All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Health Secretary Matt Hancock is set to scrap Public Health England (PHE) – the body that was tasked with preparing the UK for a pandemic – according to the Sunday Telegraph. The paper reports it will be replaced by the National Institute for Health Protection. Its remit will include pandemic planning and oversight of the NHS Test and Trace
When Dawn Butler was stopped by police last weekend she was not in a forgiving mood: It later turned out that the vehicle Butler was travelling in was stopped after an officer made a mistake when typing in the car’s number plate. ‘As a result of an officer making a human error as he inputted the car
Elite universities like Oxford and Cambridge don’t have a good track record in taking mitigating circumstances into account. One Oxford history graduate tells me that even though it deemed her to have been ‘very seriously impacted’ by her home circumstances last year, the university declined to bump up her final grade enough – by 0.3 per
20 min listen
Kaya Ilska is a free school meals student, coming from a single mother family. She is incredibly bright – and was predicted 4 A*s by her teachers, a set of grades high enough to meet her offer to study Medicine at UCL. But the government’s exams algorithm this week downgraded her results down to AABB,
Bernard Henri Levy’s latest book, The Virus in the Age of Madness, contains a striking quote from Rudolf Virchow, the 19th century father of pathological anatomy: ‘An epidemic is a social phenomenon that has some medical aspects’. He was right. Catastrophes are society’s great illuminators. From Pompeii to coronavirus, the governing axiom is clear: if you
Wars reshape states. The powers and size of governments grow. Economic activity is controlled or subsidised. Liberties are curtailed. Identity cards, rationing, censorship: the rights of the individual and freedom of speech are subjugated to a national effort to win the war. Lifestyles change, and so do societies. The struggle against Covid, if not exactly
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After much speculation, France has been put on the quarantine list, along with Netherlands, Monaco, and Malta. But do the numbers really back it up? Cindy Yu talks to Fraser Nelson and Kate Andrews about this decision. Also on the podcast, further lockdown easing and, are schools actually returning?
Covid-19 has brought us a Dunkirk spirit alright. Once again we have hundreds of thousands of Brits in a mad scramble to get back to Britain from France, as soon as a flotilla of ships will let them. It is just that this time around it feels a little more self-inflicted than last time. Have
I have recently read a fascinating new paper, via a Mail on Sunday report, about the growing number of children presenting as transgender to gender clinics. It raises all sorts of questions, and deserves to be read widely and carefully. The paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, can be found –
The myth that is developing goes like this: Labour can’t win enough seats to form a majority government at the next election, however much the Tories may tank. They will need the SNP and almost certainly the Liberal Democrats to rule. Therefore, Labour needs to stand down in English seats where the Lib Dems have
With a B, an E and a U at A-Level, it came as no surprise that yesterday I was rejected by both my first and second choice universities. Had I sat the exams myself, then I would have been more understanding of the outcome: at least I would only have myself to blame. But those
As a new generation of school leavers now consider their options on the basis of predicted A-levels and Highers, what kind of education can they expect to receive on locked-down campuses with remote teaching governed by social distancing? The sorry truth is that Britain’s universities were in a mess long before coronavirus. Rampant grade inflation,
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It’s A-Level results day and much as expected, a large minority of A-Level grades from across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland have been downgraded. For some schools and colleges, more than half of their students have been affected. On the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to Fraser Nelson and Mary Curnock Cook, former head of Ucas
Much of the coverage of today’s exam results is dominated by disappointed Jacks and furious Jills. Determined parents are planning legal action against predicted grades which they say are inaccurate, unfair and result from a Government/Ofqual safety net that is not fit for purpose. While good state schools and many big-name private schools have done well,
For me – and, I suspect, for many Scottish Tories – a lot of my time in lockdown was characterised by a sense of frustrated impotence. I would sit in front of the television in furious disbelief as I watched Nicola Sturgeon, the unchallenged leader of a one-party state, on the BBC, answering useless questions
Nicola Sturgeon was able to indulge in a small spot of schadenfreude today, as A level results were announced in England, and UK ministers were criticised for the downgrading of some students’ results. The Scottish first minister has had a hellish week defending her own disastrous handling of exam results north of the border, which
Are we increasingly living under a ‘doctatorship’? The influence of the medical profession over our everyday lives – from personal freedom, to how our children are schooled, to the economy – has soared since the pandemic. But is this a good thing? Or are democratically elected governments in danger of allowing medics to have undue
We’ve heard endless statistics on the likely death toll from Covid-19, and over the past week we have learned just how great was the economic devastation in most countries in the second quarter as they locked down to deal with the disease. But what about the global impact on children’s education? That is something the
I had just finished my last day teaching at school when I found out: it had been a blur of Microsoft Teams training, unexpected farewells to pupils and packing up suitcases full of books. Much like my students, I was exhausted, apprehensive, and more than a little confused. I turned the radio on, and that’s
It didn’t help that it was unveiled by a swaggering Vladimir Putin. Or that it was called Sputnik V – a hardly subtle reference to the Cold War. Nor that we have grown used to Russian meddling and mis-information. Even so, there is still something a little surprising about the hostility towards the Russian vaccine
The summer ritual of A-level results day is so well known it’s easy to forget the thousands of students receiving their BTec National results. That’s the intro to a BBC News item on vocational qualification results issued today. It’s also the story of British culture and economics, told in a single, unwittingly revealing, sentence. Around
‘The invasion of ‘Chelsea-on-Sea’, screamed the headline on the Mail Online above a report of how Salcombe’s mayor had blasted ‘disrespectful tourists for failing to socially distance’. As the local vicar, I find myself hearing the consternation from all sides: tourists who don’t recognise themselves as ‘invaders’; shopkeepers and pub owners who rely on tourists
LBC broadcaster Iain Dale has transformed his Edinburgh festival shows into a series of Zoom-casts. First up, David Davis. The former Brexit secretary had arranged his web-cam in a study lined with scarlet law-books. A few hours earlier, he said, he’d completed a seven-mile jog. He’s 71. Davis began by criticising the government over the corona-shambles.
The current resurgence of debate about racism shows that we still need the concept of sin. Seriously, sin? Yes. Without this concept, we can’t really understand the BLM movement. In the past, moral campaigns were tied to concrete demands for changes in legislation, or government policy. Ban the bomb, legalise homosexuality, overthrow capitalism, and so
We do not know what the long-term impact of coronavirus will be on mental health. We are still not through the pandemic, for one thing, which means that many people who have found the experience of lockdown, of losing their livelihood, or of losing loved ones traumatic, have not yet had the chance to process
Public Health England has changed its definition of Covid deaths. Hitherto, it counted anyone who died who had previously had a laboratory-confirmed positive Covid-19 test – irrespective of how long ago that test was The new definition introduces a time limit: the death of someone who tested positive no more than 28 days before death. The new data (here) means England has had 36,695
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Gavin Williamson last night announced that A-level students getting their results tomorrow could appeal using mock exam grades. Meanwhile, today, new figures showed that the UK economy contracted by over 20 per cent between April and June. Among all this, why has Labour failed to show how they could govern the country better? Fraser Nelson speaks
August is the traditional silly season, but the Labour party risks descending into a farce from which it might struggle to recover when real politics resumes in September. In the absence of any direction from the party leadership, the transgender thought police have led the party down a rabbit hole. Last week, Spectator readers may
The UK government has seemed flummoxed in recent days about how to best stop migrants and asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in inflatable dinghies – with ministers particularly concerned about the failure of the French authorities to prevent people traffickers organising journeys out of Calais. Immigration minister Chris Philp travelled to Paris this week
Stanford Business School professors, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, introduced the idea of the ‘big hairy audacious goal’, or BHAG. A BHAG (pronounced ‘bee hag’) is a bold, clear and compelling target for an organisation to strive for, with the appropriate resourcing. A great
Scexit, not Brexit, will be the word that defines Boris Johnson’s premiership. The Times has a new poll from YouGov showing the SNP on 57 per cent with nine months to go until devolved elections. The same poll puts support for Scotland’s exit from the United Kingdom at 53 per cent. This confirms earlier polls
Multi-millionaire virtue-signallers Ben and Jerry are at it again. Once again the ice-cream capitalists are doing their woke schtick in the hope that even more of the right-on middle-classes will buy their expensive tubs of cream and sugar. This time they’re taking aim at Priti Patel, lecturing her on Twitter about immigration. Thanks, but no