Society

Friday

Tim Shipman

Tim Shipman, Colin Freeman, Rachel Clarke, Michael Gove & Melanie Ferbreach

40 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Tim Shipman interviews shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick (plus – Tim explains the significance of Jenrick’s arguments in a special introduction); Colin Freeman wonders why the defenders of Ukraine have been abandoned; Rachel Clarke reviews Liam Shaw and explains the urgency needed to find new antibiotics; Michael Gove reviews Tom McTague and ponders the path that led to the UK voting to leave the EU; and, Melanie Ferbreach provides her notes on made-up language. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Stephen Pollard

The truth about the Fabian Society

It’s a strange feeling finding out that you have been part of a revolutionary group that secretly controls Britain and, er…didn’t realise it. For four years in the 1990s, I was the Research Director of the Fabian Society. It was a wonderful job, at a time when Labour under Tony Blair was open to new ideas and policies. As a Labour-affiliated, mildly left-of-centre organisation, the Fabians were very well placed. Earnest thinkers, networkers and youngsters finding their feet in politics all had a space in which they could come together and think about and discuss politics and ideas in an environment where questioning the received wisdom was the point, rather

Sam Olsen

The centre of gravity is shifting to Beijing

Beijing gave us a glimpse of the future this week. Across Tiananmen Square rolled column after column of tanks, missile launchers and robot dogs. Above, sleek new J-35 stealth fighters cut through the smog, together with drones and surveillance aircraft. The centrepiece was unmistakable: gleaming hypersonic and ballistic missiles, designed to extend China’s military reach across continents. Reviewing all this was Xi Jinping, flanked by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. It was military theatre, yes. But it was also a declaration: China is no longer just a regional power. It intends to set the rules of a new world order. Trump staged a piece of political nostalgia;

Thursday

Jake Wallis Simons

Even bike races aren’t safe from the Gaza mob

In a parallel universe, activists all over the world are rising up against the jihadi butchers who carried out the atrocities of October 7, who refuse to release the hostages almost two years later, and would like nothing better than the scalps of every kuffar in the West. But this is the real world, or what passes for it. Thus, as bizarre as it may seem to the few who remain in possession of a functioning moral compass, we have arrived at the point where even bicycle races are being disrupted in the name of Gaza. Yesterday, the finish to stage 11 of the Vuelta a Espana had to be cancelled

Alexander Larman

The style and influence of Giorgio Armani

When I was younger, I once saw an Armani overcoat in the window of the company’s store in London and vowed that I would do everything I could to buy it. It seemed to me the quintessence of sophistication and style, being a beautifully cut, long, dark coat that flattered its wearer’s body shape and gave them the look of being classy and well-heeled. A year or two later, I was able to buy it in the New Year sales. I remember feeling like a million dollars every time I wore it. Perhaps as a precaution, I even bought another, inferior overcoat for everyday wear, so as to preserve my

Lucy Dunn

Bell Hotel asylum seeker found guilty of sexually assaulting teenager

Hadush Kebatu, an asylum seeker from Ethiopia who was staying at the Bell Hotel in Epping, has been found guilty of two counts of sexual assault, one count of attempted sexual assault, inciting a child into sexual activity, and harassment without violence. Kebatu did not react as he was found guilty at Chelmsford magistrates’ court of all five counts he was charged with, keeping his hand held to his face. During the proceedings, the court heard that the 38-year-old asylum seeker had approached a group of teenagers and asked a girl back to his room at the hotel to ‘make babies’. The judge told Kebatu the evidence against him was

Gareth Roberts

Reform’s camp following, masculine rage & why do people make up languages?

51 min listen

First: Reform is naff – and that’s why people like it Gareth Roberts warns this week that ‘the Overton window is shifting’ but in a very unexpected way. Nigel Farage is ahead in the polls – not only because his party is ‘bracingly right-wing’, but ‘because Reform is camp’. Farage offers what Britain wants: ‘a cheeky, up-yours, never-mind-the-knockers revolt against our agonisingly earnest political masters’. ‘From Farage on down,’ Roberts argues, ‘there is a glorious kind of naffness’ to Reform: daytime-TV aesthetics, ‘bargain-basement’ celebrities and big-breasted local councillors. ‘The progressive activists thought they could win the culture war simply by saying they had won it’, but ‘the John Bulls and

David Spencer

The questions the Met must answer over the Graham Linehan debacle

Is the Met on an inadvertent campaign to make Nigel Farage the Prime Minister? Politically he is the only winner from the arrest of the comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport on Monday, for a series of posts made on the social media platform X earlier this year. A senior police officer with a functioning brain cell should have reviewed the investigation and ended the fiasco The circumstances behind the arrest, by armed officers, are so bizarre that they almost beggar explanation. As a former Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police I have a fairly good sense about what happened in this case – and how it could have been

Rod Dreher

Graham Linehan's arrest exposes Britain's soft totalitarianism

A softer version of totalitarianism has been gnawing its way through the British body politic like a cancer for many years now. With the Graham Linehan arrest at Heathrow this week, it seems to have metastasized into something entirely malignant. If Linehan’s arrest isn’t a bright red line for Britain, what on earth would be? If Linehan’s arrest isn’t a bright red line for Britain, what on earth would be? A decade ago, living in the United States at the dawn of the Great Awokening, I began hearing from older people who had fled to America from the Soviet bloc, seeking freedom. They were telling me that the things they

Melanie Ferbreach

The discombobulating delight of made-up languages

I wasn’t supposed to understand Potato language. It was my parents’ speech device employed when wishing to discuss certain apparently secret subjects in front of my brother and me. While chewing over some esoteric topic, they would suddenly lapse into Potato language, a.k.a ‘P-language’ or just ‘P’. Being a young child, the subject matter didn’t interest me – I was more intent on trying to figure out why on a whim they’d switch to speaking a discordant, discombobulated version of our every-day language. Unbeknown to them, from the age of about seven I gradually became bilingual in P and by ten, I was fluent. As I grew older, I realised

Max Jeffery

How volunteer groups are taking the place of our absent police

Chris Hargreaves used to be a wellness coach with a promising future in reality television. In 2023, he starred in E4’s Big Celebrity Detox and tried to cleanse Kerry Katona’s soul with piñón blanco seeds. Today, he leads The Shield: a private volunteer police force of hundreds of officers. They plan to begin patrolling Britain’s streets imminently. Hargreaves and his team regard Britain as a place of increasing lawlessness. Many would agree. Shoplifting is at record highs, prosecutions are near record lows and people are asking where the authorities have gone. According to a poll by Merlin Strategy for The Spectator, only around half of British people have spoken to

The Spectator

Letters: I’ve earned my final salary pension

Waning interest Sir: Michael Simmons correctly points out that the Treasury’s large-scale issuance of inflation-linked debt is adding heavily to the government’s interest bill at a time of relatively high inflation (‘Borrowed time’, 30 August). What he may not know is how complacent the Treasury has been about this matter. On the day Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, I was interviewed for the role of chairman of the Debt Management Office. I suggested that a post-Covid inflation surge had started and that additionally oil prices might increase significantly because of the invasion leading to a need for higher interest rates. Pointing out that nearly a third of UK

Colin Freeman

Ukraine’s Foreign Legion was doomed from the start

It seems that people would rather fight for a death cult than a democracy. At most, 15,000 foreigners have fought in Ukraine over the past three years. By contrast, an estimated 35,000 foreign fighters joined Islamic State, despite the risk of prosecution when they returned home. Why have so few westerners joined up, given that Ukraine’s Polish border is just a £50 Ryanair flight away? The answer is that despite having a master showman like Volodymyr Zelensky as its recruiting sergeant, Ukraine’s International Legion was a disorganised shambles from the start. Zelensky announced the Legion’s creation just three days into the invasion. ‘This is the beginning of a war against

William Atkinson

The lunacy of emotional support animals

Naturally, the start of the new school year is often stressful for pupils. Perhaps those anxious children returning to their classrooms this week could follow the example of Milly, a young Lancashire student. When picking up her GCSE results from her school, Tarleton Academy, near Preston, she brought her ‘best friend’ Kevin – a four-year-old ram. Milly says Kevin is her ‘therapy sheep’. He accompanies her ‘pretty much everywhere’. He was her date to the school prom, wearing a halter to match her dress. Milly seems resilient enough: later this year she is going to compete in the Young Shepherd of the Year competition. Perhaps her unwillingness to be parted

Douglas Murray

Can anyone save Britain from self-destruction?

Tens of thousands of people turned out on the streets last week to protest against mass immigration. The protestors were promptly labelled ‘racist’ by their own government, ‘far-right’ by the New York Times and as having links to ‘neo-Nazis’ by the Guardian. The protests in question happened in cities across Australia, including Sydney – but frankly those sentences could have been written about similar protests in Britain and in almost any western country. Coincidentally, the past weekend also saw the ten-year anniversary of the German chancellor Angela Merkel opening the doors of Europe, saying ‘We can manage’ and allowing Europe to become the home of anyone in the world who

Philip Patrick

Is the British Council really a ‘nest of espionage’?

I worked for nearly a decade at the British Council in East Asia. Every day, under the guise of teaching English and promoting awareness of British culture abroad, I would compile dossiers on people of interest, take pictures of government buildings and military installations and pass secret documents to couriers to smuggle back to Britain. I would sometimes meet contacts in parks where we would have brief, cryptic conversations beginning with a code line like ‘The geese are flying south early this year’, without ever directly looking at each other. Except of course I did none of these things and neither, I am convinced, did anyone else. Which puts me

Peter Jones

The ancient Greek take on human rights

While Greek and Roman thinkers were influential in developing ideas such as citizenship, justice and equality, the notion of universal ‘human rights’ (1948), especially those involving one’s ‘identity’, would have struck them as absurd. ‘Identity’ derives from the Latin idem, ‘the same, unchanged’, via the French identité (14th century). The term has been colonised by many different groups who feel that their specific identity – e.g. colour, sexual preferences, personal beliefs – bestows ‘rights’ upon them to behave or be treated in specific ways, whatever anyone else thinks about it, let alone the law of the land. But as the great Greek historian Herodotus pointed out after spending a lifetime

Lionel Shriver

The truth about the trans school shooter

True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was a girl – famously providing the peg for the Boomtown Rats’ hit ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’. But that was a long time ago. Since, American mass shooters have been overwhelmingly male. One would expect, then, that when the culprit in a high-profile attack on young children is a woman, that anomaly would merit journalistic remark. After all, following these baffling bursts of nihilistic animosity, there’s little enough to say. Yet after ‘Robin’ Westman opened fire on kids at mass in a Catholic school in Minneapolis last week, segments of the

Toby Young

Confessions of a yo-yo fat-jabber

I’m feeling quite smug at the moment. Every year I vow to get in shape in the summer, which means losing weight, drinking less and going to the gym. The summer bit is because there’s a risk I’ll be seen in a swimming costume – I want a ‘beach-ready body’ – and there’s also the exposure that comes from wearing fewer clothes when the sun’s out and the weather’s warm. Anyway, this summer I managed it. I’ve lost about a stone, am down to about half a bottle of wine a day, and have started working out again after an eight-year hiatus. I might hesitate to strut about at the