Gus Carter is The Spectator’s deputy features editor.
Spotify is bad, apparently. The charges levied against the app are that it stifles artists by paying them a pittance and listeners with its all-pervasive algorithm. ‘How Spotify ruined music,’ was the title of one recent Washington Post article, while the New Yorker asked ‘Is there any escape from Spotify syndrome?’ going on to conclude
Britain’s farmers are in a bind. Despite sitting on land worth millions, they are unable to release that wealth without selling – and many struggle to make money from what they produce. According to Defra, almost one in five farms make a loss, while a quarter made less than £25,000 last year. Yet there are
If you tuned into the Tory party leadership race, you will have heard rather a lot about the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Robert Jenrick wants Britain to leave because it stops us deporting foreign criminals. Kemi Badenoch argues that leaving won’t fix our immigration woes. She’s not wrong. Of the 144,200 people who
Ask a certain type of class warrior about the old boys’ network and they’ll tell you of ruddy-faced men in club ties, offering each other’s offspring summer internships. Or perhaps they’ll talk of thrusting bankers, who as children shared showers and a chilly dormitory, plotting to hire old school friends over more deserving candidates. Wink
The Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, Rotherham, is opposite an RSPB nature reserve. For months, its 130 rooms have been fully booked, rented by the Home Office to house migrants. Last weekend, the hotel was surrounded by a mob who broke in and tried to burn it down. Most of the ground-floor windows are now
Liberal Democrat activists were reportedly told to ‘get out the Gail’s vote’, targeting people who visit the over-priced artisanal cafés. There are 131 Gail’s in the UK and around half are in Lib Dem marginals. If you’ve never come across one, think spinach, feta and filo pastry for £6, sold by a stressed Spanish girl
That image of Donald Trump, blood streaming down his face, fist raised in front of the banner of the republic, will be a defining photo of the 21st century. Someone attempted to kill the former and would-be president, they missed, and Trump survived. His response to his followers? ‘Fight’. We can expect to see him
If you’re going to fleece a bookies, it would be wise to ask a friend to place the bet on your behalf, or do it with cash down the local Coral. Craig Williams didn’t. The Gambling Commission is investigating the Prime Minister’s parliamentary private secretary after he placed a bet on the date of the
There are moments when you realise the world is a more complicated place than you had previously thought. I had such moment earlier this week when I saw a new doughnut at a concession stand in Hammersmith station: a Krispy Kreme x Pretty Little Thing doughnut. Sure, you could probably get one in a town
Do we still need philosophers? Daniel Dennett, who died last week, believed strongly that we do. ‘Scientists have a tendency to get down in the trenches and commit themselves to a particular school of thought,’ he told me from his home in Maine, not long before he died. ‘They’re caught in the trenches so a
I can’t imagine being confronted with the body of someone who has jumped to their death: limbs splayed in ways that shouldn’t be possible, clothes shredded by velocity and tarmac, the bloodied remains of a face. The idea is appalling. So I have every sympathy for the police officers who saw just that at the
Every few weeks, I leave my front door to find a car missing its side window and a pile of glass on the pavement. One morning there were four windowless cars, all in a row; someone had already been out with duct tape and some bin bags in an attempt to keep the rain from
Funny to think what our taxes go on. I wouldn’t have had ‘the invention of a deity’ on my 2024 government expenditure bingo card, but here we are. The National Maritime Museum, which last year received £20 million from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, has unveiled a statue of a ‘god-like protector of
Not much of Hong Kong still feels British. There is the odd tube stop – Admiralty, Kennedy Town, Prince Edward – but that’s about it. On the car ride from the airport, I chatted to the driver as we passed under half-built concrete arches covered in green construction cloth. He told me the authorities were
We are in the holy city of Santiago de Compostela to scatter our father’s ashes. He and my youngest sister had planned to walk the Camino, which finishes here at the resting place of Saint James, to mark the start of her adulthood and the beginning of his retirement. Instead, my two sisters have been
Everything about Greggs is fake. You can smell it as you walk down any British high street. There’s an astringency, a hint that what lingers in those ovens is more than butter, flour, eggs and salt – that their food has been adulterated with something unnatural. What you’re smelling is an approximation of pastry, an
I’m writing this with headphones in, sitting at my desk on Old Queen Street. Please don’t tell Debrett’s. Apparently listening to headphones in the office is a huge faux pas, akin to cutting camembert with a fish knife. The company’s etiquette adviser, Liz Wyse, told the Times: ‘If you work in an open-plan office where
It’s unnerving being surrounded by a crowd in the woods. You can hear people but only glimpse their limbs or faces through the leaves. It triggers something primordial, similar to the feeling of being watched. Ideally, someone with a big strimmer would have given Cooper’s Hill a good going over before the cheese rolling. But
I’ve always wanted children. Friends sometimes tease me about my broodiness, apparently uncommon among single 29-year-old men. But unless I’ve accidentally knocked someone up in the past few months, I’m going to be an older parent than mine were by the time they had me. I suppose that’s normal. The average age at which couples
Pope Francis wants you to have sex. Or at least he wants Italians to have more sex. The country, he says, is facing a ‘Titanic struggle’ against demographic doom. Last year, the population dropped by 179,000 people – and Italy is projected to lose another five million by 2050. What’s happening in Italy is, to a
