World

Thursday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Are Big Tech monopolies the biggest threat to democracy?

38 min listen

A handful of Big Tech companies seem to run our lives, and there’s a good argument that they can be considered monopolies within their industries. In a landmark ruling recently, a US judge found that Google acted illegally with their exercise of monopoly power within the online search industry. On this episode, Freddy is joined by Barry Lynn, journalist and an expert on America’s antitrust battles, to discuss how liberal societies can combat the power of monopolistic Big Tech.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Farage’s plan, the ethics of euthanasia & Xi’s football failure

45 min listen

This week: Nigel’s next target. What’s Reform UK’s plan to take on Labour? Reform UK surpassed expectations at the general election to win 5 MPs. This includes James McMurdock, who Katy interviews for the magazine this week, who only decided to stand at the last moment. How much threat could Reform pose and why has Farage done so well? Katy joins the podcast to discuss, alongside Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, who fought Nigel Farage as the Labour candidate for Clacton (1:02). Next: who determines the morality of euthanasia? Matthew Hall recounts the experience of his aunt opting for the procedure in Canada, saying it ‘horrified’ him but ‘was also chillingly seductive’. Does

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Diane Abbott doesn’t understand fascism

Diane Abbott believes that Giorgia Meloni is a ‘literal fascist’. That must come as a surprise to the 12.3 million voters who elected her prime minister of Italy two years ago. Not to mention King Charles, who hosted Meloni at Blenheim Palace in July. The Right Honourable Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington described Meloni as a fascist as Keir Starmer jetted to Italy this week to meet the country’s leader. ‘What does he hope to learn from her,’ asked Abbott. Perhaps the British premier would like to hear how Meloni has this year reduced immigrant arrivals on Italian territory by 65 per cent. Is this the behaviour of

Boris Johnson

It’s time to let Ukraine join Nato

Kyiv The young amputee had a question. We were sitting once again in the rehab centre in Kyiv, and I was looking at the same sort of injuries I saw last year: the missing limbs, the cranial scars, the withered hands and feet that no longer obeyed their owners’ commands. The difference was that Vladimir Putin’s carnage had been inflicted on a new group of Ukrainians – noticeably younger than last year’s victims, and now including a woman. Once again, I shook their hands (where possible) and put my arms around them, and did my best to be reassuring to all, including the young man on the bed, who had

Matthew Hall

A chillingly seductive glimpse of assisted dying

A few weeks ago, I was present when my aunt, a Canadian citizen born in the UK, chose to die through euthanasia, or as it is euphemistically called in Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying or MAiD. Being British, I wasn’t familiar with the process. What I saw horrified me, but it was also chillingly seductive. My aunt was 72 and in the early stages of motor neurone disease. She had lost the use of one arm but though frail, was living independently and had perfect mental acuity. She was an artist who had worked in the theatre for 40 years designing beautiful and elaborate costumes. For several decades following her

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Why can’t China play football?

It would be tough for any country to lose 7-0 in a World Cup qualifier, but when the losing team is China, and the thrashing is at the hands of arch-rival Japan, it is deeply humiliating. The defeat was ‘shameful’, according to an editorial last week in the Global Times, a state-controlled tabloid, while the Shanghai-based Oriental Sports Daily called it ‘disastrous’, adding: ‘When the taste of bitterness reaches its extreme, all that is left is numbness.’ Some commentators called for the men’s team to be disbanded, bemoaning that a country of 1.4 billion people could not find 11 men capable of winning a match. While being awful on the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Keir Starmer’s free clothes, Huw Edwards sentenced and Tupperware faces bankruptcy

Home Sir Keir Starmer met Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, in Rome and said that sending funds to Tunisia and Libya ‘appears to have had quite a profound effect’ in cutting the number of migrants arriving in Italy. In the seven days to 16 September, 1,158 migrants arrived in England in small boats; eight drowned off France. Sir Keir made a late declaration of gifts from Lord Alli, a Labour donor, including clothes for Lady Starmer. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, defended the practice, saying that prime ministers ‘do rely on donations, political donations, so they can look their best’. Sir Keir’s hair was observed to be greyer

Paul Wood

Hezbollah’s exploding pagers are just the start

Israel’s security cabinet met in a bunker in the ministry of defence in Tel Aviv on Monday night. The main item on the agenda was Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia whose missiles and rockets have forced tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes in the north. The meeting lasted into the early hours of Tuesday. At 2.26 a.m., the Prime Minister’s office issued a statement saying Israel’s war aims had been ‘updated’ – no longer just destroying Hamas in the south, but also the safe return home of everyone in the north. ‘Israel will continue to act to implement this objective.’ This seemed like a bland restatement of existing policy

Wednesday

Jonathan Spyer

Pager bombs won’t stop Hezbollah

The killing of 12 people, including several Hezbollah members, and the wounding of thousands more when 5,000 pagers simultaneously exploded in Lebanon yesterday represents an obvious tactical triumph for Israel (or whoever carried it out). The sight of members of the Iran-supported Shia Islamist group suddenly collapsing in agony while performing mundane daily tasks was met with great amusement by the movement’s many enemies across the region. Displaying the somewhat gleeful and malicious humour which characterises all sides in the Levant, a variety of memes mocking the hapless victims of the grim beeper soon proliferated.   Hilarity aside, the operation displays the extent to which Hezbollah has been thoroughly penetrated by its

Paul Wood

The mad, bad, sad world of Ryan Routh 

Any journalist who has covered a war will recognise Ryan Routh’s type immediately – the war zone nutter. Routh is currently all over America’s front pages, accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump. The photograph used by most news outlets shows a grizzled-looking character with a flak vest, a stars-and-stripes neckerchief, and a troubled stare. Back in 2022, he travelled from his home in the US to Ukraine, shortly after Russia invaded. He ended up in Independence Square in Kiev, setting up an open-air camp adorned with flags and handwritten placards – open air camps with placards being another reliable sign of nutterdom. But then warzones have always attracted the mad,

Arieh Kovler

The Hezbollah pager bomb plot has Israel’s fingerprints all over it

At the end of the 2014 film Kingsman: the Secret Service, the plucky spy hero is in trouble deep in an enemy base. Suddenly his tech wizard figures out that he can hack into the microchips inside the enemies’ heads and make them all explode. The bad guys all go boom. Hezbollah fighters must be asking themselves what other tricks Israel might have up its sleeves On Tuesday night, the spy thriller trope became real. Across Lebanon, Hezbollah operatives’ secure pagers exploded. Security camera footage showed the small explosions in supermarkets and shops, leaving Hezbollah terror operatives bleeding or worse. More than 3,000 people were injured in the hundreds of blasts,

Tuesday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

It’s a pity Thierry Breton didn’t resign sooner

The spectacular resignation of Thierry Breton from the European Commission suggests that the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen is not quite as useless as her numerous critics suggest. Breton’s departure was overdue. Credit to von der Leyen for wielding the long knife. Breton’s arrogance was exceeded only by his uselessness. After Mario Draghi’s taxonomy of European decline last week, the role of Breton as commissioner in charge of the single market was a nonsense. Draghi said Europe is on a path to self-destruction, becoming nothing more than an open-air museum, sustained by tourism. Breton’s arrogance was exceeded only by his uselessness Gavin Mortimer wrote here that Draghi

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Donald Trump could have the last laugh on crypto

A day after nearly being shot again, the 78-year-old Donald Trump is once more being mocked for sounding like a fool while talking about cryptocurrency. In an interview with Farokh Sarmad, another of these hugely popular male influencers whom the vast majority of people have never heard of, Trump ruminated on the importance of making America the ‘crypto capital’ of the planet.  Sitting in Mar-a-Lago, underneath the hilariously kitsch ‘Visionary’ portrait of young Donald in white trousers and a tennis jumper, Trump told the Persian-Canadian Farokh that he learns about crypto from his sons. ‘Barron is a young guy,’ he said. ‘He’s got four wallets or something. I’m saying “explain this

Damien Phillips

Labour can’t afford to ignore the war in Sudan

‘The UK-UAE relationship is central to driving economic growth – it’s our largest trading partner in the region.’ So tweeted David Lammy earlier this month following a meeting with Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed, the Emirati foreign minister. Perhaps the Foreign Secretary should think twice before making such boasts. The UAE is up to its neck in the crisis unfolding in Sudan – and the United Kingdom’s warm relations with Abu Dhabi may soon develop into a diplomatic minefield for the government. Between the latest offensives in the Russo-Ukrainian war and the ongoing conflict in Gaza, there has been too little space even in the international pages of the papers for

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Are Democrats to blame for the repeated attempts to kill Trump?

23 min listen

As if there hadn’t been enough drama in America in 2024, Donald Trump has survived another assassination attempt. The attempted killing of the 45th president at his golf course in Palm Beach, Florida yesterday afternoon was not nearly as threatening or deadly as the shooting nine weeks ago in Butler, Pennsylvania – but questions remain about how the incident could have happened.  Freddy Gray is joined by Kate Andrews to discuss the second assassination attempt, the state of the race, and what’s next for Donald Trump. 

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

A father and son at the edge of the Chinese empire

39 min listen

As a child, the New York Times journalist Edward Wong had no idea that his father had been in the People’s Liberation Army. But as he grew up, a second generation immigrant in the United States, Edward was hungry to find out more about his father and mother’s pasts in the People’s Republic of China. That hunger took him to study China at university and eventually to become the New York Times’s Beijing bureau chief. Edward’s new book, At the Edge of Empire, is a marvellously constructed work that traces his father’s journey through China as a soldier in the PLA, and his own reporting in China as an American journalist. It reveals how

Eliot Wilson

Ukraine can’t wait for a decision on long-range missiles for ever

Last week was electric with anticipation. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, visited London for a UK-US ‘strategic dialogue’, then he and Foreign Secretary David Lammy both travelled to Ukraine to meet with political and military leaders and discuss the ongoing conflict. Heading in the other direction was the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, who made for Washington DC with his outgoing national security adviser, Sir Tim Barrow, to meet President Joe Biden and hold talks on the global situation. By accident or design, the government allowed speculation to grow that the United Kingdom and the United States were close to an announcement that they were lifting restrictions on

James Tidmarsh

The lesson Keir Starmer could learn from Francois Fillon

Sir Keir Starmer, the man often dubbed ‘Mr. Rules’ for his reputation as a stickler for ethical conduct, now finds himself facing an ethics probe over undeclared gifts. The accusations concern luxury suits gifted to Starmer and dresses for his wife, Victoria, reportedly paid for by Lord Alli, a Labour peer and supporter. Starmer’s team failed to declare the gifts given to Lady Starmer, a mistake apparently made after receiving incorrect advice from Downing Street. The suits themselves were declared in line with parliamentary rules, but the same was not true for the dresses. Now, questions are swirling as the Prime Minister scrambles to explain the late declaration. This recalls

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Does Starmer have the gall to send asylum seekers to Albania?

Sending asylum-seekers to Rwanda would, of course, be a moral outrage. We know this because Labour shadow ministers kept telling us so when the previous government wanted to do just this. Fortunately, however, there is a far more ethical alternative: to send them to Albania instead – something which Keir Starmer is considering after meeting with Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni to learn how her government has successfully reduced small boat arrivals over the past year. Starmer said he was ‘interested’ to see how the Albania processing scheme developed by the Italian government would work. This is just one example of a schizophrenic government weighing up a policy which is almost

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Will Michel Barnier govern for the provinces or for Paris?

Michel Barnier will unveil his government in France this week, a fortnight after the 73-year-old was nominated by Emmanuel Macron as the fifth prime minister of his presidency. It will be a government composed overwhelmingly of people from Barnier’s own party, the centre-right Republicans, and Macron’s centrist coalition. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally have ruled themselves out of contention for any posts, as have most political figures from the left. They may be out of touch with the rest of France but they don’t care It is a curious state of affairs that the Republican party, which won just 47 of the 577 seats in July’s parliamentary election, is now