Society

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

No, Elon Musk didn’t make a fascist salute

We’re not even 24 hours into the second Donald Trump term and already there’s a ‘New Nazis’ panic. Only this time it’s not The Donald who’s being branded Hitler 2.0. It’s his billionaire pal and state-slashing tsar, Elon Musk. The Guardian says Musk did ‘back-to-back fascist salutes’. At yesterday’s wacky inauguration, a giddy Musk gave a speech during which he saluted the crowd. I’ll be honest – it was a weird salute. He slapped his right hand against his chest and then threw his right arm upwards, diagonally and with vigour. He did it twice. His facial expression was an odd blend of love and anger. Within seconds, X –

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Prevent is not solely to blame for Southport failings

The assailant in the Southport massacre has pleaded guilty to the murders of three children in the town last year. Keir Starmer has leapt with unusual speed to authorise a public inquiry into what drove Axel Rudakubana into his frenzy of killing and if it could have been prevented. We now know that the state’s protective agencies crossed Rudakubana multiple times; he was referred three times to the government’s Prevent strategy, which is supposed to spot and stop tomorrow’s terrorists before hateful thought turns into lethal action. Prevent officials can’t be the only agency under scrutiny for their handling of this case The Prevent strategy has been under huge scrutiny

Julie Bindel

The grooming gang perpetrators who are never convicted

When you hear the term ‘grooming gang’, what comes to mind? ‘Grooming’, as I have long said, is a euphemism for targeting, raping, and pimping. Gang members routinely and sadistically sexually assaulted victims for their own twisted pleasure but ultimately the girls were used for profit: the gangs were running a business, and the girls were the merchandise.  All of the gang-based child sexual abuse scandals used the same modus operandi: the girls were broken in and broken down by the criminals before being driven around the UK to be sold to punters for cash in straightforward prostitution transactions.  Despite this, many children’s charities refuse to use the word pimping.

Monday

Terry Barnes

Why is Novak Djokovic getting so tetchy?

On his record, Novak Djokovic deserves to be rated as the greatest singles tennis player of the last 50 years. Twenty-four Grand Slam titles. An Olympic gold medal. Ninety-nine tournament wins overall. Goodness knows how many finals appearances. Some say he’s the greatest of all time: the Goat. Contrast that with Tony Jones. A veteran Australian sports journalist and broadcaster specialising in Australian Rules football, he’s little known outside Melbourne, let alone Australia. As the local sport presenter for Australian Open host broadcaster, the Nine network, Jones is at Melbourne Park fronting a morning magazine-style programme and doing live crosses to Nine’s national news bulletin. Could it be that the

Druin Burch

The true value of going to Oxford

Difficult, I know, to spend your life dreaming of having gone to Oxford. This year’s offers have just been announced and Cambridge’s are imminent. I feel for those who miss out, but I have some words of comfort. My late mother told me I announced my desire to study at Oxford aged seven, visiting the city on a family day trip. My earliest memories of the university, though, came from books: those whose dust jackets announced the name of the author’s college – especially when they mentioned taking a First. My luck was in coming to understand that the Oxford I longed for was always fictional Books open a world

Patrick West

Jeremy Corbyn and the curse of the eternal 1968ers

Help the aged. Really, someone should help the aged. By this I don’t mean the poor pensioners who’ve been hit by the cut to their winter fuel allowance. Nor do I mean the Baby Boomers who are unfairly maligned for having bought a house when it was affordable to do so, and have held on to it ever since. I mean that generation who came of age in the 1960s and are still trapped in that decade. Like the callow youngsters they march with, they speak in a sloganeering, agitprop language befitting of the student union This was in evidence yesterday when the MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell agreed

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Neil Gaiman and the misogyny of the geeks

One of the worst ways to form a good first impression of someone is when they’re chasing the same woman as you, so in the interests of total clarity I’ll divulge that the first – and only – time I met Neil Gaiman was way back in the twentieth century, at the Groucho Club, when we were both after the late Kathy Acker. (I wanted to hurl when he called her ‘Tweetie Pie’.) I’ll tell my Acker story first because it’s a funny one. That Christmas she was a guest at a lunch at my bohemian in-laws. My second husband’s mother had failed to turn the stove on, thanks to an

Sunday

Jonathan Spyer

Hamas has exploited Israel’s weaknesses

When Hamas launched its war on Israel in October, 2023, it did so on the basis of a clear analysis of Israeli society, according to which it hoped to achieve its objectives.  Given the nature and extent of the massacre of 7 October 2023, it was surely clear to the Palestinian Islamist movement that Israel’s response would be to seek to destroy the ruling regime that Hamas had established in Gaza since 2007. Hamas’s leaders hoped to avoid this outcome, however, by the taking of Israeli hostages. This would be followed by a bargaining process in which Hamas would exchange the lives of the hostages for its continued rule in Gaza.  Hamas

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Will Donald Trump pardon TikTok?

Millions of Americans will have tried to follow their routine this morning: turn off the alarm, grab the phone, start to scroll. For TikTok users, there will have been a moment of false hope: the shortest clip of a video starts to play, before the notification pops up that everyone was expecting , but no one was certain would actually appear: ‘Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now.’ With a federal ban looming, the company decided to cut off operations for its 170 million users in America, making clear in the statement who is responsible: ‘A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use

Sean Rayment

Gaza’s fragile peace

The signs are not good. The much-anticipated Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal is a horribly complicated construct which seems almost designed to fail. The three-phase plan, which is due to start today, will stop the fighting for 42 days. During that time, Israel will withdraw from the Gaza Strip’s most populated regions and allow much needed aid convoys at the Rafah border to enter the devastated area. In return, Hamas will release 33 Israeli hostages, and Israel will release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. The two sides will continue talking in the hope of securing the deal’s next two phases, which would free the remaining hostages and make the ceasefire

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

How Pakistan’s rape culture led to the UK grooming gangs

Lahore, Pakistan Pakistani-origin men are up to four times more likely to be reported to the police for child sex grooming offences than the general population in England and Wales, the first national police scheme data appeared to suggest last week.  The perpetrators of three of the most gruesome child abuse scandals in modern British history, in Rochdale, Rotherham, and Telford, were overwhelmingly of Pakistani origin. While sexual abuse takes place across demographics, not enough attention has been paid to the way these grooming gangs have been inspired by the anti-women customs of Pakistan.  There is a gory mix in the country of Islamic supremacism, primitive tribalism and violent misogyny The majority

Alex South

Prisons have become airports for drones

A few months ago, I spoke to a man halfway through a life sentence for murder. We first met 12 years ago when I was a prison officer. We mused on the changes to the prison service over the last decade. He said it wasn’t just the days that had got louder, but the nights too. I presumed he meant the increase in violence, or the sounds of mentally unwell prisoners trapped in their distress, but I was wrong.  ‘No,’ he said. ‘The drones. This place is like an airport for them.’ During my career I found drugs, weapons, illicit phones, a bottle of Jack Daniels and even an iPad

John Jenkins

The UK still hasn’t come to terms with the Muslim Brotherhood

Earlier this month, the UAE announced it was sanctioning 11 individuals and eight rather obscure organisations for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The UAE proscribed the MB as a terrorist group in 2014, so you might be forgiven for thinking this was routine. But it wasn’t. All eight organisations were based in the UK. Normally this works the other way round: the UK bans or sanctions entities elsewhere. Having an Arab country – especially one we claim as a friend – do that in reverse should set alarm bells ringing. There was a brief flurry of press interest, then silence.  The Muslim Brotherhood is the mothership of all modern

Nigel Jones

How Unity Mitford seduced Hitler

The Daily Mail has got a world exclusive on its hands. In great excitement it is publishing the secret diary of Unity Valkyrie Mitford, the star-struck young aristo who made a splash in the 1930s tabloids with her pursuit of her famous love interest. The thing was that the star she was struck with was Adolf Hitler. Unity was the scion of a posho family famous for its literary accomplishments and political extremism: she was one of the six daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, Lord Redesdale, a dim peer immortalised in the novels of the eldest daughter, Nancy, as ‘Uncle Matthew’. Known to his offspring as ‘Farve’, Redesdale was a reactionary

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

What Brewdog’s James Watt gets wrong about work-shy Britain

What’s the greatest divide in life? Is it between the dumb and the clever, the rich and the poor, the ugly and the beautiful? All have their points, but in my opinion it’s between those who can make a living doing a thing they love and those who do a job they don’t particularly care for. I don’t believe that anything else comes near deciding whether or not you’ll be consistently happy with your life. Personally, I have never stopped being delighted by the fact that, from the ages of 17 to 65 – even lying in bed as a newly-minted cripple – I can earn my living by writing. It’s

Eoghan Harris

Lockerbie and the forgiveness fallacy

It’s clear who was to blame for the Lockerbie terrorist bombing: Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi paid over a billion dollars to relatives of the 270 victims of the attack after accepting responsibility. But viewers of Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie: A Search For Truth, might feel that the USA and UK were somehow involved. Here’s a clue as to why that might be the case: it’s co-directed by Jim Loach, son of Ken, who seems not so much a chip off the old block as a chip off the old Trot block. Swire’s story resembles what a Sinn Féin critic like me calls the forgiveness fallacy Lockerbie’s hero is Jim Swire, who lost his

Angela Epstein

Why are so many BBC broadcasters going native?

Of the many characters created by the peerless Victoria Wood, one creation in particular lingers in the mind: namely the immaculately polished, but unashamedly snobbish television continuity announcer, who, with an assassin’s smile, treated her audience with utter contempt. ‘We’d like to apologise to viewers in the North. It must be awful for them,’ was one of her more cutting remarks. The hon hon hon bonhomie of French surnames – step forward President Macrrrrrron – is hard to take seriously Coming from Manchester, Wood was clearly making mischief with counterintuitive comedy. She was taking aim at how crisp, received pronunciation can make anything sound plausible. Had she not died in 2016, at

Robin Ashenden

Britain’s unending fascination with the Cambridge spies

Will we ever tire of the Cambridge spies? Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Burgess and Maclean – and to a lesser extent John Caincross, the fifth man in the circle – are names as familiar to us now as certain brands of detergent or the line-up of the Beatles. To compliment the countless books, dramas and documentaries about them, this week the national archives declassified MI5 files on the subject. They cover Philby’s recruitment and subsequent flight to Moscow, as well as the Queen’s nine-year unawareness that Blunt (who worked for Buckingham Palace) had confessed to his past as a Soviet agent. It seems that whatever we think of Burgess, Maclean

Friday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Did Muslim leaders help conceal the grooming gangs scandal? A fierce exchange of views

28 min listen

Welcome to one of the most heated exchanges of views in the history of the Holy Smoke podcast. In this episode, Damian Thompson talks to the distinguished Islamic scholar Dr Musharraf Hussain about the controversy surrounding the Muslim background of some of the accused in the crimes of Britain’s ‘grooming gangs’.  Damian draws an analogy between the Catholic hierarchy’s cover-up of sex abuse by priests, and what he claims was the role of certain local Muslim community leaders in restricting debate about, and investigation of, abuse committed by men from Pakistani families. To say that there was no common ground between Dr Thompson and Dr Hussain would be putting it mildly, alas…

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Why we’re horrified by Bonnie Blue and Andrew Tate

OnlyFans content creator Bonnie Blue claims to have broken a world record by sleeping with over a thousand men in twelve hours. I say ‘slept with’ but obviously the euphemism doesn’t really apply to this dubious feat. Blue, who was born in Nottingham but now lives in the United States, added to the glamour of the occasion by uploading a video of the aftermath, where she walks the streets with her face covered in what appears to be a pot pourri of male ejaculate. The reason Blue and Tate horrify us is that we mostly subscribe to a simple view: that men should treat women with respect If the 25-year-old