Society

Wednesday

Jawad Iqbal

Why India wants to conquer the moon

India – or, to be more precise, its leader Narendra Modi – wants to conquer space. That is why the success of the country’s latest moon mission matters so much. Only three countries – the United States, the former Soviet Union and China – have completed a successful landing on the lunar surface. No country has ever managed a landing near the moon’s south pole – a treacherous and freezing landscape, covered in darkness. India has long harboured the dream of being the first nation to do so, demolishing once and for all hurtful aspersions that it is a minnow in the space race. There is big money to be

Tuesday

Ben Lazarus Ben Lazarus

How did United handle the Mason Greenwood scandal so badly?  

It’s hard not to be shocked by the distressing clip shared online, allegedly featuring the Manchester United footballer Mason Greenwood. In the clip a woman can be heard trying to stop a man forcing her into having sex. The audio was uploaded in January last year alongside images of the alleged victim looking bruised and battered, with blood running down from her mouth.   When the clip was released, Manchester United responded by suspending the now 21-year-old Greenwood. But they stopped short of tearing up his contract. This was the first big mistake the club made. They could have saved themselves a huge amount of hassle (and appalling publicity) had they, at

Mason Greenwood
Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Manchester United failed Mason Greenwood

So, the Manchester United footballer Mason Greenwood has not been found guilty of the offences of attempted rape and coercive behaviour that he was accused of, but he’s still very sorry for unspecified behaviour that he did engage in.  Have you ever read anything more confusing than the following?  ‘In a statement, Greenwood accepted he had “made mistakes” and took his “share of responsibility”, but added: “I did not do the things I was accused of”.’ ‘Today’s decision has been part of a collaborative process between Manchester United, my family and me. The best decision for us all is for me to continue my football career away from Old Trafford,

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The endless hypocrisy of the comedy class

Personally I find TV panel shows pretty unbearable. They’re like being at a student party full of lairy smartarses you don’t know, and probably wouldn’t want to. But now a clip from one has, in the journalistic parlance of our time, ‘resurfaced on social media’. It is never a good thing for the people involved when a clip resurfaces on social media. It’s the kind of resurfacing that Jaws did in his heyday.   Then people knew exactly what a woman was about five cultural minutes ago, and found the idea of pretending not to know hilarious This particular eruption from the deep comes from the Big Fat Quiz Of The Year 2008, the

Monday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

We are facing an epidemic of online fraud

At what point are we going to drop the fiction that acquisitive crime is on the wane and admit that we are in an epidemic of fraud? Today, Barclays Bank has appealed to social media firms – rather than banks like itself – to refund victims of online scams. I am sure that social media companies could do more to close down scams, but isn’t the real problem that the law is tolerating online crime in a way that it doesn’t tolerate other crime?  If your house is burgled, you know to contact the police. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they will investigate, or even pay you a visit to take fingerprints, but

Sunday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will the NHS learn from Letby’s murders?

Will the fallout from the Lucy Letby case really lead to lasting change in the NHS? The most prolific killer of babies was able to continue even as doctors raised concerns about her – to the extent that the consultants themselves were forced to apologise to her face for a ‘campaign’ of bullying, rather than their concerns being taken seriously about her presence at the deaths or collapse of all the babies at the Countess of Chester hospital. Now, doctors’ union the British Medical Association has turned on NHS managers, saying the time has come for a reckoning for the ‘unaccountable’ bosses. NHS managers are often unfairly maligned: politicians like

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

What the future holds for women’s football

Well, that’s the end of that. Football, like an unrepentant runaway, stubbornly refuses to come home. Spain, deservedly probably, edged the thrilling, almost unbearably tense final and England will return to a warm, if not ecstatic, reception. England’s first football World Cup final in 57 years was undoubtedly that rarest of phenomena these days: a truly national event, with a TV audience likely to set a record for any female sports broadcast. It will also open a conversation about the importance of and future of women’s football. What should that conversation be like? I have a few suggestions and a few appeals.  For a start, can we stop comparing the

Saturday

Louise Perry

Young people don’t even know they’re being taken for a ride

Travelling home on the train last week, I heard the dulcet sounds of political discourse drifting towards me across the carriage. The words ‘social housing’ were followed soon after by the word ‘moron.’ I removed my headphones and attended more closely.  The speakers were two men aged about 30, whipping themselves up into a lather over the suggestion that there ought to be less social housing in central London. They seemed to be genuinely astonished by an argument they’d come across which pointed out that social housing tenants are dependent on the state for subsidy. ‘Moronic!’ they said, ‘insane!’  Sometimes you’re brought up short by how badly the social contract

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

It’s time to end the rewilding menace

There’s a ghastly predictability to the news that the University of Sussex – in Brighton, naturally – wants to set aside nearly half of its land for ‘rewilding’. According to our local paper, the Argus :   ‘The University of Sussex will rewild 42 per cent of its campus land in a move which aims to promote more biodiversity, achieved by designating land into areas where the grass will be cut a limited number of times a year as well as other areas where no mowing will take place. Vice-chancellor Professor Sasha Rosenail said: “The loss of nature should be of crucial concern to every inhabitant of our planet…universities, particularly those fortunate to have large, non-urban

Friday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Nicolas Sarkozy’s Russia intervention is a disgrace

Team Putin has this week gained a new and vaguely prominent supporter: Nicolas Sarkozy, the disgraced former President of France.  French politicians do not have a reputation for ethical probity but Sarkozy takes the gateau Most sensible people here are on vacation and political news is thin so a pro-Moscow declaration of Sarko, in an interview with Le Figaro, has attracted more attention than it might otherwise have commanded.  In an interview published on Wednesday, Sarkozy argued that Europe needs to ‘clarify its strategy’ and seek a compromise with Russia rather than pursue its ‘strange idea’ of funding a war without waging it. He said there was no question of admitting

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How was Lucy Letby able to operate in an NHS hospital?

How was Lucy Letby able to operate as a serial killer in an NHS hospital? Now that the verdicts in her trial are in – guilty on seven counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder, not guilty on two attempted murder charges and the jury unable to reach verdicts on six further charges – the government has launched an independent inquiry into the circumstances behind the murders at Countess of Chester hospital.  There are a number of questions that families want answered – some through a full public inquiry – including how Letby was able to kill or harm so many babies while enjoying the trust and faith of

Jawad Iqbal

Who cares if Prince William isn’t at the World Cup final?

It is absurd to suggest that Prince William’s non-attendance at the Women’s World Cup final in Australia on Sunday is some great public scandal. He faces growing pressure to cut short his family holiday and jet over to Australia pronto. Some critics have even gone as far as to claim that, if William doesn’t do so, he will somehow be guilty of letting the side – and by implication the nation – down.  The argument goes something like this. As president of the Football Association – the suits who run the English game – the heir to the throne is responsible for promoting the sport nationally and internationally at all

Julie Bindel

Why is ‘Cheryl Hole’ on MasterChef?

I don’t really care who takes part in Celebrity MasterChef, partly because I was put off commenting on such matters when one of the judges, an eminent food critic sent me some fairly strongly worded emails in response to me having a laugh – in print – about how seriously said judge took the process. After all, it is only an amateur cooking competition and not a televised race to cure cancer. But I am taking notice of the fact that Luke Underwood-Bleach, a drag queen who calls himself Cheryl Hole (geddit?) will compete in the new series.   I am so sick of misogyny in the form of drag being treated as though

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The future of churchgoing in the West: why Protestants should worry and Catholics should panic

33 min listen

King Charles III is the first British monarch to inherit a post-Christian kingdom. Less than half of his subjects identify themselves as Christian, and only about one in 20 adults in the UK go to church on Sundays. Since 1980 church attendance has more than halved – and that’s broadly the situation in most of Western Europe.  In the traditionally God-fearing United States, in contrast, roughly 20 per cent of people are practising Christians. But there, too, the statistics now point to a steady decline in religious belief; the figures are worrying for American Protestants and catastrophic for American Catholics.  My guest on this episode of Holy Smoke is Ryan Burge, an

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Talk TV’s interview with Graham Linehan was a disaster

In my time I’ve watched a lot of TV, and so I’ve seen a lot of bad TV. But the interview with Graham Linehan this week on TalkTV marks a new nadir.   Rosanna Lockwood – who I must admit I’d previously never heard of – is currently standing in for Piers Morgan as host of his show Uncensored. On Wednesday’s edition she was joined via Zoom by Graham Linehan, whose appearance in a show at the Edinburgh Fringe as part of a line-up assembled by London-based group Comedy Unleashed led to the entire show being cancelled by the venue because of his entirely orthodox and very widely shared view that

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Could Sarina Wiegman be the next England (men’s) manager?

Sarina Wiegman, the manager of England’s women’s football team, probably has a lot on her mind at the moment, what with preparing for Sunday’s World Cup Final against Spain and all that. But she was given one more thing to ponder when Mark Bullingham, Chief Executive of the FA, appeared to tout her as a possible replacement for Gareth Southgate when the current England men’s team manager leaves. Bullingham said the Lionesses coach was ‘doing a brilliant job’. And when it came to the England men’s team coaching job, he expressed his displeasure with the term ‘best man for the job’ and commented that football is ‘behind other sports in

Thursday

Niall Gooch

Michael Parkinson and the lost art of the interview

Two or three years ago, the Tory MP Jonathan Gullis was ridiculed for describing himself as ‘someone who grew up on Dad’s Army and Porridge and loves those traditional programmes of the past’, even though he was born in 1990. The suggestion was that if you weren’t old enough to vote when Tony Blair left office, then it was rather strange to retain a fondness for sitcoms which completed their original runs in the late seventies. This is not right, however. I know from personal experience that if you were raised in a household with traditional media tastes then even an eighties and nineties childhood – before the fragmentation of

Mary Dejevsky

What we don’t know about the suspected Bulgarian spies

As a British former foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington, there are few subjects I turn to with more trepidation than spying, and specifically the Russian variety. On the one hand, there is the 007 factor – the glamour, the martinis, and the derring-do – which colours perceptions on both sides. On the other is the awareness that espionage is a slithery, shape-shifting branch of human activity, where the only constant is that little is as it seems.   This is by way of a preface to the news – emblazoned on the front pages of most UK papers today – that three Bulgarian citizens, long resident in the UK, have been arrested

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Yes, Bradley Cooper’s fake nose is anti-Semitic

Bradley Cooper is not anti-Semitic. If he was, he’d surely have let it slip by now; as Mel Gibson proved (‘The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!’), it can be hard to hold such things in. And Cooper certainly wouldn’t be portraying a Jewish composer sensitively and affectionately on screen if he was. No, his decision to use a rubber nose when playing the role of Leonard Bernstein – to nose up, if you will – was likely not animated by the anti-Semitism of Hitler or Gibson. But it was animated by something and it is useful to consider what it was. Why was it necessary to

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why is the WHO promoting homeopathy?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is meant to implore us to ignore hearsay and folklore, and to follow the scientific evidence. So why is it now suddenly promoting the likes of herbal medicine, homeopathy and acupuncture? In a series of tweets this week, the WHO has launched a campaign to extol the virtues of what it calls ‘traditional medicine’. ‘Traditional medicine has been at the frontiers of medicine and science, laying the foundation of conventional medical texts’, it asserts. It goes on to claim that ‘around 40 per cent of approved pharmaceutical products in use today derive from natural substances’. After telling us the story of an Olympic long-jumper who