In his independent review of the Prevent programme last year, Sir William Shawcross warned that something had gone very wrong with Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy. Instead of focusing on Islamism, Prevent was wasting its time investigating complaints of ‘far-right’ extremism from left-wing teachers, e.g. 14-year-old boys ‘caught’ watching TikTok videos of Nigel Farage. He has pointed
I thought the Spectator dinner for Michael Gove hosted by Fraser Nelson would be cancelled. To be clear, this wasn’t a dinner where the Ming vase would be passed from one custodian to another, witnessed by the magazine’s general staff. Rather, this was a dinner to celebrate Michael’s legacy as education secretary organised weeks earlier
For only the second time in my life, I went to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last weekend. At least, it felt like I was in Saudi. I’m talking about the Anthony Joshua-Daniel Dubois fight at Wembley Stadium. Billed as the British version of George Foreman vs Joe Frazier, it was bankrolled by the Saudis
The latest issue of Scientific American, a popular science monthly published by Springer Nature, contains an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. She is the candidate that anyone who cares about science should vote for, apparently. Her positions on issues such as ‘the climate crisis’, ‘public health’ and ‘reproductive rights’ are ‘lit by rationality’ and based on
The summer holidays were a washout as far as my children are concerned, because we had to cancel our trip to Norway when I discovered two of their passports had expired. But in an effort to make it up to them, I managed to squeeze in a trip to Salcombe last weekend. Unfortunately, I failed
Free speech advocates like me need to stop talking about the meagre gains we made under the last government because the present one seems to be listening carefully, taking notes, then gleefully reversing each one. First it torpedoed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Then it threatened to put the ‘legal but harmful’ stuff
The phrase ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but it’s something the left is better at than the right. Take the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a lobby group that campaigns for more online censorship run by Imran Ahmed, a former adviser to Hilary Benn and
I hadn’t intended to go on a ‘staycation’ this summer. Quite the contrary, I’d booked a family holiday to Norway. Last August, I made the mistake of renting a villa in Majorca and it was so hot it was impossible to do anything, including sleep. So this year I insisted on going north and arranged
Good God, there’s a lot of guff being talked about the Online Safety Act. This was a piece of legislation passed by the previous government to make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to go online’. To free speech advocates like me, that sounded ominous, given that ‘safety’ is always invoked by authoritarian
With depressing predictability, the riots have led to calls for more censorship. Historically, it was the authoritarian right who blamed outbreaks of civil disorder on too much free speech, but this knee-jerk, illiberal reaction is now more likely to be found on the left. I’m not just thinking of Paul Mason, who called for Ofcom
I had a revelation while watching the Olympics opening ceremony. It was during the infamous section that I (and almost everyone else) understood to be a reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’. A large woman in a halo-like headdress was flanked by various avant-garde performance artists, including three drag queens. These, presumably, were
The appointment of Becky Francis CBE to lead the Department for Education’s shake-up of the national curriculum is typical of Labour’s plan to embed their ideology across our institutions – or rather entrench it, since the long march is almost complete. On the face of it, Professor Francis is ‘unburdened by doctrine’, to use Sir
I felt slightly anxious for Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg when I read he’d agreed to have a reality show made about his family by an American television channel. I imagine most people’s reaction on hearing this was to think: ‘Are you stark raving bonkers?’ But as someone who’s appeared in several reality shows and been followed
I’m just coming to the end of a four-week speaking tour Down Under and have spotted some worrying signs of what our new government might have in store for us, particularly on the free speech front. During its six years in power, the Labour party in New Zealand tried to criminalise ‘hate speech’ against minority
Douglas Is Cancelled, the new drama series on ITV, should come with a trigger warning – for me, anyway. Watching it brought back memories of my own cancellation six years ago, which I found so traumatic that I lost half a stone. Admittedly, the middle-aged white man at the centre of this drama (Hugh Bonneville)
I was pleasantly surprised when I got an email from the Acton Gardening Association last October telling me that a plot had become available at the Bromyard allotments. I had put my name down so long ago, I’d completely forgotten. I asked if I could come and see the plot before making up my mind,
I’m in New Zealand on a speaking tour organised by the Kiwi Free Speech Union, and in some ways it’s like visiting Britain in a more innocent era. This struck me when I went on a tour of the Hobbiton movie set, where The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were filmed. The Shire
When I told an ex-editor of this magazine that I was planning to write about why I’m voting for Reform he didn’t react as I expected. ‘For God’s sake, don’t write another of those more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger pieces,’ he said. ‘Make it a furious, tub-thumping endorsement of Nigel and his gang.’ When it comes to the ‘War
On Saturday morning, when I was helping Caroline prepare for a lunch party, I got an urgent request for help from the leader of a populist, right-wing campaigning group. His organisation had just been debanked. He had five days before the account was closed, during which time the bank would return the money it had
Michael Gove’s decision to stand down in this election was a reminder that the one really bright spot in the past 14 years was the education reforms he steered through between 2010 and 2014. These policies were vindicated in the most recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) survey, which showed England climbing the OECD’s
