Culture

Battersea Dogs and Cats Home is running a poster campaign to increase sentences for cruelty to animals. The current maximum is six months. It is probably popular — almost all campaigns for higher prison sentences are. But I doubt if the public interest would be served by locking up offenders for five years, as Battersea demands. The prisons are already full to bursting, increasingly by elderly people accused (in some cases, falsely) of ‘historic’ child abuse. Each prisoner costs the taxpayer more than £30,000 a year. One should be prepared to listen to the arguments, however. My real point is different: why should a dogs’ home campaign on public policy?

Here’s a cast-iron law of the media in 21st-century Britain: the hysteria about a Daily Mail article will always be worse than the Daily Mail article itself. It will be more silly, shrill, over-the-top, reactionary and potentially harmful to public life than the polemic or editorial or sidebar shot of a half-dressed celeb it is raging and spluttering against. You can hold me to this. Go through the archives of Twitterstorms about the Daily Mail — they number in the gazillions — and you will see it’s the same every time: every bad thing the Mail has said or done has paled into insignificance in comparison with the hot, mad

If Health and Safety is (are?) your thing, you must always be dreaming, like Alexander the Great, of new worlds to conquer. The next one, I predict, will be cooking at home. Recently I have noticed talk about the bad effect of ‘particles’ produced by hot food cooked in or on ovens. The sequence will go thus: a study will prove that people who cook at home inhale more particles than others, reducing their life expectancy. A woman seeking divorce will win a higher settlement because, she says, she was forced to spend hours of each day in such dangerous culinary conditions, suffering various ‘harms’. Then it will be shown

Pankaj Mishra’s book Age of Anger is good in parts, but also shows the weakness of leftist thought. It is a bold history of political ideas that traces the extremism and populism of our day to nineteenth-century sources. Both Isis supporters and Trump supporters are reacting to the insecurity caused by neoliberal globalisation, he argues. ‘Cosmopolitan civilisation based on individual self-interest’ has brought material wealth at the cost of creating huge expectations that lead to dangerous resentment. And now social media intensifies such resentment. More people reject traditional politics, due to ‘the gap between the profligate promises of individual freedom and sovereignty, and the incapacity of their political and economic organisations

It is testament to the chilling effect of libel law on public discussion that I feel nervous about the sentences I’m about to write. The libel ruling against Katie Hopkins is obscene. The punishment of her to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds for making a mistake on Twitter is disgusting. To punish an individual under England’s foul, antiquated libel laws is more objectionable than anything that individual could have said. This case should repel anyone who believes in liberty. This is the case of Jack Monroe, food blogger and the only working-class person in Britain the Guardian likes, suing Katie Hopkins, a foghorn made flesh. The details

The key to a happy life, it’s been discovered, is living near to Georgian architecture and a Waitrose. Bath, York, Chichester, Stamford, Skipton, Harrogate, Oxford and Cambridge are among the towns listed in the Sunday Times 20 nicest places to live in Britain survey. Almost all these areas have one thing in common: they all feature a great deal of Georgian housing. And they’re all mostly unaffordable. There is a fair amount of research suggesting that traditional architecture, such as Georgian and Victorian terraces and mansion blocks, contributes to our wellbeing. Beauty makes people happy. This can be measured through house prices, which consistently show bigger increases for more traditional

After he left the Blues and Royals in 1981, the young Tristan Voorspuy drove a motorbike from London to Cape Town. Thus began his love of Africa. He also learnt to fly, and arranged to travel alone to Kenya from England in a single-engine aeroplane, using only a schoolboy atlas. Luckily, his brother Morvern, a professional pilot, heard of this plan and prevented it. But Tristan reached Kenya by other means, and became a Kenyan citizen. For 30 years, he was a leading conservationist there and set up and ran the accurately named firm Offbeat Safaris, which allows guests to ride among the great beasts of Africa. Recently, armed hordes

It’s a curiosity of the 21st century that there is no one quite as bigoted as the person who screams ‘bigot!’ all the time. More often than not, those who casually brand as bigots anyone who has the temerity to hold a different point of view to theirs are the ones behaving with bigotry. Consider the stink over Jenni Murray’s comments on trans women. Murray is being demonised as a bigot, as a daft, obtuse ‘transphobe’, for saying trans women aren’t real women. But it’s her accusers who are the bigots; it’s their petitioning for Murray to be sacked and silenced that is the true bigotry. Murray is a victim

Chief Constable Simon Bailey, who heads Operation Hydrant, the police investigation of ‘non-recent’ child abuse cases, now says that paedophiles who view images of child abuse should not be prosecuted, because police cannot cope with the numbers involved. Mr Bailey is wedded to the doctrine that someone who says he is an abuse victim must automatically be believed. The result, said Sir Richard Henriques in his scathing report on Operation Midland, is that the criminal justice system totters: ‘Chief Constable Bailey’s argument ignores the consequences of false terminology.’ Another consequence is that the child abuse statistics, unchecked, explode. Mr Bailey will not admit his error and so, in order to

Congratulations to the Daily Mail for exposing the unpleasant methods by which TV Licensing’s staff make people pay their television licence fees. Capita, the company that does the dirty work for the BBC, encourages its employees to use ‘ruthless and underhand tactics’ to collect the money, says the Mail. The paper offers painful examples of the victims — ‘RAF man with dementia, mum in a women’s refuge’. It could have added ‘veteran Spectator columnist’, since these activities were first exposed on this page in 2006, when I got fed up with being pursued by Capita to buy a TV licence for a flat without a television. The Mail correctly identifies