Features

Thursday

Geoff Hill

South Africa’s migrant crisis

Johannesburg It’s called the ‘Reverse Jive’, retracing your steps to where your journey began, and you’ll hear it talked about all over Johannesburg, especially now, with an election next Wednesday and immigration such a hot-button issue. South Africa has a huge informal sector where the poor can at least scratch a living In Pretoria, the government estimates there are more than three million Zimbabweans, or ‘Zimbos’, living in South Africa. Decades of oppression and mismanagement at home have collapsed the economy and Zimbos form a visible presence in Jo’burg, Durban and Cape Town. And thousands of them have done the Reverse Jive.

Philip Patrick

How to quit like the Japanese

Tokyo For many, the idea of quitting a job they hate, of walking into their boss’s office and telling him or her in no uncertain terms what they think of it (and them perhaps), and then striding out without a backward glance, is a delicious one, a pleasant daydream to be enjoyed on the dreary daily commute. But for the Japanese, the idea of resigning from your company is positively traumatic, so much so that the latest boom industry here is agencies who will take care of the whole messy business for you. For the Japanese, the idea of resigning from your company is positively traumatic There are now dozens of so-called ‘resignation firms’ in Tokyo, which will act as an intermediary between the prospective resignee and their company.

Maria Avdeeva

In Kharkiv, culture is a form of defence

Kharkiv It was a strange feeling to walk alone through eerie corridors in the basement of the Kharkiv Opera Theatre and suddenly hear a burst of music and applause. As Kharkiv faced the Russian advance, a Kyiv-based drama group had come to the city to hold an Art Fortress concert to raise the spirits of local residents. For the audience, mainly middle-aged women, this underground event was a welcome distraction from the encroaching reality. Many waved in time to the music, delighted by the performance, and chanted ‘Slava Ukraini’ as the closing remarks were made. As another missile is heard, first responders in helmets and body armour rush down to the metro This support is vital as the city braces for what lies ahead.

Ross Clark

What happened to the electric car revolution?

China is often characterised as a copycat when it comes to industry and technology but in one way it has proved to be a pioneer. It was China which saw the first boom in electric cars – and it was China that was the first to suffer when demand for them collapsed. The vast graveyards of unsold vehicles found in Hangzhou and other Chinese cities are the result of a huge, subsidised push to manufacture electric vehicles, demand for which has never caught up with supply. Ride-share services bought the vehicles– in a rerun of the great cycle-share fiasco of 2018, which led to piles of unused and unwanted bikes. But private buyers have been notably less keen. Where China leads, the rest of the world seems doomed to follow.

Katy Balls

The deluge: Rishi Sunak’s election gamble

‘Only a Conservative government, led by me, will not put our hard-earned economic stability at risk,’ said Rishi Sunak as he announced a general election on the steps of Downing Street in the pouring rain. Upon these words, the Labour anthem ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ boomed out from the street. The din made the rest of his speech nearly inaudible. His suit jacket went from wet to soaking. ‘It’s bizarre,’ said one former minister. ‘How are we supposed to trust No. 10’s judgment when no one in the group even knows what an umbrella is?

Thursday

David Shipley

The power of restorative justice

In a week when the Chief Inspector of Prisons published an Urgent Notification detailing the horrors of HMP Wandsworth, I found myself revisiting memories of being jailed there for the crime of fraud. Clanging doors, rattling chains, men screaming at night in anguish or despair or because their cellmate was assaulting them. No help coming. Emergencies unattended for far too long, and people dead as a result. No purpose, no hope, not even the possibility of redemption. Wandsworth is a miserable prison, one which does as much as possible to brutalise, punish and hurt those it jails, and nothing to heal or change them for the better.

Katy Balls

Shabana Mahmood: The disgraceful treatment of Kate Forbes

It was like a scene from the Blair government: a minister admits inmates are being released before their sentence ends, to free up space. The opposition is furious, saying that ‘never in this country has a government ever been forced to release prisoners over two months early’. But in this instance, the minister is Tory and the opposition comes from Shabana Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood and the shadow justice secretary. When we meet in The Spectator’s offices, the 43-year-old seems to be channelling her inner Michael Howard. ‘Prisons are overcrowded, we just don’t have enough places,’ she says. ‘This country hasn’t built enough prison places for a long time and certainly not for the last 14 years.

Rohit Kachroo

Gangs of Tehran: how Iran takes out its enemies abroad

‘It was Friday afternoon, around 2.45. I came out of the house and was going towards the car on the driver’s side,’ Pouria Zeraati says casually. Zeraati – a presenter at the London-based TV station, Iran International – is recounting what was probably an Iranian state-sponsored attack. ‘I was approached by a man who pretended to be someone asking for £3. The second man then approached. They held me strong, very firmly, and the first person stabbed me in my leg.’ The Iranian regime is reshaping the murder-for-hire market in the US and parts of Europe Zeraati is talking on his first day back at work since he was knifed on Good Friday in Wimbledon. It’s still too painful for him to sit down, so we’re standing for our conversation.

Patrick Kidd

The Church of England’s volunteering crisis

John Betjeman knew that a church cannot run on prayers alone. ‘Let’s praise the man who goes to light the church stove on an icy night,’ he wrote in his poem ‘Septuagesima’, going on to celebrate the ‘hard-worked’ wardens, cleaners, treasurers, the organist and, most of all, ‘the few who are seen in their accustomed pew’ come rain or shine. ‘And though they be but two or three,’ he concluded. ‘They keep the church for you and me.’ In smaller churches, filling voluntary vacancies is a headache, not helped by ever-increasing bureaucracy Some vicars today may feel fortunate to garner two or three volunteers. A recent Church Times survey found a worrying decline in numbers taking on the lay roles of warden, secretary and treasurer.

Max Jeffery

Ahmad Massoud: ‘I’m 100% sure I can topple the Taliban’

It’s fighting season in Afghanistan again. When the Americans were in charge, after the poppy fields had been harvested in late spring, and the madrassas in Pakistan that supplied the Taliban with fanatical soldiers had finished for the term, the Islamists kicked off the fighting. Between 2001 and 2021, around 200,000 people died, including 453 Britons. Now an insurgent group called the National Resistance Front (NRF) are starting the annual springtime assaults, this time against the Taliban government. ‘The Taliban do not possess the support of the mass of the people. We do’ ‘In the past 31 days, we have staged 31 attacks on Taliban, only in Kabul,’ Ahmad Massoud, the NRF leader, cheerily tells me from Tajikistan, where he directs his troops in exile.

Freddy Gray

Veep show: who will Trump pick for his running mate?

We are in the fifth week of Donald Trump’s ‘hush money’ trial and the real scandal is that it’s all so intensely boring. Sex, porn-star witnesses, shady lawyers, a president in the dock – the headlines are a tabloid dream. The crux of the case, however, is a bunch of tedious charges to do with tax reporting and accountancy. Who wants to read about that?   Trump is ‘not looking for an heir because that would be Macbeth or King Lear, a bloodbath’ Trump adores the attention, naturally. As the greatest showman of the 21st century he understands that we, the people, need fresh drama and new characters.

Sean Thomas

No tips please, we’re British

I hate tipping, not because I am intrinsically mean but because of the anxiety it induces. You pitch up at some glam hotel, after a gruelling flight, then the guy next to the concierge takes your bags to your room, and, as you go, you fumble in your pockets, searching for the mysterious notes and coins, even as you try to estimate the right amount to tip the porter. Tipping is yet another toxic byproduct of America’s tragic past and should be treated like an invasive species This is a complex equation at the best of times, as it involves so many imponderables: the state of the local economy, the likely wages hereabouts, the emotionally correct sum to give – not insultingly little but not so much that you look like an oligarch.

Thursday

Mark Mason

Why do people make excuses for surly staff?

‘You grab that table, I’ll get the drinks.’ I did as bid. A couple of minutes later, Paul was back, beers in hand, and we started chatting. Soon the member of staff who’d served him appeared. She was stony-faced and holding a card machine. ‘You didn’t pay,’ she said. Paul looked confused for a second, then glanced down at the machine. ‘Oh, it didn’t go through?’ The staff member shook her head. Paul held out his card, she punched the numbers again, we all waited for the beep. Then she handed him his receipt and left. ‘Service with a smile,’ I said. He laughed. And then, a second or two later: ‘Oh well, I guess she’s having a bad day.

Svitlana Morenets

Georgia is on the brink of revolution

For weeks, the Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi has looked like a battlefield. Thousands of protestors, mostly in their twenties, have been met by riot police armed with tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets. On the face of it, the protest is about a new repressive bill in its final reading in the Georgian parliament. In reality, it’s the struggle between a government that is turning towards Moscow, and a citizenry who by and large believe the future lies with Europe. The crunch point comes next week when the Georgian parliament will vote on a bill which, if passed, would label as a ‘foreign agent’ any political or civil society pressure group that receives more than 20 per cent of its funding from abroad.

Cindy Yu

What Xi wants in Europe

On a quiet street in Belgrade, a bronze statue of Confucius stands in front of a perforated white block, the new Chinese Cultural Centre. This is on the former site of the Chinese embassy which in 1999 was bombed by US-led Nato forces during the Kosovo war. Three Chinese nationals were killed. The Americans said the bombing was an accident, but the deaths allowed China and Serbia to share a common anti-Nato grievance. This week, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the bombing, Xi Jinping visited Belgrade and talked about the Sino-Serbian ‘bond forged with the blood of our compatriots’. He had been expected to visit the embassy site but seems to have decided that that would be too provocative against Washington.

Anshel Pfeffer

The Israeli-Hamas negotiations are fraught with complexity

Jerusalem For weeks the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had been preparing for an assault on Rafah. Yet when the order finally came on Monday night, it caught Israel’s generals by surprise. This was despite the fact that two armoured divisions had been deployed on Gaza’s southern border, and hundreds of thousands of leaflets printed warning the local population to evacuate to a ‘humanitarian area’ on the coast. Twice the plan to drop the leaflets over Rafah had been postponed, following American pressure. On Monday morning, when the green light came, the plan was to give civilians at least a week to move. Ten hours later the tanks moved in. There was another reason for the generals’ surprise.

Freddy Gray

Sex and the shires: Plum Sykes reveals all

‘I looked at a picture of him today and thought: “Why are you wearing those expensive clothes, you twit?”’ Plum Sykes is in the Claridge’s ArtSpace Café, eating the avocado on toast and talking about Rishi Sunak. ‘He looks like he’s wearing handmade shoes, which is a real no-no – a real no-no! But he can’t stop himself.’ ‘People want to be Martha Stewart, Carole Bamford. I’m not sure they want to be Meghan Markle’ David Cameron would never be so gauche, says Plum. ‘In fact, I remember asking David about that and he said he’d never wear a custom-made suit on the campaign trail because it sends the wrong message.’ Plum quite likes Sunak ‘because he’s clever and sensible’.

Angus Colwell

Bugs, biscuits, trench foot: from the front line of the uni protests

On the grass in front of UCL’s main building, on Sunday night, there were about 30 tents and the portico was plastered in handwritten signs: ‘Students: You’re in debt so UCL can fund a genocide!’ Some protestors sat on chairs, eating biscuits. Others stood at the front gate chanting ‘From the River to the Sea’. ‘Do you want a tent, bro?’ asked one protestor. I explained that I was a reporter and was immediately whisked away to talk to a spokesman. ‘Spectator, Spectator … yeah, I think that’s left-wing. All good.’ A girl who had come along for the day received a keffiyeh tutorial and as night began to fall, I watched as most of the demonstrators headed towards the front lawn to pray. One student didn’t fall asleep until 6.30 a.m.

Yascha Mounk

How universities raised a generation of activists

It was only a matter of time before America’s student protests spread to the UK. In Oxford, tents have been pitched on grass that, in ordinary times, no student is allowed to walk on. The ground outside King’s College in Cambridge looks like Glastonbury, complete with an ‘emergency toilet’ tent. Similar camps can be found at UCL, Manchester University and more. There have been no clashes with police, but that may yet come. In Leeds, for example, pro-Palestinian students tried to storm a university building, leading to bloody clashes with security guards. From the Sorbonne to Sydney University, the movement has gone global. Its ostensible cause is hardly ignoble. It’s possible to be appalled both by the 7 October attacks and the tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths.

Thursday

Kara Kennedy

Wales is facing a US-style opioid crisis

In Europe at the end of the Noughties, the problem drug was krokodil. The semi-synthetic, necrosis-causing alternative to heroin was cheap. My father favoured it so much before his death that he started importing it from eastern Europe into Wales. Across the pond right now, the problem drug is fentanyl, which has made its way into much of the US drug supply. Indeed, it’s become so synonymous with death that many casual users have given up the bag all together (‘I love a line, but I’m not going to die for it,’ one Manhattanite told me recently). More than 75,000 Americans died from synthetic opioids in 2022. And now the opioids crisis has arrived in Wales.