, on Friday, at a meeting organised by Brexit Secretary Dominic Rabb, the head

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The Tiger purrs

So in the end it was a fallible Tiger that won all hearts at the Open, not the glowering, red-shirted monarch of the fairways who carried all before him long ago. But a softer, puzzled, vaguely frail Tiger is hard not to like: this is someone now who isn’t quite sure what shot to play, who doesn’t quite know where the ball is going. Now we like him, and by golly the sport needs him. Like a fading but reformed rock star, he looks happier too: easier with the media, and carrying an ailing sport with dignity. The money is pretty good too. Sadly the fact that the sport’s biggest

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why austerity is ending

The last day of the parliamentary term is usually an occasion for the government to get a whole bunch of bad news out of the way all at once. But this summer’s end-of-term announcements were used as a chance to put out some seemingly good news. Teachers, prison officers and members of the military will all receive pay increases of above 1 per cent for the first time in five years. The lifting of the public sector pay cap is another reminder of how politics and the Tories have moved on from the age of austerity that George Osborne announced in his 2009 conference speech. Much has been written about

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The more extreme the left’s screeches, the greater the populist surge

The latest exciting news is that it may very soon be possible for surgeons to perform uterine transplants, so endowing a man who has ‘transitioned’ into being a strange approximation of a woman with the ability to gestate a child. And to give birth, after a fashion. The benighted child would need to be hacked out of the man’s midriff, because there’s not enough room down there for a child to come out naturally (yes, because he’s a man). Sweden — the world leader in uterine transplants — is anxious to reclaim the title of the world’s most batshit crazy nation, which the Canadians and that simpering idiot Justin Trudeau

Cosmo Landesman

Problem children

There was a time when middle-class liberals used to complain that the English were a nation of child haters. They packed them off to boarding school as soon as possible and banned them from the dinner table as soon as they got back. Why-oh-why, they asked, can’t the English just relax and enjoy the presence of children like the French did? Well, they’ve got their wish. That old, much-mocked Victorian proverb — children should be seen and not heard — has been replaced by a new dictum in child-centric Britain: children must be seen, heard, celebrated, praised and obeyed all of the time. Once children were expected to fit themselves

The Spectator

Hitting home

From ‘The munitions strike’, 27 July 1918: It is necessary for the Government to make it clear that the present strike of munition workers is unlike all previous strikes in that it is a direct challenge to the authority of the State. Such a challenge in time of war is in the nature of sedition and treason, and must be treated accordingly… If this is not made plain, the authority of the Government will disappear, and we may as well all say good-bye to the glorious prospect of handsomely winning the war. If the production of the munitions of war is to be held up, there is no political principle…which

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why dismiss a Catholic priest for being Catholic?

They’re just kids! What’s your problem? This has become the default reaction of a whole raft of clever people to anyone who gets hot under the collar about the fashion for students banning things in universities: speakers, ideas, books. It was ever this way, they say, and besides, sometimes the kids are right. The little episode of righteous vandalism at Manchester last week was a case in point. Students painted over a mural of Kipling’s ‘If’ in the newly renovated union building, on the grounds that he ‘dehumanised people of colour’. Kipling was a racist, they insisted, a man of Empire. Out came the whitewash and on top of it

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Paris notebook | 26 July 2018

‘Problème est masculin; solution est féminine,’ says Brigitte, the adored French teacher at the British embassy in Paris. Good way to remember your ‘les’ and ‘las’. If only it were true. Theresa May has not — yet — solved Brexit. Angela Merkel has not resolved the migrant crisis. Anne Hidalgo, the city’s mayor, has not flushed out its rats. If she fails at re-election, it will be on pest control and tent cities. A sign on the Square du Temple gates asks picnickers to leave no croissant crumbs behind. It attracts the rats. Below, in black marker: ‘Et les Algériens?’ Not nice. But tempers run high in hot summers.  The

Lucy Vickery

Tourist misinformation | 26 July 2018

In Competition No. 3058 you were invited to supply snippets of mischievously/sadistically misleading advice for foreign tourists visiting Britain, or for British ones travelling abroad. This is an assignment that you always embrace with relish, though one competitor observed that it felt curiously difficult this time round because ‘the interaction between Britain and Abroad isn’t very funny just at the moment’. That may well be true, but your entries still raised a chuckle, and as usual those with a ring of plausibility worked best. There was a fair amount of repetition: popular tips included the desirability of introducing Brexit into conversation at the earliest opportunity, the inadvisability of tipping black

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 26 July 2018

Maasai Mara   Last night the hyenas made off with our fudge cake. We are camped with a group of four families on the banks of the Mara river, waiting for the wildebeest migration. During the night hours, tucked up in our sleeping bags, only slivers of canvas divide us from the African bush. It is very exciting to be roused from slumber by hyenas cackling as they canter between the guy ropes of the tents. You lie there listening to pods of hippo chortling, to the elephant and the lion, and baboons barking in the trees. This morning everybody said how well they had slept. It must be the

Lee Langley

Hot and bothered

Success as a rare books dealer, academic, publisher, broadcaster and author of several non-fiction books — at 70, Rick Gekoski had ticked all the boxes. Time to relax, perhaps? Gekoski thought otherwise: he wrote his first novel, published last year, a quirky black farce mutating into a revelation of love and loss. Heaped with praise, Darke has since been shortlisted for two best first novel prizes. A triumph, then. Followed by the familiar fate of the second novel — heightened expectations. Darke was a witty metro-politan narrative with a sharp literary edge. A Long Island Story is warmer, more leisurely, awash with period background; an affectionate portrait of the author’s

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Public sector pay rise masks political row to come

The Downing Street media grid must be a rather dismal affair these days, with announcements planned that barely get any attention at all thanks to a combination of Brexit and another minister being on the brink of resignation. But one story that has come off reasonably well is today’s public sector pay award. Ministers have confirmed that around one million workers in the health service, schools, armed forces and so on will receive a raise of between 1.5 and 3.5 per cent. Obviously, this works nicely politically because everyone loves a pay rise. But the small print of this announcement reveals that it’s not going to make life dramatically easier

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Hancock’s health hour

Matt Hancock has been ambitious for a big Cabinet job for a good while. He’s finally got it, and today the new Health Secretary had his first outing in the Commons with departmental questions. Every new Secretary of State wants to make their mark on the job, showing how they’re different to their predecessor, and setting out their priorities for the portfolio. Jeremy Hunt was particularly good at the latter, making patient safety his focus as Health Secretary. Hancock has clearly paid attention to how the longest-serving Health Secretary approached the job, and last week gave a speech setting out three priorities: workforce, technology and prevention. His message was clear

Simon Marcus

Could this summer see a repeat of the 2011 riots? | 24 July 2018

The heatwave is on and reports of London’s crime wave are widespread, with crime up dramatically in the last year: could a repeat of the 2011 riots be on the cards? Predicting riots is tricky but sometimes there are clues: the weather plays a part; and so too does the economy, community cohesion, social morals and other factors that can combine to lead to outbreaks of widespread disorder, just as they did seven years ago on the streets of the capital. Of course, 2011 wasn’t the only time people intent on violence have taken to the streets of Britain in recent years. The 1958 race riots, the ‘summer of 1968’, further race riots in

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The trouble with social prescribing for mental illness

It’s a measure of how much the debate around mental health has changed that Matt Hancock’s latest announcement on social prescribing for mental illness isn’t being written up as mere quackery. The Health and Social Care Secretary today pledged a £4.5 million fund for these schemes, which include gardening, arts clubs, running and so on. Hancock is worried about possible over-prescription of anti-depressants and the associated risk of diagnosis creep, whereby people who are not depressed but quite understandably struggling with life events such as a bereavement are given a medical diagnosis and handed pills that aren’t really going to help them. As I’ve written before, anti-depressants are not without

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Forget the ‘Beatles’: here’s what happens to most British jihadi suspects | 23 July 2018

What happens to Brits who’ve returned from fighting for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq? Most would expect that they’d immediately fall into the criminal justice system, and wouldn’t then emerge for a very long time. Today it emerged that Home Secretary Sajid Javid had dropped Britain’s blanket opposition to the death penalty so that two Isis fighters from the group dubbed the ‘Beatles’ could be sent to the US. But in most cases, the question isn’t where someone will face justice, but whether they can face justice at all. We know that there are hundreds of people who have returned from fighting for Islamic State. But what is less

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: the day the internet died

Your latest challenge was to compose a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’. Phyllis Reinhard’s Don McLean-inspired entry stretched the definition of short story rather but was entertaining nonetheless. Here’s a quick burst: Bye, bye Mister Trump’s tweeting lies Instagram’s nude shots of Kimmy and her plastic backside, And Facebook Russian’s sharing what is most classified. Singin’ it’s the day the internet died – Amazon took pure cyanide. John O’Byrne was good too, as was Jim Lawley, but they were just outflanked by the winners below who pocket £25 each. Frank Upton Today we have comforting concepts such as finite-loop learning classifier systems, but in 2019 one could

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Elon Musk: Genius or jerk?

Elon Musk, the California-based entrepreneur behind the Tesla electric car, the SpaceX commercial rocket venture and several other wacky start-ups, made a fool of himself with his attempt to intervene in the Thai cave rescue and subsequent Twitter spat, but there’s no doubt he’s an original thinker and a remarkable businessman. If the futuristic Tesla is a fine feat of technology, what’s more impressive is that the company is not only still in business after 15 years without turning a profit and having lost at least $3.5 billion since 2015, but that its market capitalisation, at $52 billion, is bigger than Ford’s at $42 billion. Tesla built more than 100,000