Society

Tuesday

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The worst excesses of the Saintly Reading Cult 

I read a lot of fiction. I always have. It’s not unusual for me to have three of four books on the go at the same time, which I read in rotation, a chapter at a time. I say this not as a brag. It just is. I do it because I really enjoy doing it. The fact that it might seem like a brag leads me to my point: there is nowadays an air of saintliness about reading, particularly reading fiction, that is very irritating.  A publisher has just slapped a trigger warning on, of all things, Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse – and not for any specific reason, but just

Mary Dejevsky

The days of ‘our’ NHS are over

Have you noticed something? Whether it is the nurses, who are no longer striking, the junior doctors, about to spend three days on the picket line in pursuit of their 35 per cent pay claim, or the consultants, threatening a two-day walk-out which they may choose to spend topping up their income in the private sector rather than shouting slogans outside their hospital – it’s all about them.  They are exhausted, they are suffering from ‘burn-out’, their work brings on mental health issues. Their pay has – hardly uniquely – lagged way behind inflation, their working conditions are intolerable. No one respects them or their hard work, they’re threatening to

Monday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Virginia Woolf doesn’t need a trigger warning

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Americans, apparently. Or at least that’s the conclusion Vintage US seems to have drawn. The publishing house has slapped a new edition of Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse, with a trigger warning, alerting US readers to its potentially upsetting content. (Vintage UK hasn’t followed suit.) The warning, reported in the Daily Telegraph, doesn’t mention anything specific, probably because you’d have to strain yourself to find anything particularly offensive about this philosophical, semi-autobiographical novel about a well-to-do family’s holidays on the Isle of Skye. Instead, it just warns hypothetical, easily offended readers about how old – and thus potentially terrifying – the novel is: ‘This

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The unedifying Yilin Wang vs British Museum row 

If you visited the British Museum’s new exhibition China’s Hidden Century a fortnight ago, you’d have seen a substantial section on the revolutionary woman poet Qiu Jin, with substantial extracts from her poems in Chinese and English displayed in a giant projection. What you might not have noticed was that the translator was not credited anywhere in the physical exhibition. But Yilin Wang, whose translations of those poems appeared in the exhibition, did.  Indeed, Ms Wang, who has won awards for her poetry and has an extensive record as a translator, was more dismayed than that. Not only was she not credited: she hadn’t even been consulted by the British Museum about their use of her work.

Sunday

John Keiger John Keiger

The French riots threaten the state’s very existence

How dangerous are riots to the very existence of the French state? Most commentators avoid the question and concentrate on causes. The more whimsical attribute cause to that clichéd French historical reflex of insurrection; the sociologists to poverty and discrimination in the banlieues (suburbs); the far-left to French institutional racism and right-wing policies; conservative politicians to excess immigration, the ghettoization of France and the state’s retreat from enforcing law and order. But a growing chorus now evokes an unmentionable potential consequence: civil war. Of most concern is that those voices include groups with first-hand knowledge of the state of the country: the police, the army, domestic intelligence. On Friday, following three days

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Barclay outlines the NHS workforce plan

‘The biggest workforce expansion in NHS history.’ At a time when the NHS is under extreme pressure, with staff shortages and strikes causing widespread disruption, Health Secretary Steve Barclay outlined the government’s £2.4 billion plan to employ more than 300,000 new doctors and nurses over the next few years. He clarified to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that this would be additional money from the Treasury – although he was vague when asked to explain how it would be funded. What progress has been made on Sunak’s five pledges? Sophy Ridge attacked the government’s record on its five main pledges, asking Barclay what would happen if the five targets set out by

Ed West Ed West

The long defeat of the French language

After Brexit, it was all going to be so different for Europe. Following years of growing dominance by the English-speaking world, at last the great European project could return to the language of its founders. Well, that’s what the French believed. For many officials in Paris, Britain’s exit was seen as an opportunity to raise the status of the French language in the EU. Under their presidency last year, French diplomats announced that all key meetings would be in French, alongside translations, with minutes and notes being in French. Such is the domination of English in the Middle East that even ISIS opened two English language schools in Raqqa French, although one of three

Jawad Iqbal

Prepare for the Saudi tennis takeover

The self-serving ethical blind spots of some of those in charge of running international sport never ceases to amaze. Step forward Andrea Gaudenzi, a former top 20 singles player who now leads the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the global governing body of the men’s circuit. Gaudenzi recently revealed that tennis officials have been in discussions with Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund on projects including events, infrastructure and technology investment. He described the talks  as ‘positive’, before adding predictable reassurances that any investors had to respect the history of the sport. Is there a sport left that stands for anything more than just succumbing to Saudi Arabia’s latest big money

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Clarkson ruling puts Ipso in violation of its own charter

At 10 p.m. on Friday night, the BBC sent out a ‘breaking news’ notification informing millions that a joke made by Jeremy Clarkson about Meghan Markle has been deemed sexist by Ipso, the press regulator. That such attention was given to a few sentences published on p17 in a months-old article is odd, but the BBC had cottoned on to an important point: the battle for press freedom had just suffered a major setback. Hacked Off, an outfit campaigning for state regulation of the press, reacted with typical illiteracy, announcing: ‘Ipso finally upholed [sic] sexism complaint’ marking ‘the first time in Ipso’s history that it upheld a complaint about sexism’.

Tom Goodenough

Is Gary Neville following in the footsteps of Thatcher – or Trump?

A video loop on the homepage of Gary Neville’s new website shows the ex-Man Utd captain turned businessman, broadcaster and now BBC Dragon’s Den star in various action poses. The clip changes at such speed it’s hard to keep up without becoming nauseous. And that’s the problem with Gary the dynamic middle-aged wannabe politician-tycoon: he makes everyone feel a bit sick. Neville is in the football stand cheering on his team, decked out in an expensive suit fielding questions from an adoring audience and zooming around Manchester in his car. He’s like a luxury watch model but the looks aren’t quite there.  ‘Relentless’ is Neville’s slogan and the name of his

Heather Mac Donald

Affirmative action was hurting black students

Harvard may have a slightly more difficult time poaching black students from Boston College, Miami University of Ohio, or other less elite schools in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating Harvard’s racial admissions regime. Recruiters from BlackRock and Goldman Sachs may have to suffer the indignity of recruiting their black employees from the University of Connecticut or Rice University, rather than from Stanford and Yale. But contrary to the hysterical rhetoric from President Joe Biden, the Court’s dissenting Justices, and the democratic commentariat, the doors of educational opportunity will remain wide open to black people. As many black students as before will go to college, assuming that they

Patrick J. Deneen

Why America needs regime change

No sensible reader of the news could look at America and think it is flourishing. Massive economic inequality and the breakdown of family formation have eroded the very foundations of society.  Once-beautiful cities and towns around the nation have succumbed to an ugly blight. Cratering rates of childbirth, rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair,’ widespread addictions to pharmaceuticals and electronic distractions testify to the prevalence of a dull ennui and psychic despair. The older generation has betrayed the younger by saddling it with unconscionable levels of debt. Warnings about both oligarchy and mob rule appear daily on the front pages of newspapers throughout country, as well as throughout the West. A growing chorus of voices reflects on the likelihood

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Project drear: Starmer’s plan to bore his way to power

The very modest poll ‘bounce’ that Rishi Sunak delivered for the Tories after the farcical Liz Truss premiership has proved to be of the dead cat variety. The most recent YouGov poll showed the Conservatives at just 22 per cent – about half the vote share they achieved in the 2019 general election. This, you might think, explains Labour’s buoyant 47 per cent rating in the same poll. Well, not really. Because digging deeper into the figures reveals that only 15 per cent of 2019 Tory voters have switched to Keir Starmer’s party. That’s about one in seven. Even the little-known Reform party led by Richard Tice is doing better than

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The Transmaid’s Tale

It’s generally agreed that sex-selection is a Bad Thing. In India and China, sons are favoured over daughters – but so are they in the USA, where the margin has only moved a few points since the 1940s; 38 per to 24 per cent then, 36 per cent to 28 per cent now.  Not surprisingly this overall preference is driven by men; 43 per cent preferred a son compared to 24 per cent who preferred a daughter while women showed no preference. This may be down to the somewhat doomy male perception that, as Billy Bigelow sang in the musical Carousel ‘You can have fun with a son – but you

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will the NHS plan work?

Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Steve Barclay want us to see the NHS workforce plan, published today, as being one of the big historic events in the lifetime of the health service, which turns 75 next week. Barclay describes it in the Daily Telegraph as ‘the most radical modernisation and reform of the workforce since the NHS was founded in 1948’ and ‘the first time any government has published a comprehensive workforce plan’. The last time there was any real planning for workforce was back in 2000 when the Blair government launched its NHS plan, and so Barclay can reasonably lay claim to this being a big moment. There are

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Does the TUC understand what the word ‘mum’ means?

Imagine if, in 1868, when the TUC was founded, someone had told those warriors for workers’ rights that one day they would be referring to biological males as ‘mothers’. And what’s more that they would be publicly scolding anyone who dared to dissent; anyone who said: ‘Hold on – surely only women can be mums?’ They would have thought you mad. We’re a reasoned, rational organisation concerned only with improving the pay and conditions of working people, they’d have insisted. Well, fast forward to 2023, and what do you know: the TUC, the big beast of union politics, has openly declared that men can be mothers too. A curious thing

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The truth about ‘affirmative action’

I’ve never cared for the expression ‘affirmative action’, which puts a positive spin on a negative practice: naked, institutionalised racial discrimination – that is, real ‘systemic racism’, which was initiated in the United States long before the expression came into fashion. After all, following the Civil War, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution were expressly added to establish equality under to law for Americans of all races, and a raft of Congressional civil rights legislation has since reinforced this colour-blind principle. Perhaps I risk sounding ungrateful. Still, now the Supreme Court has finally ruled that universities in the US are forbidden from admitting students on the basis of race, my

Mark McGinness

The genius of Nancy Mitford

Nancy, the first – and perhaps most famous – of the six Mitford girls, died half-a-century ago on 30 June. The lives of the Mitford sisters seem as remote today as Jane Austen’s Bennett sisters. It is almost impossible to separate the family from their fictional equivalents. The books that made them so, Nancy’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, have become classics, still in print today, creating cult figures of her already notorious family. The intensely autobiographical nature of her fiction might suggest a lack of creative imagination but the real-life models she was so brilliantly able to draw on – with little embellishment –

Thursday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

If only there were more Anglicans like Wes Streeting

Why is Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, not more strident on the subject of religion and sexuality? The Labour MP has spoken in the House of Commons about his dismay at the Church of England’s feet-dragging over gay marriage. Yet in an interview with Theos think tank, ahead of the publication of his memoir, Streeting resisted denouncing the homophobes holding back the Church. Instead, Streeting was measured, and rather understated. Unlike many gay Christians, he didn’t sound evangelical about the reformist cause, but admitted that it was a profoundly difficult issue, on which people disagree in good faith. I suppose the diplomatic pragmatism of the politician is a factor

Peter Lampl

Bright, poor students are being badly failed by Britain’s schools

Britain’s flagging productivity is commonly thought to be the root of the country’s present economic struggles. And as successive governments have painfully discovered – not least Liz Truss’s – there is no quick fix for it. Looking longer-term and investing in the skills of the future workforce satisfies nobody’s desire for instant results. Yet it’s actually the best lever ministers can employ to reverse the slide.  A strong, internationally competitive economy requires a flourishing pipeline of home-grown talent coming through schools, colleges and universities and into employment or entrepreneurship. Yet many of the future scientists, mathematicians, engineers and start-up gurus that this country needs to produce simply don’t make it through. The reason?