Protest

Thursday

Christopher Sandford

Tear gas Ted: the mayor manning Portland’s barricades

Portland, Oregon The federal courthouse in downtown Portland, Oregon, has become ground-zero for the nightly orgy of assaults, looting, arson, and public nudity — and, most recently, a surrealistic duel between protestors and federal agents using leaf-blowers to drive back each other’s tear gas — that continues to enliven America’s so-called Rose City in the wake of the death of George Floyd. It’s a curious thing, this new alignment of some of America’s most high-profile mayors with the very people burning down their towns. In Portland the competent authority figure is 57-year-old Ted Wheeler, who took office three and a half years ago. By law, all Portland mayors are nonpartisan,

John Lloyd

Should Nicola Sturgeon get a statue?

The Scottish National party and its supporters like the world to see Scottish independence as a final act of decolonisation, Scots throwing off the yoke of English imperialism and, with it, the taint of having been imperialists themselves. Last week Scots academic Sir Geoff Palmer compared it to the process that led to his native Jamaica gaining its independence. Yet Scots were the greatest of British colonialists and, for most of the 300-odd years of the Union, strong unionists. Scots statuary of figures from before the 1707 Act of Union is quite sparse. But even those few earlier Scots haven’t been exempt from the wider debate about our monuments. In

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Open letters have become ransom notes

In the States, the ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary genre exhibit striking similarities to the ransom note. During June’s riots following George Floyd’s murder, a beloved independent bookstore in Denver called The Tattered Cover posted online that the shop would be politically impartial, the better to remain a neutral space for customers. Cue local outrage. Cue the store’s immediate volte-face: fulsome support for Black Lives Matter. The reversal proved unsatisfactory. Signed by miffed patrons and authors, an open letter to the owners listed ten demands. Among them, the shop must hire more ‘individuals from marginalised backgrounds’, especially at management

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The vanity of ‘white guilt’

When I was about ten, on return home from church I ate a peach, the juice of which dribbled down my new pink frock. I scuttled to my room to change, bunching the dress under the bed. I emerged the picture of innocence, but I felt guilty. For weeks, the garment pulsed with accusation. Going to sleep, I always knew it was there. Sure enough, my mother discovered the wad while vacuuming, and she was furious. She could have scrubbed out the juice had I told her about it right away. To this day, I’m mindful that you can only expunge stains while they’re still fresh — and somewhere in

The Spectator

What are online shoppers most likely to snap up?

Price of protest Greenpeace was fined £80,000 for defying a court order and occupying an oil rig in the North Sea. What else have protestors been fined for in Britain in recent times? £750 for spray-painting a war memorial in Whitehall in a climate change protest. £430 for spraying slogans on a pavement against Barclays, accusing it of investing in fossil fuels. £400 for eating a raw squirrel at a vegan food market in Soho. £150 for chaining themselves to the gates of a nuclear submarine base. Travel money The tourism industry is opening up again. Who spends the most: Britons holidaying abroad or overseas tourists coming here? — In

Thursday

The Spectator

The danger of the Facebook boycotts

The printed press is not a natural ally of Facebook. Silicon Valley publishers have hoovered up so much advertising that they are seen by newspapers as a mortal enemy. Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has ended up with more power over people’s attention than any press mogul. A slight change in his algorithms can direct millions towards any publication or argument. Facebook might not want to be seen as a publisher (especially one that did so much to enable Donald Trump, for instance) but it has ended up becoming the biggest player in the information wars. So when certain advertisers started to pull out of the social media platform — citing

Sohrab Ahmari

This ‘revolution’ isn’t what it looks like

America is not in the middle of a revolution — it is a reactionary putsch. About four years ago, the sort of people who had acquired position and influence as a result of globalisation were turfed out of power for the first time in decades. They watched in horror as voters across the world chose Brexit, Donald Trump and other populist and conservative-nationalist options. This deposition explains the storm of unrest battering American cities from coast to coast and making waves in Europe as well. The storm’s ferocity — the looting, the mobs, the mass lawlessness, the zealous iconoclasm, the deranged slogans like #DefundPolice — terrifies ordinary Americans. Many conservatives,

Alexander Pelling-Bruce Alexander Pelling-Bruce

The Black Lives Matter movement is re-racialising society

Every day I thank God for the British Empire. Without it I wouldn’t exist. My Gold Coast-born mother would never have met my English father. She herself is the descendant of a Scottish merchant called Bruce. Now she lives happily in rural Perthshire. She’s the only black in the village. Growing up in the 1990s, I faintly remember debate over whether non-whites could be British. Certainly the question had receded by the time Monty Panesar made his England cricket debut midway through the following decade. Meanwhile, however, Britain quickly became one of the best places for cultural entrepreneurs to promote the pernicious fallacy that we are best understood through the

Thursday

Toby Young

The protestors have brought down the lockdown

I wasn’t surprised to see that a woman whose father died at a care home in Bicester in April has decided to take legal action against the government. If I had an elderly relative in a nursing home whom I hadn’t been able to visit in the last months of his life because of the lockdown, I too would be angry. And I can imagine that anger turning into incandescent rage as I watched pictures of the Black Lives Matter protests on the nightly news. Why are police officers, who were so zealous about enforcing the social distancing rules until last week, now getting down on one knee to genuflect