Features

Wednesday

Lara Brown

Lucy Powell’s ‘oracy’ plans are meaningless

Whenever a government minister cites the advent of artificial intelligence as the justification for a policy, you can be certain that there has been an absence of actual intelligence in the reasoning behind it. Nowhere is that clearer than in the Education Secretary’s embrace of ‘oracy’ as the new priority for our schools. ‘With AI on the rise,’ Lucy Powell asserted, ‘we need to go harder on the skills that make us human, like oracy.’ Ms Powell refrained from explaining what it is about large language models that requires a different approach to language teaching in our schools.

Alan Bekhor

What Spinoza got right – and wrong

The scrupulously maintained traditions of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish congregation in London, where I worship, still forbid the rabbi from pronouncing the name ‘Spinoza’ from the pulpit. London, as the sister Jewish community of Amsterdam, inherited the same customs, and in both congregations, Baruch Spinoza continues to be regarded with a lingering sense of abhorrence on account of the herem, or excommunication, pronounced against him in 1656. In secularist philosophy, that excommunication has acquired an almost mythical status. Along with the trial of Galileo and the excesses of the Inquisition, it is often seen as one of the great episodes in the battle to emancipate western thought from religious obscurantism and intolerance.

Peter Hitchens

Generals must not dictate our foreign policy

Is Britain becoming an army with a country, instead of a country with an army? Who is actually making national policy on Ukraine and war in general? The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roland Walker, delivered an astounding speech to soldiers last week. He said, as if he were prime minister: ‘Our citizens have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritise defence and security.’ And then he told the soldiers: ‘Ultimately, we’re going to need them to back us, to back you, to do the one thing that you do, that nobody else gets to do, and that is to take the fight to the enemy.’ It was surely not his job to put the case for sacrifices by the voting public. Nor was it for him to tell politicians to explain this to the public.

Christopher Howse

You can thank The Spectator for the letter box

A detail of daily life – scarcely noticed because it is taken for granted – was added to our houses thanks to a campaign pursued by The Spectator. I mean the letter box in the front door. In 1849, nine years after the Penny Post came in, the Postmaster General mildly suggested that time could be saved if householders were ‘to provide a letter-box, except where the outer door is kept open’. The box would function like a mailbox in America today, though a hole or slit in the door would do. In its issue of 21 July that year, The Spectator thought the recommendation ‘ought to be enforced, and might be with little difficulty. Tax every recipient of a letter living in a house which has no letter-box, by charging him an additional penny on delivery of each letter.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Does Andy Burnham actually have a foreign policy?

It often takes an outsider to see us most clearly. When I had breakfast with the ambassador of an EU country last week he asked me: ‘What is the Burnham government’s foreign policy? Because it seems to me there is only domestic policy conducted on the international stage.’ Keir Starmer and David Lammy’s approach was ‘progressive realism’. Under New Labour, Robin Cook advanced an ‘ethical foreign policy’. Andy Burnham, however, appears to have little interest, leaving the details to Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary. As a Labour peer notes: ‘We have Andy’s vibes and Ed’s conscience.

Lara Brown

The growing rebellion against screens in schools

In the late 17th century, Europe’s greatest intellectuals were consumed by the quarrel of the ancients and the modern, satirised by Jonathan Swift in The Battle of the Books. In the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau asked whether education should nurture children’s natural capacities or mould them to society’s expectations. The great educational dispute of the 21st century is rather less august: should children be reading books or collecting coins for cartoon robots? In the past decade, a new divide has opened in Britain’s classrooms. Not between rich and poor, clever and dull, or private and state schools, but between children still taught by teachers using whiteboards, pens and paper and those being instructed by an avatar on a screen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Flora Watkins

Meet Jared Cooney Horvath, the neuroscientist taking on screens in schools

‘I’ve been here a week, and I can’t figure it out,’ says Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, neuroscientist, teacher and now the figurehead in the fight to get screens out of classrooms. ‘Every other country is pulling the trigger on rolling EdTech back. But here, you’re spending £900 million a year on it, more than any other country – and no one gives a shit!’ He apologises for being sweary – but he’s passionate about this stuff and: ‘Hey, I’m an American!’ I wave it away: plenty of parents who control screen time at home – but feel undermined by online homework and school-issued iPads – are finding similar words creeping into their vocabulary, I say. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Owen Matthews

Has Trump changed sides?

Has Donald Trump effectively changed sides in the Ukraine war? Over just a few tumultuous days, Trump’s already rocky relations with Volodymyr Zelensky have tumbled into something close to irreconcilable breakdown. After Trump announced that he would be de-sanctioning Russian diesel exports in an attempt to lower global prices, Zelensky had the temerity to call him ‘weak’. Trump responded bluntly that ‘it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president’, then squarely (and unfairly) blamed Zelensky’s continued strikes on Russian oil refineries for an international fuel price spike.

Louis Sarkozy

We cannot trust our AI overlords

It is no longer an exaggeration to say that the digital apocalypse is at our door. The advance of artificial intelligence is outstripping our fears and expectations. The machinery of the state, slow and predictable by nature, is so thoroughly outpaced in its capacity to control and regulate that it does not even realise it. Our politicians, running on antiquated software, cling to problems that are pressing but dated (such as the retirement age and the number of civil servants) and barely speak of the cataclysm on the horizon. Édouard Philippe, who is currently the frontrunner of the traditional right-wing constellation in France, recently remarked that he used LLMs (large language models) to write his emails. Such is the abyss of our backwardness.

Graham Keeley

After years of socialism, is Spain about to turn to the far-right?

Good-looking and always smartly dressed, Vito Quiles sports a wristband with the red and gold of the Spanish flag. It is ubiquitous among Vox supporters. He has made a name for himself in Spain by supposedly reporting on the hate figures for the far-right: migrants, housing rights protestors, students and far-left leaders. He confronts these figures to create provocative content online. Quiles, who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram, is part of a small but growing number of right-wing agitators who are attracting young people to Vox, a far-right party which less than a decade ago was regarded as a political joke.

Dan Jones

In defence of Staines

Ten years ago I moved to Staines and my mate Kwasi Kwarteng took me on a pub crawl. Kwasi was then the local MP, and as we drank our way around town he taught me a useful political heuristic. ‘If you want to predict an election, don’t listen to the BBC,’ he said. ‘Go to your local and listen to real people.’ Say what you like about Kwasi, but he had that right. My local is a backstreet boozer called the Beehive, which in decor and ambience is a portal back to the later 20th century. I go there for conversation, drinking, to play crib, to do a quiz on a Friday night and for political intelligence. For any pollsters looking to know what England really thinks, it isn’t complicated. Fund the NHS, stop the boats, get the scroungers off the welfare.

Rupert Hawksley

How Swindon became Britain’s drone hub

In July 2021, the Honda factory in Swindon closed after 36 years. Three thousand jobs were lost. One young apprentice at the plant, which produced 160,000 vehicles a year, said it was ‘like a rug had been pulled out from underneath us’. Another long-serving employee added: ‘I’d planned on staying there for the rest of my career.’ Here was a familiar tale of industrial decline in Britain. This Wiltshire town, where in 1843 Isambard Kingdom Brunel opened a locomotive works for Great Western Railway, and where Spitfire fighter planes were manufactured during the second world war, was now seemingly closed for business. The high street reflects this. Boarded-up shop fronts are punctuated by fast-food chains, vape emporiums and bookmakers; 19.

Wednesday

Tali Fraser

The anti-Semitic alliance between Restore and the Greens

Johann von Leers was one of Goebbels’s most industrious propagandists: 27 books in 12 years, among them Jews Are Looking at You and Jewry and Knavery. After the war he slipped away to Peron’s Argentina and then to Nasser’s Egypt, where he put his skills to work against Israel. ‘Israel is abnormal,’ he said. ‘It must go. It causes trouble.’ All von Leers did was change his vocabulary – ‘Jew’ became ‘Zionist’ and race science gave way to the language of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, with the same ideas finding a new audience in the Arab world. Von Leers converted to Islam and became Omar Amin, reportedly in honour of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a wartime ally of the Nazis.

John Connolly

Andy Burnham’s concerning links to Abu Dhabi

Last month at the UN general assembly, Andy Burnham spoke movingly about Manchester’s statue of Abraham Lincoln, which stands outside the offices of No. 10 North. The oversized bronze commemorates the decision by Manchester’s mill workers, at great personal cost, to boycott slave-picked cotton from the South during the US Civil War. ‘In 1862, people with little power used it to help those with none on the other side of the world,’ the Prime Minister told delegates. It is an unfortunate irony that, two weeks after his UN speech, Burnham is facing a reckoning over his adopted city’s deep links to the UAE, a country with one of the worst records on modern slavery in the developed world. The story, as is often the case in Manchester, begins with football.

Peter Hitchens

Don’t take Britain’s cathedrals for granted

Everywhere I hear voices complaining about charges being imposed on those who wish to visit our great cathedrals. Everywhere, I reply to them: ‘Stop moaning and pay up!’ In fact, you should give more than you are asked. Who else is going to provide the money to save these astounding, irreplaceable buildings for a future in which they may one day be full of worshippers again? Wouldn’t you spend more on a good meal or a good bottle of wine, or a trip to the cinema? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KJJ4FFVjGA Yes, of course, there should be concessions and exemptions if you are a child or disabled or have no job or are living on a tiny pension.

Prue Leith

Am I a fashion icon?

Ever since I met Omi (one half of the fashion design duo Vin + Omi) on a train, I have found myself, every six months, walking in their London Fashion week show. A preposterous idea, you’d think, an 86-year-old strutting down the catwalk. But I’m such a show-off, I can’t resist it. It is enormous fun. There’s a lot of hanging about while all 60 or 70 of us get our make-up and hair done and get fitted (and later dressed) in whatever we are to wear. I like the atmosphere with everyone in one big room and so at ease with each other. Exquisite young models of both sexes are stripping off with no embarrassment, sitting on the floor, everyone relaxed and friendly.

Gareth Roberts

Up next… Yookay Street, a refreshing new soap opera

The idea of TV soap operas was originally, at least in part, to reflect the nation as a whole. This was never really true – out of dramatic necessity, the characters in these shows take an unusual interest in one another’s business and tend to have peculiarly eventful lives. But it was more true than today, when soaps – for all their obsession with ‘issues’ – are squeamish and avoidant, preferring to duck difficult topics. Here is my attempt to restore the balance with a more honest soap opera, where all the problems of modern Britain are concentrated in one place. Everything is absolutely fine on… Yookay Street. SCENE 1 – THE STREET. Afternoon We open on a long, terraced urban street with a corner shop at one end and a pub at the other.

Flora Watkins

Whatever happened to the midlife crisis?

‘You’re probably just having a midlife crisis,’ says Scarlett Johansson to Bill Murray in Lost in Translation (2003). ‘Did you buy a Porsche yet?’ Murray was 52 when he played the fading actor having an intense yet chaste emotional affair with a woman half his age. My husband turns 50 this month and, apart from expressing a wish to go to the National Gallery and stand in front of ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ (the ageing, obsolete warship being towed away for scrap, etc, etc), is managing not to be too boring about it. Yes, he’s buying a new car, but it certainly isn’t a Porsche. It’s an electric BMW iX3 (‘soulless’ and ‘functional’, according to Tanya Gold of this parish) because we need a more reliable family car than my knackered old Discovery.

Gavin Mortimer

Do France’s pupil protestors have a point?

On 21 September, pupils at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, south-east of Paris, staged a protest. They had a list of grievances. Classes were overcrowded and there was a shortage of teachers. They were also dismayed at the decaying state of some of the school buildings and the automated university admissions platform they feel deprives them of autonomy. Pupils filmed the protest and uploaded the footage onto social media. It went viral. Across France, children in other secondary schools joined the protest. They aired the same complaints as their peers in Créteil – and more. Some pupils described seeing rats in classrooms, others of enduring leaking ceilings and mouldy walls. For many, memories of the summer heatwave were still painfully fresh.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Exclusive: work or face benefits ban, Tories tell under-25s

Kemi Badenoch, like many in the Labour party, is not sorry to see the back of Keir Starmer. ‘I did not find Starmer an interesting person,’ she says. ‘He never said anything interesting.’ Andy Burnham is a different proposition. ‘Quite interesting,’ she thinks. ‘He has more of a clear sense of who he is politically, which makes him more confident in terms of what he wants to do. But who he is politically is so far removed from who I am politically that I think that there’s a sharper contrast between us.’ We speak in her office in Portcullis House with the Labour conference in full cry in Liverpool. ‘It feels very much like student union people who’ve got older, but they still want to do the stuff that they did in the student union,’ Badenoch says.