Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Who lives in the countryside?

The recession relationship There are fears that the US and UK may both be heading for a recession. Has the US ever suffered a recession which did not spread to Britain? Since the Great Depression of the early 1930s there have been 16 identifiable periods in which the US met the usual definition of a recession (two consecutive quarters of negative growth), the most recent being in 2022. Britain has seen only ten such periods – even though its economy has grown by less overall. Periods when the US saw a recession but Britain did not include 1937-38, when the US economy shrank by 18 per cent over a year,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Welfare war, gold prices soar and gang jailed for toilet heist 

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, entertained 29 other national leaders online to seek a way of guaranteeing the future security of Ukraine. He then invited European defence leaders to meet in London. He spoke by phone to President Volodymyr Zelensky after the inconclusive conversation between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin. John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, thought to be the last Battle of Britain pilot, died aged 105. The government faced resentment in its own party against welfare cuts outlined by Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary: the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payments would be tightened; incapacity benefits under universal credit would be frozen for existing claimants

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Putin is outwitting Trump

In the incessant conflicts of life and politics, people who know what they want tend to win. That is why Stalin won at Yalta and why, despite the extreme disadvantages of his country’s polity and economy compared with those of the United States, Vladimir Putin is outwitting Donald Trump. He wants Ukraine (and has related revanchist imperial ambitions), and has spent many years working out how to get it. His probing has taught him just how much both the United States and Europe, in their different ways, do not know what they want. The only real mistake Putin made was to think that Ukraine itself did not know what it

The Spectator

Kemi’s stance on net zero is courageous – and correct

Kemi Badenoch secured the Conservative leadership on the basis that she would confront her party and the country with uncomfortable truths. This week, in a speech to launch the Tories’ policy renewal programme, she effectively told Theresa May and Boris Johnson that they were naifs for committing to unachievable climate targets. The decarbonisation of our economy, she said, was a ruinously expensive folly. By stating baldly and unapologetically that it will be impossible for Britain to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 without huge economic pain she has broken a consensus and breached a taboo. It is difficult for opposition parties to attract attention for policy announcements so

Wednesday

Alex Klaushofer

Bristol’s low traffic bullies have gone too far

At 3am last Thursday morning, council contractors and police descended on a Bristol neighbourhood to install roadblocks under the cover of darkness. Fadumo Farah was one of the residents who got up that night to see what was going on. She was shocked to see dozens of police officers and security guards with drones. It ‘felt like a movie scene,’ Farah said. In a last-ditch attempt to prevent the work proceeding, she – and a group of other residents – lay down in the road. The operation was the latest episode in a long-running battle over Bristol’s first Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) – known in the local lingo as ‘East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood’

Angela Epstein

Save me from Disney’s Snow White feminism

Controversy surrounding the live-action version of Snow White, which is released on Friday, suggests there is little likelihood of a happy ever after for Disney studios bosses. The £210 million remake of the beloved 1937 cartoon classic has been branded too woke and labelled ‘2025’s most divisive film’. It could be a recipe for disaster at the box office. The accusation that Snow White is playing politics is hard to avoid. From the casting of Latina actress Rachel Zegler in the lead role, despite the character being described in the book on which the film is based as having ‘skin as white as snow’, to replacing dwarfs with CGI ‘magical creatures’ in

Abbie MacGregor

A smartphone ban won’t solve our kids’ problems

As a former teacher, I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that Bridget Phillipson ranks among the worst Education Secretaries this country has ever seen. Yet when Phillipson described the Tories’ attempt to ban phones from the classroom as a ‘headline-grabbing gimmick’ back in January, I found myself nodding along in agreement. She was right. Unfortunately, this moment of optimism about Phillipson was fleeting. The Education Secretary declared this month that headteachers have the government’s ‘full backing’ on removing phones from classrooms. This reversal of good judgement is yet another example of a policy that appears to place conviction over evidence. Giving children unfettered access to a world they are developmentally

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will Labour MPs stomach Liz Kendall’s benefits crackdown?

To underline that there was government agreement on the welfare cuts and reforms she was announcing, Liz Kendall had Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and a slew of other cabinet and senior ministers sitting behind her in the Commons. The Work and Pensions Secretary announced ‘decisive action’ on the benefits system, which she said was ‘failing the very people it is supposed to help and holding our country back’. That ‘decisive action’ was a reform package that Kendall said was expected to save over £5 billion in 2029/30. It included restricting the eligibility for the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) so that only those who have the highest level of

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The plight of James O’Brien

Pity poor James O’Brien. The long-suffering remainer has always had a raw, fiery quality unusual in the British phone-in host. Where most of his male colleagues tend to be pear shaped more than bear shaped – and where female radio presenters often resemble head girls sitting bolt upright in the front row of the class with their hands up – O’Brien has always been an outlier. Even if O’Brien sounds the part as a radio host, he has never quite looked it. In LBC promo photographs of the smiley, ‘say cheese’ variety, he looks uncomfortable. O’Brien resembles a bouncer in the background in a wedding album. He has hosted a weekday

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Do Labour know what they want from welfare reform?

Liz Kendall and her ministerial colleagues were forced to offer an hour’s worth of holding statements about the government’s welfare reforms this afternoon when they appeared at Work and Pensions Questions in the Commons. Those reforms are supposed to be coming in a green paper this week, probably tomorrow, but the Work and Pensions Secretary ended up dodging questions on whether she even had collective agreement from her colleagues. Those questions came from Kendall’s shadow Helen Whately in the topical section. When Whately asked whether there had been collective agreement, Kendall replied that the shadow minister would have to ‘show a little patience’, before mocking the Conservatives for having no

Steerpike Steerpike

Even Italians are horrified by the NHS

Anyone who has the misfortune of stepping foot into a hospital recently will know how bad things are with the NHS, where the only good thing about the long waits is that they stave off the subsequent terrible treatment. Still, it is helpful sometimes to see how other countries view our health service – which has for years been described by politicians as the ‘envy of the world’. In that vein, Mr S was alerted by Spectator commentator Susucat to a revealing article which was published yesterday by the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, based in Milan. In the piece, the paper’s correspondent, Luigi Ippolito, explains his experience of dealing with

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Happy St Patrick’s Day – but not for Ireland’s Jews

‘Céad míle fáilte’, the Irish love to say. It means ‘a hundred thousand welcomes’. It’s emblazoned in the arrivals hall at Dublin airport. You’ll see it written in the Celtic font on the walls of Ireland’s cosy pubs. It has led to Ireland being christened ‘the land of a thousand welcomes’, where all visitors, no matter their heritage, will be greeted with a hearty hug. The tragic truth is that Ireland is awash with Israelophobia Well, not all. There’s one group of people to whom Ireland’s famed friendliness seems not to extend. ‘Zionists are not welcome in Ireland’, barks an Irish leftie at an Israeli gentleman in a chilling video

Patrick West

The audacity of ‘decolonising’ Shakespeare

It seems to have become an unspoken requirement of recent that anyone in charge of promoting or putting on the plays of Shakespeare must first of all hate him and his works. We have long grown accustomed to the Royal Shakespeare Company prefacing his plays with trigger warnings reminding us of what a terrible man he was, that his works contain all manner of bigotry, sexism and racism. So it was no surprise to read yesterday that his birthplace is now being ‘decolonised’, in response to concerns that the playwright is being used to promote ‘white supremacy’. According to the Sunday Telegraph, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which owns buildings connected

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Is ‘good enough’ all we want from TV?

For those people with a therapeutic bent of mind, the phrase ‘good enough’ has an almost magical power. It says: don’t beat yourself up because your child isn’t a straight-A student, your marriage isn’t the best thing since Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, and your sobriety is patchy. Sure, you hit your kid – but you didn’t stab them. Sure, you hate your husband – but you haven’t plotted with a stranger to have him killed. Sure, you’re depressed – but you got up this morning and went to work like any other normie. All these instances of your fallibility are opportunities for growth. As they say in twelve-step programmes, it’s

Theodore Dalrymple

Britain has become a pioneer in Artificial Unintelligence

In some countries, the study and pursuit of Artificial Intelligence (AI) proceeds apace, while in this country the practice of Artificial Unintelligence (AU) becomes ever more widespread. AU is the means by which people of perfectly adequate natural intelligence are transformed by policies, procedures and protocols into animate but inflexible cogs. They speak and behave, but do not think or decide. They are always only carrying out orders and stick to them through thick and thin. AU is much in evidence in the organisation of the NHS. Its great advantage, from a certain point of view, is the multiplication of job opportunities for bureaucrats that it necessitates. But for patients,

Sunday

Robert Taylor

The Falkland Islands have become surprisingly diverse

What springs to mind when you think of the Falklands? You might imagine the wild, windswept landscape, sparsely populated by the sheep-farming communities that have made the Islands their home for nearly 200 years. Those of my vintage will recall grainy television images of the war in 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s subsequent visit, and grateful islanders speaking to her in accents that sounded like a mixture of West Country and Kiwi. And those fortunate enough to have visited (I’ve had that privilege several times) will recall the sheer Britishness of the place, with a Victorian cathedral that wouldn’t be out of place in rural Somerset, pubs to help weary travellers just

James Heale James Heale

Can Dale Vince make Labour go even greener?

Dale Vince has donated millions of pounds to Labour, but the green energy tycoon is only just getting started in politics. Having helped remove the Tories from power last summer, Vince is turning his attention from party donations to offering ministers a ready-made policy platform instead. The 63-year-old wants to champion an eco-agenda for Keir Starmer’s government via his Green Britain Foundation. The six-man outfit works to apply ‘green principles to transport, food, sport, telecoms, jewellery’ – and now the world of Whitehall too. When we speak over Zoom, Vince is critical of Labour’s decision to press on with both carbon capture and the Sizewell C reactor. The former, he argues, will not work at scale, while the new nuclear

Cosmo Landesman

My day talking about penis size on the TfL cable car

For me, one of the great pleasures of public transport is getting into a conversation with a stranger. But in our age of smart-phones and headphones, where everyone is plugged into their own private space, it’s a pleasure that’s becoming increasingly rare. So when I heard of a new scheme by Transport for London (TfL) to encourage people to chat to each other, I was eager to sign-up. I admit that I’m not keen on most of TfL’s schemes to affect public behaviour. Has the public ever been subjected to a slogan more irritating – and relentless – than TfL’s demand that we be on our guard and, ‘See it, Say it,

Zoe Strimpel

Skype was a relic of happier times

Sometimes epics end with a whimper not a bang. This is the case for Skype, whose demise Microsoft has announced – for those paying only the closest attention – in a preview of the latest Skype for Windows update. ‘Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available. Continue your calls and chats in Teams,’ the message reads bluntly, with a slightly sinister follow-on that asserts that a number ‘of your friends have already moved to Teams free’. RIP.  Skype, launched in 2003, defined an era of new internet possibilities, with the explosion of social media a couple years later through Facebook, and the slow migration of internet usage from

Johan Wennstrom

Why Sweden needs the bomb

Imagine the Guardian newspaper fully committing to increasing Britain’s stockpile of nuclear warheads. It may sound fanciful, but that’s the closest comparison to what happened last week, when the Swedish liberal–left leaning Dagens Nyheter wrote in a leading article: ‘We are going to need a [national] discussion about nuclear weapons. Should the French [nuclear forces] protect the entire continent, or do we need to acquire a nuclear deterrent of our own, perhaps in cooperation with our Nordic neighbours?’ The idea that Sweden – the self-described global apostle of nuclear disarmament – should produce nuclear weapons would have seemed ridiculous not long ago. In fact, when I argued in a column published in Sweden a few