Society

Yesterday

Stephen Bayley

The Great British Railways trains are an abomination

Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, has revealed new train designs for the nationalised Great British Railways. By next spring, a train looking like a nursery school project will be arriving at a station near you. According to Alexander, the Union Jack-based design supposedly ‘represents a new railway, casting off the frustrations of the past and focused entirely on delivering a proper public service for passengers.’ As far as its appearance is concerned, it would have been better if it was not so much on time, as cancelled entirely. The design is an advertisement of failure The physicist Wolfgang Pauli once rejected a student’s thesis, saying ‘It’s not even wrong’. He meant

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

From grooming gangs to maternity safety: how the British state is failing

Is anyone happy with the latest maternity safety report, published by Baroness Amos today? The former UN diplomat says the standard of care that she has found so far in the NHS has been ‘much worse’ than she’d anticipated. This is quite striking, given the appalling findings of the many reviews that have already taken place into failings in maternity units across England. You might expect this review to merely have confirmed what has already been uncovered. From grooming gangs to maternity safety to unsafe housing, the intrays of Whitehall are groaning under ‘recommendations’ But many campaigners have responded to Amos’s interim report with a weariness and frustration. Victims of

Druin Burch

Is racism to blame for the NHS maternity crisis?

‘Nothing prepared me,’ said Baroness Amos as she released her ‘reflections and initial impressions’ about England’s maternity and neonatal services, ‘for the scale of unacceptable care that women and families have received, and continue to receive, the tragic consequences for their babies, and the impact on their mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.’ Amos’s words today paint a bleak picture of English maternity services, staffed by people who often don’t care, don’t listen, and deliver worse outcomes for the working class and people who aren’t white. It’s a picture that many parents – including myself – recognise. But is it right to suggest that black mums are being discriminated by the

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why were these Afghan rapists even in Britain?

Everything about that rape of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa is horrifying. First and foremost, the barbaric act itself. It took place on 10 May. Just after 9pm the girl was separated from her friends and abducted by Jan Jahanzeb, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker. He frogmarched her to a darkened park with the intention of sexually assaulting her. If officialdom had done what voters have begged it to, and properly policed our borders, these young men might not have made it here Then there was Jahanzeb’s sickening phone call to his friend, Israr Niazal. ‘Come quick’, he said. Come and help me rape this girl – that’s what

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Piers Morgan fell into Nick Fuentes’s trap

When Michael Gove introduced me to Piers Morgan last week at the Spectator Christmas reception, Morgan seized my hand and beamed, ‘I know Jonathan. We’re old friends.’ This was generous of him, not least because it isn’t true. We’d met once before, briefly. But some months earlier I had written a critique of his YouTube show for The Spectator which, to judge by his response, he did not enjoy. He called me a ‘disingenuous twerp’ on X and blocked me there. He then wrote a piece in the magazine entitled, ‘In defence of Piers Morgan, by Piers Morgan’. I mention this not to litigate any grievance, but in the interest of full

David Shipley

The open borders crime scandal

On 10 May this year a 15-year-old girl was with friends near parkland on the outskirts of Leamington Spa. Shortly after 9 p.m. she was separated from those friends and abducted by Jan Jahanzeb, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who arrived in the UK in January. The victim had the quick thinking to record the start and aftermath on her phone, so footage of the incident exists. As a result we know that while she was being taken away from her friends, the girl screamed for help, but Jahanzeb placed his hand over her mouth. Every single one of these horrific crimes is not just a tragedy. Every single one

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

How was Commercial Christmas born?

31 min listen

Historian and writer Charles Coulombe joins Damian Thompson to talk about how Christmas has changed over the past two centuries, the differences between Catholic and Anglican Christmas – and how a modern, commercial Christmas developed over time. Plus, he takes us through the origins of Christmas traditions from Christmas trees to Advent and whether we should say ‘Happy’ or ‘Merry’ Christmas.

Monday

Alexander Larman

Harry could be about to spend a lot more time in Britain

For lovers of self-destructive hubris – a quality that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex surely possess in spades – the saga of Prince Harry’s security is surely the gift that keeps on giving. Not since Jeremy Thorpe ensured that his former lover Norman Scott was deprived of his National Insurance card has anyone publicly expressed a grievance with so much fervour and repetitiveness as Harry’s attempts to obtain taxpayer-funded armed protection whenever he brings his family back to Britain. But now, in this season of miracles, it looks as if he might have got his wish, after all.  It seemed certain, after various expensive and amusingly humiliating courtroom defeats,

Eliot Wilson

Is the navy prepared to fend off Russia's underwater threat?

The Royal Navy has traditionally been the mainstay of Britain’s military power on the global stage. It is approaching its 500th anniversary, when Henry VIII established the ‘Navy Royal’ in 1546, a standing maritime force with its own dockyards and secretariat, the Navy Board. As this year’s Strategic Defence Review made clear, it remains vital for the protection of the United Kingdom, the defence of the wider Euro-Atlantic area and Britain’s ability to project power across the globe. To do that, the Royal Navy has to be strengthened and modernised. On Monday, the First Sea Lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins – the first Royal Marines officer to serve as professional

Lucy Dunn

Will Starmer take up Badenoch's grooming gangs advice?

Plans for a national inquiry into grooming gangs are underway, but will the inquiry actually happen? The Labour-led probe has not yet started and has almost been derailed by survivors on the victim liaison panel dropping out, complaints about transparency and concerns about the scope of the inquiry. Today, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch set out her party’s preferred terms of reference for the inquiry – a move she insisted was not party political, but one that she hopes Labour will act on. Labour needs to show it has listened – even if that means taking recommendations from its political opponents The Tories want a judge-led inquiry which has a hard

Stephen Pollard

Jewish fans deserve the truth about Maccabi Tel Aviv's Villa Park ban

Everyone is familiar with the old insult that you can tell when a politician is not telling the truth because his lips move. Be that as it may, a variation of this has emerged, but this time when someone from West Midlands Police is giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee. Did West Midlands Police simply make stuff up? It’s difficult to avoid that conclusion It emerged on Sunday that when the chief constable, Craig Guildford and the assistant chief constable, Mike O’Hara, gave evidence last Monday on why they decided to ban Jews – sorry, Israeli fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv – from last month’s Europa League game at

Andy Jones

How Europe can turn the tide on Russia's underwater warfare

Europe is right now fighting an enemy it cannot see and protecting a vulnerability it has not mapped. Undersea drones are taking the conflict between Russia and the West below water. But these sea drones are not looking for soldiers or civilian targets: they are patrolling infrastructure thousands of metres below sea level, aiming to prevent vital communications cables from being severed. In a silent, deep-sea war, Europe and its allies are already counting the cost of Russian damage to its vital undersea cables In a silent, deep-sea war, Europe and its allies are already counting the cost of Russian damage to its vital undersea cables – the spinal cords that

Terry Barnes

Aussies are enjoying England's Ashes meltdown

What a letdown for lovers of Test cricket in both England and Australia. After just six playing days, the Ashes series between the two old enemies is all but decided. England needs to win all three remaining Tests to regain the Ashes, a feat that only one side has ever achieved: the 1936 Australians, who had a young batsman named Don Bradman. The Australian media has relished the unexpected chance to put the boot into the beleaguered England side Having lost the first Test in Perth in record time, and in the second in Brisbane showed little of the patience and ball-by-ball judgment vital to Test success, the England team

Debbie Hayton

Why this trans person is troubled by a conversion therapy ban

Conversion practices are in the news again, at least if you listen to the BBC. We woke up to the Today programme on Friday recounting appalling stories of Electric Shock Aversion Therapy (ESAT) from years past. Further instalments were delivered on the corporation’s Six O’Clock News. Gay and lesbian people were subjected to those horrors in a futile attempt to change their sexual orientation. Outrageously, this happened within the beloved NHS. Following a BBC investigation, the government will now investigate the historical use of ESAT in NHS hospitals. Good, but this horse has already bolted. ESAT is not supported by professional bodies, and it is no longer used by NHS

Alex Klaushofer

Britain's water crisis is getting worse

When the taps run dry in Tunbridge Wells you know something has gone very wrong in the heart of Albion. Some 24,000 residents had their water supply cut off for almost a week after South East Water found that water at the local treatment plant was contaminated with chemicals. Schools closed, businesses lost money and, although supplies have resumed, residents have been told to boil water. The fiasco is illustrative of our national water crisis. In my part of south London, the streets literally course with water flowing from burst pipes. As I predicted in a piece for The Spectator eighteen months ago, the situation for Thames Water customers has worsened. One recent

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The BBC's anti-Semitism training is an offensive parody

The BBC has unveiled its compulsory training course for all staff on how not to be racist to Jews. I completed the online module and found it laughable, feeble and entirely beside the point. This isn’t education. It’s parody. A cartoonish exercise in HR-driven pseudo-virtue, dressed up as moral instruction. I have written before that if one were writing a sitcom about the modern BBC, and wanted to script a scene satirising its institutional absurdities, one might invent a plotline in which a woke producer commissions a documentary about the children of Gaza and secretly casts the 13-year-old son of a Hamas minister as its narrator. As we know, that’s

Sunday

Alexander Larman

The Andrew debacle has blown open the royal coffers for all to see

If you’ve ever dramatically broken up with an ex, only to find, to your miserable disbelief, that they keep popping up in the most inconvenient circumstances, you may feel a degree of sympathy with the royals as regards Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. A few weeks after he was stripped of his titles and ordered to leave Royal Lodge, he may now be the Andrew formerly known as Prince, but he shows no signs of wishing to leave his Windsor grace-and-favour home. By the terms of his (remarkably generous) lease, he is entitled to twelve months’ notice before departing. As one of his few remaining friends told the Times, ‘It’s really rather sad,

Druin Burch

The joy of receiving Christmas cards – even from people I loathe

These days I barely know what my own handwriting looks like; about my friends, the knowledge is all but lost. Seeing their pen strokes has grown rare. But, for a brief period each winter, that odd intimacy returns as Christmas cards – some with messages, most with just a scribbled name – land on my mat. I adore receiving cards. Even ones from people I cordially dislike, or frankly loathe, are welcome There used to be something exciting about the sound of the postman’s footsteps, of letters being pushed through the door, of their thump as they landed within. That was during the days when there was a great deal

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

AI has helped make 'parasocial' the word of the year

‘After having thrown a sheep six times from the top of a tower,’ reported the Gloucester Journal in 1784, ‘Montgolfier prevailed upon a man to try the experiment, which was performed with the utmost safety.’ The trick was done thanks to ‘a machine called a parachute’. Within weeks, a kind of hat called the Parachute Bonnet became the craze. An alternative to the Parachute Bonnet was the Lunardi, named after the ‘Daredevil Aeronaut’ Vincenzo Lunardi. In 1785 Robert Burns berated a louse for exercising on ‘Miss’s fine Lunardi, fye!/ How daur ye do ’t?’. Lunardi made an ascent before 200,000 people on 15 September 1784 in a hydrogen balloon, with

Sarah Perry

Slipshod: a short story by Sarah Perry

It was months before the difficulty with Marnie and Addison was talked about, or even alluded to. The sight of their names in emails circulated around the department was enough to cause a pall to settle on everything, like ash from fires only just put out. Besides, the nature of the difficulty (that was the word we all used) was both so opaque and so distressing we’d have had trouble talking about it, even if we’d wanted to. It fell to me to piece things together. My brief from Helen was simply to satisfy the university that nobody in the department was to blame. It fell to me because I