Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator
I wrote a piece about the Fixed Odds Betting Terminals uproar in the magazine this week, and it has prompted some angry responses by email and over social media. I’m told that I didn’t treat problem gambling with sufficient seriousness. I’m not sorry about that, I’m afraid: I think it’s silly to be too serious about the vices of others.
Hands up: who knows what a FOBT is? It stands for fixed odds betting terminal. No? Well, you should, because they are a serious menace to society. That’s what Ed Miliband says, anyway. FOBTs, you see, are those souped-up slot machines one can find in bookmakers’ shops all over the country, especially in deprived areas,
Now look, as Tony Blair would say, homophobia is bad. Very bad. But does that mean we have to turn the Sochi Winter Olympics into a sort of global gay pride event, simply because Russia has passed a not very pleasant law against teaching children about homosexuality? Apparently it does. Every right-thinking hack on earth, it
One of the many things I love about my wife is that she doesn’t make me do anything for Valentine’s Day. Bloody Valentine’s. It brings nothing but resentment and misery. It makes single people feel left out and lonely and turns happy couples against each other. True, some women might feel a little gratified if
Boy oh boy do I feel sorry for Laurie Penny. I hope that’s not a sexist thing to say. There she is, doing what she does, churning out perfectly harmless po-mo guff for the New Statesman about ‘why the patriarchy fears scissors‘ because ‘short hair is a political statement’ — and people seem to hate her for it, as
François Hollande seems like the European Left’s answer to George W. Bush, a disaster-prone buffoon who somehow makes it to the top and then wrecks his country. The comparison doesn’t quite work, however: Bush II, for all his flaws, had charm, some good fortune, and some political skill: he was re-elected, remember. Francois Hollande seems
It seems that everyone agrees Pope Francis should be Time’s ‘Person of the Year 2013’. Better him than Miley Cyrus, at any rate, or Bashar al-Assad, and Francis deserves it, too. This year he has — forgive the media-speak — changed the narrative about Christianity in the liberal world. He’s spreading the Good News, not
What happened to the cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Just over a decade ago, the French, having refused to join the allied adventure in Iraq, were the butt of every hawkish joke. (Remember ‘Freedom fries’? Oh how we laughed.) Now, as America and Britain are beating a retreat from the world stage, France has turned into the
There’s courage, there’s fearlessness, and then there’s the sort of sublime audacity you need to do something like sidecar racing. Stan Dibben, 87, has it in spades. He won the world sidecar championships in 1953, still whizzes around the racetrack today and is the subject of a beautiful short documentary film by Cabell Hopkins, No
A successful gambler once told me: ‘Never bet on football, never bet on multipliers, and never ever bet on football multipliers.’ Multipliers, in case you don’t know, are those enticing combination wagers on bookmakers’ shopfronts: ‘Liverpool win 2-0 + Sturridge to score = 33/1.’ Mugs like me fall for them every time. My subconscious tends
As Isabel says, the HS2 brigade are on a roll. Not only are Labour now under serious pressure over the party’s support or otherwise for the project, each day brings a new headline about the advantages of high speed rail. Today, the money quote comes from David Prout, the HS2 director general. He says that, without high speed
As Britain’s train lines suffer in the wake of St Jude, the political storm over high speed rail continues to rage. The government and Labour are playing footsie with each other. Labour’s somewhat left-field idea to re-open the Grand Central Railway — at an estimated cost of £6 billion, compared to £43 billion for HS2
Phew! America has stopped banging its head against the debt ceiling. For now. The world’s pre-eminent power can carry on ruining itself for a while longer — until the next boring-but-incredibly-important fiscal crisis hits. (The dreaded sequester is next up, oh joy). There’ll be plenty more soul-searching essays about the eclipse of American power. But
When you hear the words ‘economic recovery’, do you think: ‘Great! Britain is on the mend’? Or ‘Damn! I should have bet on the Tories to win an outright majority’? If your reaction is the latter, this column is for you. Back in March, when economists were talking about a triple dip and Chancellor Osborne looked like
Barack Obama may not be a great president, but he is a wizard at the blame game. He has fought ‘fiscal brinkmanship’ battles throughout his presidency, and he tends to come out on top. America’s federal government is today closing down, and most pundits refuse to say it’s in any way the president’s fault. Instead,
Hillary Clinton is overwhelming favourite to be America’s next President – and this time nobody, especially not no pesky filmmaker, will get in her way. Charles Ferguson, who was working on a major new documentary about Hillary, has just announced that he’s cancelled the project. The reason? Apparently, the American political class didn’t approve. The
Hats off to the Second City Network for the brilliant video above. The funny thing about the great Syria intervention saga has been the number of astoundingly smug and normally dovish left-liberal types who have been cheering on a US-led strike. Those who would usually be first to cry ‘western imperialism’ have in this instance
Are you ashamed of your country and depressed following last night’s vote against intervening in Syria? David Aaronovitch the journalist is. I do not give a fuck what this means for Miliband and Cameron. It’s the message it sends to Assad that counts. I am ashamed. — David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) August 29, 2013 Tim Shipman of the
Leave Florence and Sienna to the aesthetes. Let the in-crowd do Naples and Palermo. For the amateur Italophile, Rome is the destination. The eternal city is endlessly glorious, chaotic, stylish and funny: where else do you see nuns listening to iPods? Or medieval churches with condom machines by the doors? You can barely walk ten
‘Syria won’t go away if we just shut our eyes,’ says the newly ennobled Daniel Finklestein, in today’s Times (£). What he proposes instead is that we support the Prime Minister, then close our eyes and intervene. It is better to do something than nothing. Who knows what will happen? But at least we will
