Features

Wednesday

Posie Parker

Fear and loathing in New Zealand

The mob lunged towards me, screeching and grabbing, and I knew that if I fell I would never get up. I’ve stopped expecting mercy from anyone whose motto is ‘Be kind’ but the event last week was terrifying. I was sure in that moment, on the New Zealand leg of my ‘Let Women Speak’ tour, that the trans activists who surrounded me would trample me to death if they could. They gather in menacing groups to intimidate us and hurt us if they can, just to prevent us speaking a simple truth: that women don’t have penises, men don’t have vaginas, there is no such thing as non-binary and transitioning children is abuse. We started these talks at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London and have now taken them around the UK and across the USA.

Lisa Haseldine

David Kezerashvili: ‘Georgia is a proxy of the Russian state’

David Kezerashvili knows better than most what standing up to Russia entails. He helped to overthrow the Kremlin-aligned Georgian government during the 2003 Rose Revolution. Then he served as Georgia’s defence minister for two years including when Russia invaded in 2008. He eventually fled to London in 2012 when the Kremlin-backed Georgian Dream government accused him of embezzling $5.2 million in state funds. Seven criminal charges were levelled against him, including extortion and money laundering. None was upheld in court, until two years ago when the country’s Supreme Court overturned the embezzlement acquittal, sentencing him in absentia to ten years in prison.

Charlotte Eagar

Getting a job after 50 is easier said than done

I am fed up with the government claiming that half a million professionals aged over 50 are reluctant to get back to work. They make it sound like we’re all on cruises, gardening or watching telly. But have they actually tried getting a job after the age of 50? I’m not doing nothing, I hasten to add. Part-time, I run a successful, if tiny, NGO, producing plays with refugees. Our work is studied at universities all over the US and Europe. I write books and screenplays and I once made a film that got into Cannes. But none of this has yet translated into the security provided by cold hard cash, so I spend half my time applying for jobs. If you’re too high-powered, you’re a threat and/or too expensive.

Sean Thomas

The decline and fall of urban America

They’re calling it ‘revenge travel’: the desire to make up for the touring opportunities we all lost when we were locked down in our pandemical homes. As a keen professional traveller, I confess I’ve got a fearsome case of this bug: I’ve spent the past 20 months going just about anywhere I can, playing catch up. Here’s a brief list of the cities I have visited since mid-2021: Tbilisi, Seville, Munich, New Orleans, Lisbon, Reykjavik, Bangkok, Yerevan, Rome, Istanbul, Athens, Da Nang, Nashville, Los Angeles, Florence, Phnom Penh, Tucson. I could add a dozen more, but you get the gist. I’ve missed a terrific number of domestic social engagements; but I have recently seen quite a lot of the world and, more pertinently, seen how the urban world is coping post-pandemic.

Ross Clark

What David Attenborough’s ‘Wild Isles’ doesn’t tell you

It is not just Gary Lineker, apparently, who has fallen victim to sinister right-wing forces at the BBC. A follow-up programme to David Attenborough’s BBC1 series Wild Isles, focusing on the decline of UK wildlife, will not be shown on terrestrial television but only made available on iPlayer. ‘The decision has angered the programme-makers and some insiders at the BBC,’ reports the Guardian, ‘who fear the corporation has bowed to pressure from lobbying groups with “dinosaurian ways”.’ The BBC has claimed that the extra programme – which, like the whole of the Wild Isles series, is co-produced by the WWF and the RSPB – was never intended to be shown on BBC1.

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

The ebb and flow of life on a houseboat

In the spring of 2021 I took a man to a pub in Hackney and bought him a drink. Perhaps he should have been doing the buying, since I had just handed him a large sum in return for his narrowboat. But I was in an exultant mood. No London flat, I reasoned, could ever be as cosy as that low-ceilinged, teak-panelled interior with its coal-burning stove and narrow cabin bed. And outside it lay a pathway to adventure through the hidden districts of the capital, their parks, nature reserves, railway bridges, gasholders, locks, warehouses and waterside pubs. Such thoughts, amplified by a sub-genre of YouTube and Instagram accounts, tempt scores of idealists on to the canals each year. They quickly discover reality.

Wednesday

Harriet Sergeant

Ghost children: the pupils who never came back after lockdown

‘There was this guy in my year who never came back to school after lockdown,’ a 14-year-old girl at a comprehensive in the Midlands says. ‘Then one day my friends and I saw him by the shopping centre. He was, like, sitting on a piece of cardboard by the side of the road, looking a bit homeless. Other kids recognised him and bought him food and clothes. He’d always been popular. Then someone told a teacher and a couple of days later he came back to class. But he was so far behind, he grew frustrated and angry, and then one day he just upped and left for good.’ That boy is a ghost child – a victim of the disastrous policy of school closures during the Covid pandemic. On 8 March 2021, when schools reopened, everyone expected that it would be business as usual.

Damian Thompson

How to lose friends and ghost people

In Elizabeth Day’s new book about the fragility of friendships, annoyingly but memorably entitled Friendaholic, there’s a gripping chapter on ‘ghosting’, the process of turning a friend into an ex-friend without explaining why. It culminates in the act of cutting them dead in public. I’ve always found it a haunting experience when someone does it to me, and I hope my ex-friends feel the same way when I do it to them. It can be a difficult trick to pull off, especially at a big party. I worry that the person hasn’t noticed that he or she is dead to me, and so after my initial snub I move awkwardlyaround the room, glaring at them from multiple directions. By the end of the evening they’re sighing with relief that they’ve been dropped by a loony.

Owen Matthews

The mild-mannered economist who could end Erdogan’s rule

In modern Turkey, as in ancient Byzantium, the factions and passions of the stadium crowds are a key bellwether of the people’s true mood. Last month the terraces of Istanbul’s Sukru Saracoglu stadium – home to the Fenerbahce team of which Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a proud member for 25 years – echoed with chants of ‘Erdogan, resign’ and ‘Lies! Lies! Lies!’. The same weekend, the home crowd of another major Istanbul club, Besiktas, had filled the pitch with a heartbreaking, minutes-long hail of soft toys thrown from the stands in memory of the thousands of children who lost their lives in the devastating earthquake of 6 February.

Ian Williams

ChatCCP: how will China cope with AI?

The Chinese Communist party faces a conundrum: it wants to lead the world in artificial intelligence and yet it is terrified of anything with a mind of its own. Chinese regulators have reportedly told domestic tech companies not to offer their users ChatGPT, the Microsoft-funded chatbot that can provide seemingly well-researched answers to pretty much any question you can think to ask it. China Daily, a CCP mouthpiece, has admitted that the technology has already gone ‘viral’ in China. The paper said that AI could give ‘a helping hand to the US government in its spread of disinformation and its manipulation of global narratives for its own geopolitical interests’.

Sasha Hinkley

The James Webb Space Telescope and the search for life in the universe

The James Webb space telescope, the most powerful telescope ever built, has gathered some extraordinary images since it was launched by Nasa just over a year ago. There have been shots of stars on the cusp of death, of stars violently colliding together, and even of ancient galaxies that have challenged our very understanding of the cosmos. But it’s the study of exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – that, for me, really justifies the telescope’s $10 billion price tag.

Kara Kennedy

The killer next door: growing up in the murder capital of Wales

It was about this time last year when I stopped receiving the daily messages. At first, I had replied politely. He was from my hometown, so it felt weird to ignore him. A man who knew all of my friends, had even dated some of them, and would often walk past me in the pub couldn’t be that bad, right? The messages started with the usual: ‘How are you, Kara? Do you fancy a drink?’ When I began to reject him, making it clear that I wasn’t interested, he became manic. He would ask me if I wanted to meet him in a forest not far from where I lived, and, when I didn’t reply to that, his demands became darker and more sexual. While his messages were a bit alarming, at the time I wasn’t really concerned. Like many young men in my town, he was obviously using hard drugs.

Wednesday

Julian Jessop

What economic crisis comes next?

As we come to the end of an era in which money was practically free, the big question is what the fallout will be from rising interest rates. It isn’t difficult to spot possible problems. Many governments look vulnerable. There are concerns about the UK, where the national debt is now equivalent to roughly 100 per cent of economic output. But what about Italy, where national debt is 150 per cent of national income? Might it succumb to a new vicious circle of rising debt and borrowing costs? How long can its bonds be propped up by low interest rates in the eurozone and backstops provided by the European Central Bank? For Japan, government debt sits at 260 per cent.

Kate Andrews

Crash test: the new era of economic uncertainty

Why did nobody see it coming? When the late Queen asked this question about the crash of 2008, on a visit to a London business school, no one had a clear answer. Why, in a financial world crawling with regulators, did no one spot that subprime mortgages were toxic, on the brink of falling apart?  The simple answer is that we got too comfortable. We assumed that times had changed and dropped our guard. It looks as if we’ve dropped our guard again. On the way out of the financial crash, we seem to have simply and blindly assumed another set of false beliefs: that ultra-low interest rates, designed to help tackle recession, were here to stay. Entire business models were built on this premise. But then inflation returned – and interest rates shot up.

Leah McLaren

The truth about single motherhood

If you believed Hollywood, you’d think the world was madly in love with harried, struggling single mothers. I mean, who doesn’t love Erin Brockovich? Or Renée Zellweger’s character in Jerry Maguire? But in real life, that’s not how it works. In recent months, I have unexpectedly found myself the sole-care single mother to two young sons. This has changed my life in unfathomable ways but the main thing it’s altered is my relationship to work. There’s just way more of it – the unpaid kind. For all our talk of progress and equality, single mums are held to higher account than single dads In October, I went from being a partner, wife and co-parent to the only responsible adult on deck. My parental responsibility doubled, and my resources were halved.

Gus Carter

Sexual politics is damaging young men

Masculinity has been in crisis for as long as anyone can remember. The usual explanation is that post-industrial society doesn’t much care for brawn. We’re all office dwellers now, mutely churning out spreadsheets for other spreadsheet producers. The theory makes sense as far as it goes. But something else has changed much more recently: a rejection of the very concept of masculinity. The polling company YouGov found that just 8 per cent of people have positive views of white men in their twenties, by far the lowest of any ethnicity or age group. Males are routinely presented as inherently dangerous, aggressive and animalistic, incapable of controlling their own instincts. You can see it on public transport, where government adverts announce that staring is sexual harassment.

Ivo Dawnay

Tbilisi is a tinderbox

Never judge a country by its airport road. Georgia’s, from international arrivals to the heart of Tbilisi, is impeccable. The George W. Bush highway (yes, really) is smooth asphalt, with chic electric cars humming down avenues, punctuated by spanking new Lukoil petrol stations with fuel at dirt-cheap prices. It is impeccably clean. And when you reach the parliament building downtown, they have almost finished clearing up the detritus from three consecutive nights of protests, rubber bullets, tear gas and riot police. Tbilisi’s highway was built during the country’s most recent economic sugar rush, when a good-looking young president, Mikheil Saakashvili, was in his brief but glamorous heyday.

Cosmo Landesman

Confessions of a class tourist

Pundits writing for a young audience are always telling readers to ‘stop pretending to be working-class!’ and stop ‘fetishising the working class’. They seem more angered by the imitation of class than the iniquities of class itself. Singer Lily Allen and the rap star Yungblud have both been denounced on Twitter for – to paraphrase E.P. Thompson – the faking of the English working class. Personally, I don’t understand the fuss. For most of my youth I pretended to be working -class – and so did most of my middle--class mates (sorry, friends). And we were not alone. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the voices of youth all sounded working--class, especially the middle-class ones like Jagger, Bowie and, yes, that faux working-class hero himself, John Lennon.

Eyck Freymann

How Britain can help keep the peace in Taiwan

During a recent trip to Taipei, I sat down with several retired Taiwanese national security officials to talk about the possibility of war with China. Their responses were sobering: most agreed an outright war is likely this decade or in the early 2030s – whenever Beijing thinks it can outmuscle the US and Japan. They wanted the world to know the situation’s severity. ‘I lived to see Taiwan’s rise,’ one elder statesman told me. ‘Now I fear I will live to see its fall.’ If Xi is committed to attacking, no military capability Taiwan could acquire would make a difference Officials in the Pentagon are laser-focused on the western Pacific. They see Vladimir Putin as little more than a distraction.

Martin Vander Weyer

Innovators driving economic renewal

The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards 2023 in partnership with Investec are open for business. We’re looking forward to hearing from entrepreneur-led high-growth businesses across the UK and we’re especially pleased to welcome back our partner Investec – an international banking, wealth and investment group with an extensive UK regional network and a deep commitment to supporting entrepreneurship. These prestigious awards, now in their sixth year, are well recognised in entrepreneur and investment communities in every region of the UK and it has been a joy to see the number and breadth of entries grow year by year.