The Spectator

Wednesday

The Spectator

How many members of the House of Lords are there?

From our UK edition

No platformed What effect have strikes had on rail travel? – In the first quarter of this year, some 389m journeys were made on the rail network, up on 2022 but only 88% of the number of journeys made in the same period in 2019, before the pandemic – Ticket revenue was £2.2bn, 70% of the same period in 2019 – LNER (111% of 2019 levels), East Midlands (101%), Hull Trains (122%) and Grand Central (111%) all managed to increase passenger numbers on 2019; all other franchises saw a decline – Passenger numbers fell the most on the Transpennine service (60%), which was recently relieved of its franchise Source: Office of Rail and Road  Crowded house Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list was published, minus several expected peers.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Don’t stifle AI

From our UK edition

In his meeting with Joe Biden this week, Rishi Sunak proposed a research centre and regulatory body for artificial intelligence in Britain. This raises a dilemma for governments worldwide: how can humans reap the benefits of AI without creating an uncontrollable, possibly existential threat? The technological leaps in recent months have captured the public imagination, but as we are all now aware, an AI clever enough to cure cancer and create clean energy will also be so smart that it could inflict huge damage. In Brussels, Washington and London, the mood has swung from complacency to panic. Leaders who once cheered on the technology now fear it, and increasingly call for regulation.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Prince Harry heads to court, Waitrose says sorry and Rishi goes to Washington

From our UK edition

Home The government was acquiring two barges to house 1,000 migrants in addition to one at Portland for 500. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said that small-boat crossings of the Channel were down 20 per cent, and ‘our plan is starting to work’. A group of asylum-seekers, transferred to a Comfort Inn in Pimlico and told they would have to share four to a room, refused to enter and stayed on the pavement. The scandal-hit CBI said that 93 per cent of the 371 members who voted backed its plans to reform; the British Chambers of Commerce launched a rival group called the Business Council.

The Spectator

Who sat on the first TV sofa?

From our UK edition

Sofa so good Phillip Schofield has said that his career on the TV sofa is over. Who first sat on one?  – BBC Breakfast, first broadcast on 17 January 1983, famously featured a red leather sofa which presenter Frank Bough told his audience was the ideal way to present a news programme. But the history of the TV sofa goes back a lot further. The Tonight Show, first broadcast on NBC in 1954, featured one from 1964 onwards – a surviving clip from that year shows presenter Johnny Carson standing in front of a blue cloth-upholstered sofa. Death and taxes How much does inheritance tax raise, and how many people pay it? – In 2021/22 the tax raised £6.1bn. This is double what it raised a decade earlier.

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Letters: we don’t need a Covid inquiry

From our UK edition

Toothless inquiries Sir: You rightly say that inquiries in Britain have become a form of cover-up (‘The politics of panic’, June 3). This is clear as we contemplate the delay in reporting on the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, the £200 million spent on the Bloody Sunday report published 38 years after the event, the seven-year delay in concluding the Chilcot inquiry, and the shaming fact that Sweden has reported on its handling of Covid before our inquiry has even begun.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rishi Sunak defends Kathleen Stock, food prices rise and AI extinction warning

From our UK edition

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, supported a visit to the Oxford Union by Professor Kathleen Stock, who believes that there are such things as women: ‘University should be an environment where debate is supported, not stifled,’ he said. He said in a separate announcement that he would ban companies from giving out free samples of vaping supplies to people under 18. He then packed his bags for a visit to Washington, DC, in the coming week for talks with President Joe Biden. Delaney Irving, aged 19, from Vancouver Island, won the women’s race at the Cooper’s Hill cheese-rolling event near Gloucester. Food prices continued to rise rapidly, according to the British Retail Consortium, by an annual rate of 15.4 per cent in May, compared with the even steeper rate of 15.

The Spectator

Covid and the politics of panic

From our UK edition

It is 15 months since Sweden’s Coronavirus Commission presented its final report. The 770-page document analysed how the country handled the pandemic and came up with numerous suggestions for how things might have been done better. The initial response, it concluded, was too slow, but the report vindicated the decision to make social distancing measures voluntary rather than compulsory. Why, then, has it taken the UK’s own Covid inquiry so long even to get going? In two weeks’ time the chair of the inquiry, Baroness Hallett, will finally start to hear evidence for module one – which looks at Britain’s pandemic preparedness – but she has said that she expects to be collecting evidence for three more years. And then of course the report will have to be written.

The Spectator

2604: Snap – solution

From our UK edition

The unclued lights are card games, as is the puzzle’s title, SNAP. The pair is 15A/29. First prize Mark Rowntree, Greenwich, London SE10 Runners-up Frances Whitehead, Harrogate, N. Yorks; Alan Pink, Crowhurst, E.

The Spectator

Who was the original Terf?

From our UK edition

Terf wars Who was the original Terf (trans-exclusionary radical feminist)? – The practice of some women’s groups in excluding trans women began almost with the advent of trans women themselves. In 1978, the Lesbian Organisation of Toronto refused membership to a trans woman who identified as a lesbian – saying it would only accept ‘womyn born womyn’. – The term ‘Terf’, however, dates only from 2008, when it was used in a blog post by feminist writer Viv Smythe in response to a ban on trans women attending the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (a ban which had been in place since 1991). – The festival, which had been going since 1976, was boycotted by some and was last held in 2015.

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Letters: Jeremy Clarke was an example to us all

From our UK edition

Goodbye, Jeremy Each week I opened The Spectator at Low Life in part to read that brilliant column and, more recently, to see how Jeremy Clarke was coping with his deteriorating health. Always hoping the column would be there; that he had, despite excruciating pain, penned us another. Like very many of his regular admiring readers, I had found the last two weeks disturbingly sad and last week we learned that he has died and is free at last from his suffering. As an oncologist, during a career treating thousands of patients, at first ones with prostate and other urological cancers, and later ones with breast cancer, I have seen the ravages of metastatic cancer in its many and varied forms and observed how people cope in their individual ways.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rioting in Cardiff, rising migration and falling inflation

From our UK edition

Home A crash in which a 15- and a 16-year-old boy riding on an electric bike were killed led to rioting, the burning of cars and attacks on police in the Ely estate in Cardiff; social media had said the deaths followed a police chase, which the police denied. But video evidence seemed to show a chase. During the riot, one of the boys’ mothers posted a Facebook message: ‘Please I beg you all to stop and let my son be moved to hospital so I can see him.’ A woman hit on 10 May by a police motorcycle escorting the Duchess of Edinburgh died.

The Spectator

2603 – solution

From our UK edition

2603 has the prime factors 19 x 137 which further decompose into (102 - 92) x (42 + 112). Therefore the rubric states: ‘puzzle NUMBER is BRACKET TEN SQUARED MINUS NINE SQUARED BRACKET TIMES BRACKET FOUR SQUARED PLUS ELEVEN SQUARED BRACKET’.

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How Rishi Sunak should react to the Ely riot

From our UK edition

‘There’s a lot of societal issues in Ely,’ said an anonymous caller to BBC Radio Wales the morning after the recent riots in that Cardiff suburb. ‘Motorbikes going up and down constantly. Open drug-dealing going on in broad daylight, that the police are aware of, and nothing gets done about it. Children in Ely – dare I say it? – probably don’t have aspirations. They only see what’s around them. There are young children going to school wearing Rolexes and rolling around on £6,000 e-bikes that their parents haven’t bought for them. So where’s the money coming from? There’s so many things at play that it’s shocking... things will start coming to the surface that would make a lot of people on both sides of the fence hang their heads in shame.

The Spectator

Do speeding fines work?

From our UK edition

Fine lines Would Suella Braverman be more likely to stick to the speed limit had she chosen to go on a speed awareness course instead of being fined? A government-commissioned study in 2018 looked at the reoffending rate among 1.4 million drivers who had accepted the offer of a speed awareness course and compared it with that of drivers who opted to take three points and pay a fine instead. Within two years of taking the course, around a quarter of drivers had reoffended. However, the rate was lower than it was for motorists who had chosen to pay the fine. The relative reduction of reoffending was put at 12-23% after six months, 9-17% after one year, 9-11% after two years and 6-13% after three years.

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Jeremy Clarke remembered: by Boris Johnson, Sophie Winkleman, Eric Idle and more

From our UK edition

Boris Johnson    When Jeffrey Bernard died in 1997, it seemed possible that we would never again have a regular Low Life columnist in The Spectator – or no one half as good. We needed someone who could match Taki for appalling frankness, for saying the unsayable; but not about the denizens of Gstaad or New York nightclubs. Low Life meant the opposite milieu. We needed our man with the half-eaten packet of prawn cocktail flavour crisps and the monster hangover, our man in the pub lock-in, the ferret show, the debtors’ court, the A&E at 3 a.m. with the drunk guy going crackers. It had to be someone who knew how to argue with social workers. We needed a new literary Hogarth.

The Spectator

Letters: Britain’s net-zero ambition problem

From our UK edition

Zero ambition Sir: How extraordinary that Ross Clark (‘Carbon fixation’, 20 May) can look at the cut-throat competition to capture the economic gains of the future and conclude that Britain’s problem is an excess of ambition. The USA stands alone as the only G7 nation not to have a net-zero target in law, but is nonetheless spending billions to achieve it. The country’s Inflation Reduction Act has proved so popular with the market that it is leveraging trillions more of private investment than previously expected, the majority in Republican-led states. Likewise China may lack a legally binding target, but enjoys a comfortable lead in core technologies following decades of investment.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Why Britain is falling behind in the global universities race

From our UK edition

Our country still excels when it comes to higher education. Britain has seven of the world’s top 50 universities. In spite of many claims that Brexit would lead to a reduction in the number of foreign students, the intake has never been higher. In 2021-22, there were 680,000 overseas students in higher education in Britain, an increase of 123,000 in just two years. That’s good news for the British economy. A report by London Economics estimated that one year’s intake of students would, by the time their courses had finished, bring in £29 billion in revenue from tuition fees and other income. Importantly, the benefits are spread all over the country: the University of Manchester and the University of Edinburgh each have around 18,000 overseas students.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rise in sick leave, more rights for renters and moving mountains

From our UK edition

Home The number of people not working due to long-term sickness rose to a record 2.5 million, many with mental sickness or back pain, according to the Office for National Statistics. Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said that income tax could be cut by 2p in the pound if Britons who had left the workforce during the pandemic returned to work. Pay growth in the public sector rose to 5.6 per cent, the highest rate since 2003. Pat Cullen, the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing union, said that the Health Secretary should ‘start off in double figures’ in pay negotiations.