Society

Wednesday

Peter Jones

The ancient answer to the welfare state

Such is the increasing cost of the welfare state that at some stage a government – never this one – is going to have the ask the question: ‘Welfare for whom, and what should it cover?’ There was no welfare state in the ancient world. But there was the elite 2 per cent, who owned the land, and hence the wealth, since the land (and sea) provided all human needs – food, fire (warmth), clothing and building materials (including metals), power sources (wind and animals) and international transport. But they also needed hoi polloi, since only by turning them into a fighting force could they protect and expand their wealth

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Leaving the ECHR won’t fix Britain’s immigration chaos

If you tuned into the Tory party leadership race, you will have heard rather a lot about the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Robert Jenrick wants Britain to leave because it stops us deporting foreign criminals. Kemi Badenoch argues that leaving won’t fix our immigration woes. She’s not wrong. Of the 144,200 people who have arrived on small boats since the start of the crisis in 2018, just 3,788 have been returned. That’s despite the fact that, according to the left-leaning charity the Refugee Council, some 40 per cent of people who come to the UK this way are not refugees. If you apply that rather liberal calculation to

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Still hunting for a Trump trade? Gold may have further to rise

Anyone hunting for a ‘Trump trade’ at this late stage has probably missed the US election bus. If you bought gold as a traditional safe-haven asset back in February at £1,600 an ounce, you’d be a smug 33 per cent up by now – though my man in the bullion market tells me the rise is by no means all to do with presidential hopes and fears. There has also been big buying from China possibly linked to moves, with Russia and other unfriendly actors, towards ‘de-dollarisation’ of world trade using a partially gold-backed alternative currency. Which means there could be more upside ahead, my man says, and gold ETFs

The Spectator

Letters: How to save the NHS

The survey says Sir: David Butterfield’s 21 years of experience of higher education (‘Decline and fall’, 26 October) chimes with my 35. But the decline in the rigour of university education which he so deftly describes has not been entirely self-willed. Successive governments have championed a consumerist understanding of higher education. Students have become consumers and academics have become service providers. The reduction in the intellectual demands of undergraduate courses and grade inflation are due to the annual National Student Survey. Universities are in thrall to this and make ever greater efforts ‘to enhance the student experience’. This includes pandering to the desire of most students to have fewer essays,

Zoe Strimpel

Flying isn’t what it was – but don’t blame British Airways

It is tempting, confronted with the news that British Airways is to swap out lunch on long-haul flights leaving between 8.30am and 11.29am in favour of a ‘Great British Brunch’, to conclude that flying has simply gone to the dogs. The cost-cutting move, which applies to business and First Class passengers, has raised many an eyebrow, especially as the brunch menu sees the traditional opening sallies of lunch (cheese, artichoke, choice of other appetisers) followed by a gear shift into waffles or eggs and other apparent constituents of the ‘Great British brunch’. Not only is it hard to think of anything less convincingly likely to be done well in the

Tuesday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Justin Welby’s homosexuality reforms could still backfire

Last week, Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury since 2013, started leading the Church of England. He got off the fence on homosexuality and backed a major change to the Church’s teaching. He said that that ‘all sexual activity should be within a committed relationship, whether it’s straight or gay’. This obviously goes against the Church’s existing official teaching, that sex should not occur outside of heterosexual marriage. The Church is now likely to change that teaching fairly swiftly – probably next year. I predict that Synod will affirm equal marriage within three years. This shift comes after about 25 years of painful paralysis. At the close of the last century

Sam McPhail

Erik ten Hag cornered himself

‘I’ve proven in my career that I will always win,’ Erik ten Hag told the press last month. ‘In the last six years I have won eight trophies.’ The now-sacked Manchester United manager’s words were true but said without conviction. As loss followed loss, it was just one of the many excuses he trotted out to try and maintain his dignity and placate the fans. Both pundits and punters could see that ten Hag had grown tired and embittered after two years under the yoke of England’s biggest but most troubled football club. But how did the prospects of a talented manager collapse so quickly? Ten Hag joined Manchester United

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Halloween indulges a very human obsession

Halloween is approaching. The Americans, who go very big on it normally, are distracted this year by the election, so it feels like we have it more to ourselves than usual. And nobody in Britain will be having a happier Halloween than Danny Robins, a former comedy writer and journalist who has cracked the big time with his extremely successful spooky BBC podcast Uncanny (which became a TV show last year), and his play 2:22 A Ghost Story, which had a four-year run in the West End and was taken up in productions around the world. This year the podcast is running an advent-style Halloween event, serving up a fresh,

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Britain’s population problem cannot be ignored

Never before have English and Welsh mothers produced so few babies. New data, released by the ONS yesterday, shows the number of babies expected to be born per woman last year fell to 1.44 – down from 1.49 the year before and the lowest recorded level since these things began to be officially tracked in 1938. For a population to ‘naturally’ sustain itself (e.g. without immigration) an average fertility rate of 2.1 is needed. Looking at the raw numbers, fewer babies were born than at any time since the late 1970s. Last year just 591,072 births were registered in England and Wales and the fertility rate has been falling consistently for the

Patrick West

Labour will regret its war on bus passengers

Aside from debates as to what actually constitutes a ‘working person’, the Labour government does ostensibly seem clear as to whom it wants to shield in the forthcoming Budget: the less well-off and those who continue to struggle financially. It is therefore perverse that it should remove a benefit that has been a blessing to precisely that demographic: the £2 cap on bus fares. The government looks set to be making another long-term error This measure, an initiative of the last Tory government, was introduced last January and implemented in England outside areas that already have devolved powers over transport. It’s been an invaluable aid for those who use the

Monday

Jenny Lindsay

Why was I hounded for speaking up for women’s rights?

The evening of 2 June 2019 is something of a ‘sliding doors’ moment in my life. I had just read a column in a local arts magazine called The Skinny, written by a notorious gender identity activist. In it, the columnist justified violent action against lesbians at Pride marches, defending tweets in which they had written: ‘Get in their faces, make them afraid. Debate never works, so fuck them up’. He admitted he had faced some backlash for his stance from ‘Terfs’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) but he ‘stood by what [he had] said’. It was a far cry from what I was used to reading in this magazine. I tweeted

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

When will Sally Rooney boycott Britain?

I have a question for Sally Rooney. Why are you perfectly happy to engage with cultural institutions in the UK, despite the various mad wars us Brits have waged in recent years, but you dodge like the plague cultural institutions in Israel because Israel is fighting a war in Gaza? Rooney, the celebrated Irish author of chick lit for people with PhDs, has reportedly put her name to a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions that are ‘complicit in genocide’. Hundreds of other writers with virtue to advertise have apparently signed too. Arundhati Roy, Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner and others all say they will forswear Israeli ‘publishers,

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Keir Starmer, Karl Marx and the cant of ‘working people’

Labour has promised that, come what may, they will not be increasing taxes on ‘working people’. Well, jolly good. Those of us who work for a living will tend to welcome such a promise. So will hedge fund managers, who go to work every day, and the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and the lawyers and accountants who manage vast offshore tax efficiency schemes. Working people all. ‘Working people’ is a cant phrase, which – as Bridget Phillipson was forced to admit when she struggled to say if small business owners counted – means nothing concrete at all. It has the advantage, as all such cant phrases do, of denoting

Jonathan Spyer

The long roots of Iran’s hatred for the Jewish state

As the dust settles on the latest confrontation between Israel and Iran in the Middle East, the nature of the Israeli strikes against Tehran this weekend is becoming clear. It is a mark of the extent to which clashes between these two regional powers have become normalised over the last six months that the details, rather than the fact of the attack itself, are the main subject of focus and discussion. It should first be noted that what has just taken place is the largest operation against the Islamic Republic of Iran on its own soil in 40 years.   Hatred of Jews has been there from the start in the Teheran regime

Sunday

Yossi Melman

The humiliation of Iran

Tel Aviv In attacking Iranian military sites this weekend, Israel broke through its fear barrier. For years, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have planned to strike Iran using aircraft but they have always backed out at the last minute. IDF war planners feared the worst-case scenario: downed planes, pilots captured and Israeli citizens hung as spies in Tehran’s central squares. Yet at two a.m. on Saturday morning more than 60 US made F-35, F-16, and F-15s, accompanied by Boeing mid-air fuelling planes and early warning air intelligence aircraft, took off from several Israeli air bases. Aboard were 150 air crew. They flew 1,600 kilometres for two hours, passing over Syria

Charlie Walsham

The BBC’s troubling coverage of the Kaba case

Coverage of the death of Chris Kaba – and the acquittal of the police officer Martyn Blake tried for his murder – has raised more troubling questions about editorial decision-making at the BBC. Kaba was shot dead during an armed vehicle stop in south London on 5 September 2022. Because Kaba was black, it appears the BBC’s commitment to achieving due impartiality succumbed quickly to the distorting lens of identity politics.   Anyone consuming only BBC coverage of the Kaba case would have likely assumed that he was just a talented young man who was ultimately the victim of a terrible injustice When Kaba’s name emerged the day after the shooting, a

Daniel Thorpe

The baby trafficking scandal that has horrified Turkey

Turkey has been rocked by the disturbing news of the arrest of a so-called ‘newborn gang’ which is accused of being responsible for the death of multiple babies.  According to an Istanbul prosecutor’s indictment, healthcare workers in both state and private hospitals allegedly arranged the transfer of newborns to intensive care units in private hospitals, as a way to extort money from the state and distraught parents. These transfers were made when state hospitals still had capacity or the infants did not require intensive care.   Some claim that profit-oriented private hospitals without sufficient government oversight are incentivised to carry out unnecessary medical interventions Through the scheme, the gang secured large sums

Arieh Kovler

Why Israel didn’t hit Iran where it would really hurt

In Christian countries, it’s typical to put things off until ‘after Christmas’ when the new year begins. In Israel, the equivalent is ‘after the festivals’. The Jewish autumn festivals begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year followed by Yom Kippur and the eight-day festival of Tabernacles, Sukkot. Throughout his career, Netanyahu’s talent has been finding people he can blame for restraining him This year, Israelis cowered in their bomb shelters on 1 October, the day before Rosh Hashanah, when 180 Iranian ballistic missiles rained down on the country. The long-threatened strike, supposedly in retaliation for the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah

Jim Lawley

Why Spaniards keep being killed by bulls

A 57-year-old man was gored and killed during the bull running through the streets of Vall d’Uixo (population 31,000) in Spain last weekend. It was the third goring in three days in the town. In 2023 a total of eight people were killed by bulls in Spain during such events; the year before 23 died.  In 2023 more than a thousand people in the Valencia region required medical treatment after being trampled or gored While in a formal bullfight it is the matador (literally ‘killer’) who almost invariably emerges victorious, in the streets the aggressive, astonishingly fast, half-ton bull sweeps all before it. The dangers were well illustrated a few years ago by dramatic footage on national

Robin Ashenden

The endless allure of the Shipping Forecast

The Shipping Forecast on Radio 4, 100 years old this October, seems to have achieved the impossible. Few people know the places it reports on when it gives the weather conditions in its 31 regions. Almost no one understands the finer points of what it’s telling them – about wind force and direction, atmospheric pressure, or visibility out at sea. Not many working people are even awake at the times it’s broadcast in the early hours. Yet you feel that if the BBC ever tried to cancel it, there would be a revolution.  Its very opacity is part of its charm, as well as the vivid but workaday metaphors it supplies us