Society

Saturday

Piotr Wilczek

Britain doesn't need to become great again – it already is

After three-and-a-half years as Poland’s ambassador in London, I’ve come home with two strong impressions. The first: the United Kingdom remains one of the most astonishing places in the world. The second: the British are suddenly, and oddly, intent on convincing themselves it isn’t. Everywhere I went — dinner parties in Hampstead, conversations with taxi drivers — the refrain was the same: ‘This country is finished’ Everywhere I went — dinner parties in Hampstead, opinion columns in the Guardian, even conversations with taxi drivers — the refrain was the same: ‘This country is finished.’ The trains are late, the NHS is on its knees, the education system is in meltdown, the

Michael Gove

From Porn Britannia to Political Chaos: The Spectator’s Year in Review

31 min listen

The Spectator’s senior editorial team – Michael Gove, Freddy Gray, Lara Prendergast and William Moore – sit down to reflect on 2025. From Trump’s inauguration to the calamitous year for Labour, a new Pope and a new Archbishop of Canterbury, and the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the year has not been short of things to write about. The team take us through their favourite political and cultural topics highlighted in the magazine this year, from the Assisted Dying debate, the ongoing feud over Your Party and Reform’s plan for power, to Scuzz Nation, Broke Britain – and Porn Britannia. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.  

Friday

Joshua Young

Did Band Aid make a difference?

Is this the year that ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ – the charity song written by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure in 1984 to provide relief for the victims of famine in Ethiopia – finally died? The song has been condemned for its broad-brushstrokes lyrics about Africa, and it feels increasingly like the work of a naïve and distant past. But the truth is that it has always been better music than critics would like us to think. The question that matters most though is the hard one: did Band Aid improve the world? Urging the public to ‘feed the world’, Band Aid created the modern association between fame and

Mark Solomons

Save our Boxing Day football

Football’s race to destroy the sport’s finest traditions has surpassed itself, yet again. For the annual Boxing Day feast of top-flight football – something which has been part of the game’s calendar since 1913 – has been all but wiped out. This year there is only one Premier League match: Manchester United vs. Newcastle United. Once again, football fans are paying the price We shouldn’t be surprised by the death of Boxing Day football. The last few years have seen TV bosses, club owners and the Premier League itself try and suck the joy out of the game for supporters, particularly those of us who actually go to matches. Interminable

Druin Burch

Christmas and the luxury of fallow time

Christmas is now a festival of family and overeating, yet it keeps its pockets of quiet reflection, even for those for whom the sacred has slipped away. There are times when life insists we do nothing, and some come at Christmas. Holidays bring downtime, moments when work and parties, preparations and cleaning, computer games and social media, all cease. William Henry Davies knew the value of time left fallow: What is this life if, full of care,We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep or cows. I remember a fertile silence as a young man in a wintry

Thursday

Patrick West

Iron Maiden at 50: how heavy metal became mainstream

The death of the Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne this July, and the huge reaction it provoked worldwide, represented something of a landmark to us heavy metal fans. After decades of having been shunned, scorned and ridiculed, this genre had not only become acceptable, but the passing of the frontman of heavy metal’s founding fathers became an occasion for national mourning. How different it had been in the 1980s. In that decade, heavy metal was deemed a form of music made by morons, for morons. And the undisputed kings of the genre in that decade were Iron Maiden. They were certainly my favourite band at the tail end of that

Chas Newkey-Burden

Christmas dinner is hell for vegans

It’s one of the last bastions of national orthodoxy, one that people look forward to for months, but many vegans dread Christmas dinner. It’s not the food that’s the problem – it’s the conversation. Veganism is now as mainstream as oat milk lattes, so for 364 days of the year it barely raises an eyebrow, but come 25 December it’s often seen as a personal affront to centuries of tradition. Politely declining the turkey is treated as a personal assault upon centuries of gravy-soaked heritage.  As the seasonal sitting wears on, even mild-mannered relatives can metamorphose into belligerent barristers for Big Meat. ‘But would you eat a pig if you

Rupert Shortt

The revolutionary meaning of Christmas

As stale as it is flawed, the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee’s view of Christmas nonetheless encapsulates secularist scepticism in revealing ways. Published three years ago, her broadside is a variation on complaints voiced every December in allied quarters for many decades. ‘Much as I dislike most Christian belief, the iconography of star, stable, manger, kings and shepherds to greet a new baby is a universal emblem of humanity . . . But the rest of it, I find loathsome. Why wear the symbol of a barbaric torture? Martyrdom is a repugnant virtue, so too the imposition of perpetual guilt.’ The Christian conviction is that God remakes human nature by defenceless love, rather

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

How to stop the next massacre of British Jews

No one remembers the ones they catch in time. Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein will quickly be forgotten and so will the carnage they planned to visit upon British Jews. The men were convicted at Preston Crown Court on Tuesday of preparing terrorist acts. A third man, Bilel Saadaoui, brother of Walid, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about planned terrorist acts. Walid plotted to open fire on a march against anti-Semitism in Manchester city centre before moving onto a Jewish area in the north of the city to continue the massacre. Police officers who got in the way were to be shot dead. It is not enough

Andrew Tettenborn

Is this finally the end of non-crime hate incidents?

Roll up for a Christmas surprise on the policing front. According to a leak from the College of Policing to the Telegraph, since confirmed by its chairman and in all likelihood condoned by a government desperate for an upbeat Christmas message, non-crime hate incidents are finally to go. Next month the College and the National Police Chiefs’ Council will formally announce a move to a more selective, and less intrusive, practice. Recording will be limited to a much smaller category indicating clear risks of harm or threats to particular communities, such as anti-Semitism. There is something deeply sinister about the state formally recording that a citizen has said something entirely

Druin Burch

The welcome tyranny of Christmas cheer

In 1946, buoyed by post-War optimism, the World Health Organisation adopted a famous definition. Health, it declared, was more than the mere absence of disease or infirmity, it was ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’. A beautiful and tyrannical idea, sentimentally idealistic and setting an impossible standard for human lives. In these qualities of cheerful and unreasonable despotism, it resembles Christmas. Our wish to make kids happy at Christmas turns us into untiring fifth columnists of festive tyranny On the first of November, collecting my cardboard cup of coffee in Costa, I noticed it was decorated with a festive scene. I scowled, which comes naturally, but felt

Francis Young

The ancient tradition of burning a Yule Log

To most modern Britons the words ‘Yule Log’ probably bring to mind that masterstroke of marketing that has enabled supermarkets to sell an ordinary chocolate roulade (with the addition of a plastic sprig of holly) as a speciality item for the Christmas table. But the edible Yule Log of our own day – to an even greater extent than the meat-free mince pies of modern Christmas – is a mere shadow of what it once was. The original Yule Log was an actual log – in theory, an enormous one that was large enough to burn between Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night (5 January). Its evocative name preserved the pre-Christian Old English

Niall Gooch

The power and nostalgia of Christmas music

Picking up the children from school recently, I heard the lovely old carol ‘In Dulce Jubilo’ drifting slowly across the quadrangle. It was a recorded version played over loudspeakers as part of the Christmas light switch-on, rather than the work of rosy-cheeked choristers in gowns, and yet I felt a sudden, unexpected catch in my throat, and a pricking at the corner of my eyes. I am still trying to work out why I reacted, involuntarily, in that way. ‘In Dulce Jubilo’ does not have any specific personal resonance for me. Perhaps it was something to do with the poignant timelessness of the scene – children hurrying between ancient buildings,

Patrick West

Do Eskimos really have a hundred different words for snow?

Do the Eskimos have many more words for ‘snow’ than the rest of us, and does this question matter? As we approach the full blast of winter, now would seem a good time to lay this old chestnut to bed for good. The person we have to thank for setting this debate in motion is one of the founding fathers of social anthropology, the German-American Franz Boas (1858-1942). In his landmark work The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), Boas mentioned in passing that ‘in Eskimo’, we find: One word expressing ‘snow on the ground’; another one, ‘falling snow’; a third one, ‘drifting snow’; a fourth one, ‘a snowdrift’. All quite unremarkable,

Damian Thompson

How transformative has 2025 been for Christianity?

21 min listen

Anglican author The Rev’d Fergus Butler-Gallie, Catholic priest Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith and Evangelical commentator Fleur Meston join Damian Thompson to reflect on 2025. They discuss Pope Leo XIV’s leadership so far, the choice of Dame Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury and why Christianity has been coopted by the far right. Plus, was the ‘quiet revival’ of Church-going the start of a trend – or just a blip? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

The ghosts of Andrew and Epstein will not stop haunting the royals

As the rest of the Royal Family prepare for the pageantry and pomp of their traditional Christmas, two ghosts have gatecrashed the party, in true Dickensian fashion. One phantom is that of the long-deceased Jeffrey Epstein, whose malign influence continues to stretch into the present day thanks to the release of the latest tranche of his emails with the great and good. And the second is that of a living figure whose reputation, rather the physical presence, is haunting the royals this festive season. The latter is, of course, the embattled Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, whose reputation has been traduced by his actions involving Epstein over the past decades regarding which Andrew denies

Henry Blofeld

An obituary for Bazball

Any account of the third test match, in Adelaide, inevitably becomes an obituary notice on England’s abortive attempt to wrestle the Ashes from Australia’s iron grip. There can be no doubt that trying to win the Ashes in Australia is the hardest task in the world of cricket – if further proof was needed.  The conditions, the ruthless determination of Australia’s cricketers and their huge and intensely patriotic crowds who believe that permanent possession of the Ashes is their God-given right, all help to make it the seemingly impossible task that faced Ben Stokes’s much heralded side. It has been a long time since English cricket and its supporters have

Francis Pike

Black Christmas and the battle for Hong Kong

The Peak is where the smart set in Hong Kong has always lived. It’s an area of relative peace and tranquillity that sits above the hubbub of the city. Before the Pacific war, Chinese people were banned from living there. It was from her terrace here on 8 December 1941 (the day after Japan’s carrier fleet attacked Pearl Harbor) that Emily ‘Mickey’ Hahn – an implausibly beautiful New York bohemian, opium addict, mining engineer and journalist – watched as Japanese bombers pelted Hong Kong 85 years ago. On the adjoining property she heard an Englishman harrumph, ‘That’s it. The Japanese have committed suicide.’ He was right, but not quite in

Arabella Byrne

Country drivers are the real menace this Christmas

Driving home for Christmas? If you live in London you might well be a menace, according to research published by insurer NFU Mutual. Its survey of 2,000 motorists found that 38 per cent of those from the capital had been in a crash on a country road, compared with 23 per cent of the general population. Cocky Londoners are, according to the survey, the most likely to consider themselves ready to drive on country roads as soon as they gingerly reverse out of the DVLA test centre with their new licence – with some 75 per cent declaring that they were raring to go for a spin down some country lanes.  Since moving from London to the country, the most

Jonny Ford

In defence of nepo babies

What do Mary Shelley, John Stuart Mill and Tim Berners-Lee have in common? They’re all nepo babies, of course: weasels with no talent who swanned into the professions of their successful parents. Frankenstein, On Liberty, and the world wide web: the flukes of unworthies. You get my point, though it’s not a popular one. Nepo babies are fair game. The very phrase, coined in 2020, isn’t meant as a compliment. At least not to Julie Burchill. In these pages in October, she rinsed India Knight’s new book for its witlessness and its author for being the daughter of a journalist – or ‘nepo-baby hack’. The article was a laugh, the