Society

Chris Bayliss

Why did the BBC say ‘Muslim reverts’?

‘Revert’ as a noun rather than a verb sounds like one of those Victorian terms that went out of fashion in the 1960s and is now considered a slur. However, this was the term that the BBC website felt was appropriate to describe people who had converted to Islam, in an article published on Friday, before hurriedly amending it on Saturday morning. As it happens, this is the term used by some converts to Islam to describe their status within their new faith, based on the theological principle of fitra; the innate predisposition within all humans toward recognising the oneness of God. By this way of thinking, one does not

Debbie Hayton

What happened to the Birmingham I love?

My beloved Birmingham, the city I called home for 26 years and where my children grew up, is drowning in a sea of black bin bags. It’s a shocking sight to see this once proud city, that was arguably the centre of the industrial revolution, in such a state. Thousands of tonnes of rubbish is piling up, rats are everywhere – and the stench is dreadful. As the weather warms up, life in Britain’s second city might become unbearable. It wasn’t always like this in Birmingham. Two hundred years ago, great thinkers met here: Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt and Matthew Boulton among them. Towards the end of

James Vitali

Israeli students aren’t troubled by ‘microaggressions’

Jerusalem’s Shalem College should have been brimming with life when we visited last month. But this leafy campus was oddly empty. The reason, of course, is that a large contingent of its students are currently serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as part of the war effort against Hamas. Away from campus, the young Israelis that we met on our trip were of similar age and appearance to the undergraduates I taught in Cambridge as a doctoral student. But the similarities stopped there. For these young people were about as different to their contemporaries in the West as it is possible to be. We met a girl in her

Leah Pennisi-Glaser

Have I grown out of my dyslexia?

I am 11 years old and in an English class. My teacher asks who wants to read out a passage from Iqbal by Francesco D’Adamo. No one volunteers. She scans the classroom and her gaze lands on me. Wrong kid, miss: I can’t read from left to right. For me, words refuse to stay still; sentences wiggle and oscillate in size, letters disappear, or crop up where they shouldn’t. I like reading from the middle of the page, gulping down whole paragraphs. Focusing on individual words feels counterintuitive and takes time. Two years later, and to no one’s surprise, I am diagnosed as dyslexic. At the time, the diagnosis gave

Yesterday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

In defence of the Norfolk mega pig farm

The ‘blockers’ who have so offended Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have, for the moment, scored another success in thwarting a wealth-creating development – but it is a success which I don’t yet hear the Prime Minister and Chancellor rushing to condemn. Nor, to be politically neutral, did our pro-growth former Prime Minister Liz Truss exactly rush to support the development when it was first proposed for her constituency – although she expressed a more balanced view than many of her constituents. The project in question, which has just been given the heave-ho by the Borough of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk, is a ‘US-style mega farm’ which would house

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Gavin Mortimer, Colin Freeman, Lawrence Osborne, Lionel Shriver and Anthony Cummins

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Gavin Mortimer looks at how the French right can still win (1:48); Colin Freeman interviews Americans who have fought in Ukraine and feel betrayed by Trump (11:01); Lawrence Osborne details his experience of last week’s earthquake, as he reads his diary from Bangkok (18:38); Lionel Shriver defends traditional, monogamous marriage (24:07); and, Anthony Cummins examines media satire and settled scores as he reviews Natasha Brown’s Universality (31:13).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

James Tidmarsh

Could France’s GB News be shut down?

France’s media regulator, Arcom, has been asked to investigate the right-leaning news channel CNews over its coverage of Marine Le Pen’s conviction this week. The 24-hour news channel is accused of being too one-sided, too sympathetic to Le Pen, and too critical of the judiciary in its editorial response to the decision that knocked her out of the presidential race. On Monday, Marine Le Pen was convicted by the Paris Criminal Court of misusing European Parliament funds – a four-year sentence, with two years suspended and two years with an ankle tag, a €100,000 fine (around £85,000) – and a five-year ban from holding public office which came immediately into

David Shipley

Are Islamist gangs in control of Britain’s most secure prison?

HMP Frankland, in Durham, is supposed to be one of the most secure jails in the country. The category A prison holds terrorists and murderers, including Soham child killer Ian Huntley. Frankland should be a place of order, where the state is in absolute control. Yet the jail is said to be so overrun with Islamists that inmates who refuse to join their gangs are being forced into separation units for their own safety. Prisoners who refuse to convert to Islam are also being targeted, according to a leading criminal defence barrister who uncovered the shocking allegations on a visit to Frankland. Tony Wyatt told the Times that ‘there are

Andrew Tettenborn

Is Hungary right to quit the ICC?

When Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, who is nobody’s fool, offered Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a state visit to Budapest last year, he knew a storm would follow. Netanyahu has now arrived in Hungary – and the backlash has duly followed. Orbán has vowed not only to ignore the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant against Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war between Israel and Hamas; he has said his country will withdraw altogether from the ICC. During a joint press conference yesterday with Netanyahu, Orbán said the ICC had become a ‘political court’. Netanyahu hailed Hungary’s ‘bold and principled’ decision to withdraw from the court.

David Shipley

Unlocked was changing inmates’ lives. So why has Labour binned it?

Unlocked Graduates, a charity that recruited hundreds of high-calibre graduates into the prison service, was one of the few glimmers of hope in our broken justice system. But Unlocked’s future is now in doubt: its graduate programme is over. The current cohort of prison officers – who are making a huge difference to the lives of inmates and their hopes of rehabilitation – will be the last. Unlocked set out to transform prison officer hiring – and it succeeded Unlocked’s fate has been clear for some time: last year, the Ministry of Justice failed to renew the programme’s contract. This week, prisons minister Lord Timpson confirmed that discussions on the graduate

Thursday

William Moore William Moore

Cruel Labour, the decline of sacred spaces & Clandon Park’s controversial restoration

51 min listen

This week: Starmerism’s moral vacuum‘Governments need a mission, or they descend into reactive incoherence’ writes Michael Gove in this week’s cover piece. A Labour government, he argues, ‘cannot survive’ without a sense of purpose. The ‘failure of this government to make social justice its mission’ has led to a Spring Statement ‘that was at once hurried, incoherent and cruel – a fiscal drive-by shooting’.  Michael writes that Starmer wishes to emulate his hero – the post-war Prime Minister Clement Atlee, who founded the NHS and supported a fledgling NATO alliance. Yet, with policy driven by Treasury mandarins, the Labour project is in danger of drifting, as John Major’s premiership did.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The BBC isn’t even pretending to be impartial about Trump

If, for some unfathomable reason, you missed Newsnight last night, do make sure you see, somehow, the interview between presenter Victoria Derbyshire and the former deputy assistant to Donald Trump, Sebastian Gorka. Derbyshire has had it coming for a long time. She believes it is sufficient, when interviewing somebody who takes a Trumpish view of the world, simply to screech her idiotic objections and prevent the interviewee from speaking at all. This happens every time a supporter of Trump is allowed on to her show. She is as bad as Maitlis, except without the charisma. Gorka refused to stand for it and told her three times to shut up –

Alexander Larman

Prince Harry can’t seem to stay away from Britain’s courts

As flies are to wanton boys, so Prince Harry is to the British legal system. Amidst perhaps the most serious reputational controversy that the Duke of Sussex has yet faced – the Sentebale drama – Harry will be returning to the Court of Appeal in London next week. There he will attempt to overturn the High Court’s decision that he should not be allowed taxpayer-funded police protection on his and his family’s visits to Britain. If he is defeated, it seems likely that his time spent in Britain will become fleeting at best This case has placed the man who was once third in line to the throne in the unusual position of

John Armstrong

Have a tenth of all gay people really had an exorcism?

According to research commissioned by Stonewall, clerics are conducting one LGBTQ+ exorcism for every two religious wedding ceremony they perform. This shocking finding is the logical conclusion of Stonewall’s ‘Culture Wars and Hate’ survey which found that 10 per cent of LGBTQ+ people in the UK have experienced an exorcism which aimed to change their gender or sexual orientation. At first glance, this may seem to contradict the government’s National LGBT Survey which found in 2017 that only 2 per cent of LGBT people had undergone conversion practices. Perhaps there has been a recent boom in exorcisms? Stonewall’s full data set finds that that 8.2 per cent of LGBTQ+ people in

Sam Leith Sam Leith

AI slop is flooding the zone

There are two accounts of the negative effects for humanity of the explosion of generative AI: one minatory, one trivial. The minatory, the existential, version of it is that AI will poison the information ecosystems on which our democracies depend, crash our economies by doing a very large number of us out of a job, give every lunatic and terrorist the means to engineer novel pathogens at home, and administer the coup de grâce by sending terminators into our recent pasts and/or overstocking the cosmic stationery cupboard by turning all of us into paperclips. None of these scenarios shows any signs of imminently coming to pass, though since experts in

Philip Womack

AI will never write good fiction

Sam Altman, Dark Lord of Chatbots (or the CEO of OpenAI as he is more conventionally known), has released another version of ChatGPT. This one, he claims, can ‘write’ fiction. After being fed prompts, like ‘metafiction’ and ‘grief’, Sam’s bot, which has been trained on past literature, regurgitated a plausible-sounding chunk of prose. Nothing much happens in the story (it’s ‘metafiction’, after all) but essentially, a woman called Mila stops visiting the AI, which would make it sad, if it were human. There are enough moments of surface sheen to dazzle the unwary. Here’s a sample: ‘I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for

Francis Pike

The truth about ninjas

One of my favourite scenes in Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino’s black comedy martial arts film, is the meeting of Beatrix ‘the Bride’ Kiddo, played by Uma Thurman, with sword-maker Hattori Hanzo at his scruffy sushi bar in Okinawa. Hanzo: What do you want with Hattori Hanzo? Kiddo: I need Japanese steel. Hanzo: Why do you need Japanese steel? Kiddo: I have vermin to kill. Hanzo: You must have big rats, to need Hattori Hanzo’s steel. Tarantino filched his sword-maker’s name from history. Hattori Hanzo was a real ninja (or rather, the historically correct word shinobi). Born in 1542, he spent his life in the service of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu

The Spectator

Letters: Where to find Britain’s best dripping

Open arms Sir: The latest magazine (29 March) has two references to American military capabilities, from Rod Liddle and Francis Pike. Mr Liddle suggests that the prevalent attitude over there is that we ‘Yerpeans’ should have contributed more to the recent strike on Yemen (‘America first, Europe last’). He may not have known it was RAF tankers which enabled the US fast jets to attack. (This also escaped the Signal group chat.) Mr Pike suggests that the US navy’s carriers are suddenly vulnerable to modern weapons (‘Carriers of bad news’). As an excellent historian, he will concede that commentators have been writing off naval carriers’ effectiveness for decades. He is

Douglas Murray

The hypocrisy of the Heathrow Nimbys

Some readers may have noticed that it takes rather a long time to get anything done in Britain these days. For example, if you added them all together, I wonder how many hours of Prime Minister’s Questions and BBC Question Time – under consecutive governments – have been taken up by a discussion of HS2. The debate over whether the country could construct a faster way to get out of Birmingham seems to have dangled over us for decades now. It is always we who must become impoverished and everyone else who can become enriched It is the same with almost every other major infrastructure project. That is because the

Patrick Kidd

Is Britain ready for a patriotic theme park?

It is the early 9th century. Peace reigns in a small French village as they prepare for a wedding. Garlands are being hung, sheep are being shepherded, all is sunshine and smiles. Then, in a snap, this bucolic bliss bursts as Viking warriors invade the scene and unleash hell. The original Puy du Fou is unashamedly pro-God, pro-monarchy and Vive la France A longboat splashes down a chute into the river, another spectacularly emerges from beneath the lake; swords clash, fires erupt, women are carried off and treasures seized. The villagers need a miracle, and it comes with the sudden appearance of a bishop, the blessed St Philibert. Just as

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

How to find your perfect man

My late parents perpetually promoted their marriage as the best in the history of the universe. Because this cult of two was hardly subtle, others readily detected what they wanted to hear, so fawning social admiration of what lovebirds they were made them even worse. For us kids, this Trumpesque superlative (how they’d hate that adjective) wasn’t remotely as traumatising as divorce, but still – the romantic hagiography was a bit much. In our adulthoods, our own sad little relationships could never compare, and our parents seemed to feel sorry for us. While big proponents of marriage as an institution, they seemed to regard their children’s marriages as pale imitations

Peter Jones

Trick or treat

A Today programme presenter used the term imperium (cf. ‘emperor’) with reference to Donald Trump’s desire to annex Greenland. To a Roman, it meant the authority to give orders that must be obeyed, no matter what. Anyone invested with that power by the Roman state was accompanied by lictors, attendants carrying the fasces, an axe bound inside a collection of wooden rods, suggesting what might happen to someone who refused the order. That was certainly one way to get people to obey you. But what about in normal life? This topic forms the subject of the opening scene in Sophocles’s tragedy Philoctetes. Agonised after being bitten in the foot by

Rachel Johnson

The Lady vanishes

The moment I stepped out of the Covent Garden sunshine and into the regal offices of the Lady magazine, it was like stepping into a 19th-century Tardis, and I was already in love. ‘I’m going for the editorship hell for leather,’ I wrote in my diary (published in 2010). ‘I’ve even been out and bought and read a copy of the magazine for the very first time!’ It was the funeral parlour ambience. The genteel tones of the telephonist, Ros, taking calls from deaf dowager duchesses placing adverts for a couple to prepare light luncheons and do some gentle housework in return for accommodation in the gatehouse. It was the

Toby Young Toby Young

Is it time to clean up my act?

I was having a drink in the Bishops’ Bar in the House of Lords last month when I was introduced to a 92-year-old peer called Lord McColl of Dulwich. I asked him if he’d known my father, Michael, who was made a life peer in 1978. Had they overlapped? He told me he hadn’t merely known him; he’d operated on him. If I have mild indigestion I think I’ve got stomach cancer; if I get a headache I decide it’s a brain tumour I realised with a start that the man I was talking to was the famous surgeon Ian McColl, who was made a life peer in the Queen’s