Culture

High-rise housing is hellish. It’s time to bring back terraces

On the radio this morning the subject of high-rise housing was being discussed, the hook being the new film adaptation of JG Ballard’s High-Rise. Tower blocks are widely considered to be a disaster today; they took largely working-class populations out of often sub-standard (but potentially very nice) terraced houses into technically better housing that was in reality often isolated and unsafe. Yet, despite this hindsight, I feel we’re making something of the same mistake again, with the current rush for skyscrapers across the city – with some 435 high-rise buildings now approved. Some of those being proposed and planned, such as the Paddington Pole and the new tower in Notting Hill

Britain’s young men are falling further and further behind. Does anyone care?

The toughest causes to campaign for are those which are not fashionable. To fight racism in the 1950s or stand up for gay rights in the 1980s took guts – and the progress made today is largely down to those who took up the cause before it became a form of virtue signalling. International Women’s Day should be a chance to remember the billions of women who are treated appallingly in developing countries – but when it comes to Britain, the battle has pretty much been won. The pay gap is a problem for women born before 1975, but not after. The problem is sorting itself out. For the under-40s, there is a negative pay gap: i.e., men are paid marginally less.

Is anyone surprised that the Queen didn’t approve of gay marriage?

Of all the frankly riveting stuff in the Daily Mail’s serial of what it calls ‘The Unknown Queen’ — nicely timed for the Queen’s 90th birthday — is there anything less surprising than the revelation she was/is opposed to gay marriage? Is the head of the Church of England a Christian? Well, it seems so. ‘There is,’ say Richard Kay (a friend of the late Princess Diana) and Geoffrey Levy, ‘one area of social policy where Her Majesty holds more traditional views…same sex marriage.’ Talking about the issue in the home of a close friend around the time the legislation was being passed by Parliament, the Queen is said to have expressed

Rod Liddle

Perhaps public schools do have their benefits, after all?

Guardian journalist in self-awareness shock. A very good piece by Hadley Freeman about the utter ubiquity of public school-educated monkeys at the top of every desirable profession (and, of course, trade). Here’s the crucial bit: Life is unfair, and I benefit from this unfairness every day. Even besides being born in the era of modern medicine and Ryan Gosling’s face, I went to a private school. As much as I’d like to think my career is all thanks to my special snowflake qualities, it’s difficult, when looking around at the rest of my heavily privately-educated profession, to draw any conclusion other than that my schooling might have helped me. Yes,

The DfE has issued guidance on exclamation marks. How Orwellian is that!

A friend of mine, another journalist, is getting terrifically worked up about the Department for Education’s persecution of exclamation marks. He’s busy writing a defence of free punctuation and because he’s a better stylist than the people laying down the law on this one, this will sting. Apparently, exam bureaucrats told teachers and moderators at a briefing run by the Standards Testing Agency last month that the use of an ‘exclamation sentence’ must start with either a ‘how’ or ‘what’ and must be a full sentence – including a verb. So, ‘What a delightful home yours is!’ is fine; ‘Awesome!’ is not. Naturally, there’s going to be a backlash. It

The mystery of Mothering Sunday

Among the treats the mothers of Britain can look forward to on Mothering Sunday there are some rum offerings. A company called Nosh Detox is offering a hamper including something called a Nux Vom drink, and the Guardian has helpfully drawn up a list of mother-related films you only take your mother to if you want to terminate the relationship. Meanwhile, the profile of the mother as depicted in the gift sections of M&S and Waitrose is that of a woman with a penchant for anything pink, who loves imported roses and has a thing about prosecco. Her day is made if you take her out to tea. I quite like

No, Lena Dunham, the world isn’t out to get you

The face of young feminism, Lena Dunham, took a break from campaigning to #FreeKesha this week to focus on the issue of Photoshopping instead. On Instagram, the social media forum for all serious politic debate, Dunham posted a message to Spanish newspaper El Pais. In it she told her 2.4 million followers the paper had Photoshopped her image for the cover of its magazine Tentaciones. Dunham did not approve of how she had been depicted. Not because the photograph showed Dunham wearing virginal white and thick eyeliner, staring into the camera like a vacuous anime doll – rather than the articulate media power player she is – but rather, Dunham complained, she looked too

Fraser Nelson

Should internet trolls, hiding behind made-up names, be prosecuted?

On Tuesday, I wrote a short blog about Sadiq Khan’s threats to crack down on Uber. For the rest of the day, my Twitter timeline was filled by obloquy from made-up accounts from black cab drivers. No more than a dozen of them, but using similar themes: showing pictures of immigrant Uber drivers, claiming that they went on bizarre routes to rip off passengers, or that they rape their passengers. I have no doubt that most of their graphics were fake (like the ones showing an Uber surge 33 times basic fare) but it was a glimpse into how the internet can be used by people hiding behind made-up names to slur. In this case: a company.

The BBC has forgotten that journalism is a trade

This is written from a small and dank room in the state of Arslikhan, as Private Eye calls it. My boss at the Sun, Tony Gallagher, has done an interview with the Press Gazette. His two chief points are that a) journalism is a trade not a profession and b) the BBC does not break stories, or does not break many stories. You will be unsurprised to know that I make the bloke right on both points. But are these two facts not related? Here’s what Gallagher had to say about journalism: ‘You become a journalist by practising it not by learning it in a classroom. I think one of

Receiving online abuse has now become a badge of honour

On Monday night I took part in a discussion on free speech in London for the think-tank Policy Exchange. The other speakers were ‘feminist comedienne’ Kate Smurthwaite, a student called Kitty Parker Brooks and the wonderful Munira Mirza.  Jess Phillips MP failed to show up, which was a shame because I wanted to decide for myself whether she is the free-thinking future-leader acclaimed by Julie Burchill or the PC-party-line clutz who recently compared New Year’s Eve in Cologne to any night in Birmingham. Anyhow, the argument I made was that two things are putting huge pressure on free speech and giving enormous impetus to the censors on campuses and elsewhere.  These are social media

Women proposing on leap years? Wrong on so many levels

I’m planning to propose to my boyfriend this leap year. I’m proposing that he earns another £10,000 and loses a stone. But marriage? Hell, no. I don’t know why, in the age of equality, society still endorses women going down on bended knee on one solitary day every four years. The internet blames it on St Bridget, who in the 5th century allegedly complained that some men took too damn long to propose. It was St Patrick, though, who came up with the wheeze of granting us special dispensation to propose every 29 February. But to propose on this day is hideously outdated. It is tacky. It is tabloid. It is

The best state schools have pulled ahead of private schools. Why is that so hard to accept?

For years, now, the Sutton Trust has been releasing research showing how many doctors, judges, journalists etc were privately educated and conclude that it’s all a posh boys’ stitch-up. The British press loves banging this old drum, but in doing so they drown out a new tune. Today, there is more academic excellence in the state sector than the private sector. Not that many people want to know. Take, for example, an article in this week’s Economist. “Education should not be about wealth” it quotes Tony Blair saying in 1996. Wrong, Blair! The Sutton Trust’s report shows that “two decades later, it still is” about wealth. But when does the Economist think these ‘senior civil

Who will watch for BBC bias in the EU referendum campaign?

It is wearisome work, but I hope the ‘leave’ campaign is carefully monitoring the BBC’s coverage of the referendum. On Monday, the first full weekday since Mr Cameron’s ‘legally binding’ deal, I listened to the Today programme for more than two hours. I heard six speakers for ‘remain’ and two (John Mills and Nigel Lawson) for ‘leave’. In this I am not including any of the BBC interviewers themselves, though my hunch, based solely on the way they ask questions, is that all of them, with the possible exception of John Humphrys, are for ‘remain’. The guests explicitly in favour of ‘remain’ were Carolyn Fairbairn, Sir Mike Rake, Stanley Johnson and Michael Fallon. Jonathan

Why immigrants are to thank for rising standards in schools

Something very strange is happening in London: its state schools are going through a huge renaissance – while attainment in many northern English schools is going into reverse. The chief of Ofsted, Sir Micahel Wilshaw, laid the problem bare in a speech to the IPPR today:- Three in ten secondary schools in Manchester and four in ten in Liverpool require improvement or are inadequate compared to one in ten in inner London. The situation in some of their satellite towns is even worse. A third of the schools in Rochdale are not good enough, as is a similar proportion in Salford. In Oldham, six in ten secondaries require improvement or are inadequate and in Knowsley

Is flashing at a man the best way to punish him? I’m unconvinced

I’ll never forget the first ‘Funisher’ I met. It was sometime in the late 1980s when you could meet all sorts of interesting girls. She was one of the moderately attractive, moderately intelligent broads the media has always been jam-packed with, the on-off up-down girlfriend of a male mate of mine, and one night she was annoyed by some roué writer who seemed to think he had droit du seigneur over all the PR girls at his publishing house, of which she was one. She fussed and fumed about it for a bit, then three vodkatinis in, a serene smile swallowed her face and she said ‘I know how to punish

The Independent hasn’t died, it has merely changed its form

Our newsagents are about to get a little duller: the Independent is no more – at least, not the print edition. I know that, in this brave new digital world of ours, we’re not supposed to equate the end of print with the death of a title. But it’s certainly the end of an era. The Independent is what brought me into journalism: I started reading it when it was set up, and was hooked pretty quickly. My first journalistic heroes—Andrew Marr and Neal Ascherson—wrote for its pages. A friend bought me Paper Dreams, Stephen Glover’s story of the Independent, for my 20th birthday. I had no friends or relatives

Freddy Gray

The strange tale of Evgeny Lebedev and the Independent

What sad news that the Independent is closing. In September last year, I did an investigation into the strange, celebrity-orientated world of the paper’s young owner, Evgeny Lebedev. What was intriguing was that, although Indie journalists were willing to talk — off the record — about Lebedev’s eccentricity, almost everybody I spoke to was keen to stress that, on the business side, Evgeny had done a great job. And in Amol Rajan, it is generally accepted, he had found an innovative, daring and original editor. The Indie’s losses had been dramatically reduced under the leadership of the younger Lebedev and his father, Alexander, the oligarch. Did the money dry up? Was the downsizing

The feminist case for naming names in sexual assault cases

Google ‘Mark Pearson’ and the first thing you will learn about the 51 year-old artist is that he was accused of a sex attack. You can read all about how at Waterloo Station Pearson supposedly sexually assaulted a woman before striking her.  Then, if you have time, read on: and you’ll also discover this never happened. That a jury, shown CCTV footage proving the incident never took place, acquitted Pearson this week. Yet while now, and perhaps forever, Pearson’s name will be linked to a crime he did not commit, what we will never know is the name of the women who falsely accused him. Right now we wait in the wake

Fraser Nelson

Introducing the Timothy Garton Ash prize for European writing

Events in Europe are unfolding rapidly, and we at The Spectator are looking for writers living abroad who would be interested in contributing occasionally to the magazine and our website. So we’re setting up a writing competition: the Timothy Garton Ash prize for European writing. It will go to the best original essay from any country in Europe, which will be published both in the magazine and online. In 1978, Alexander Chancellor was looking for someone to cover events in Europe – someone actually living out there, rather than the many eloquent writers in London who knew what these countries were like years ago. Things were changing too fast, Alexander thought: The Spectator

Why is there one rule for badgers, and another for mosquitoes?

It’s unusual for a left-leaning paper to propose wiping out an entire species. Normally they’re proposing doing the exact opposite – reintroducing species that haven’t been seen there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But in a recent column in the Observer, Eva Wiseman decided that wiping out all mosquitoes is the best solution for humankind. Very few people like mosquitoes, that’s true enough, and there are serious and sensible reasons behind that dislike. As well as their blood-sucking tendencies, they also transmit some of the deadliest diseases on this planet – most famously malaria, but also a whole host of others, including dengue fever and the one that’s