Tali Fraser

The socioeconomic duty (SED) might not sound sexy but bear with me: this is the tool the Labour party plans to use to ramp up its attack on the middle classes. The SED was described by its Labour ministerial creators in 2009 as ‘socialism in one clause’. It would, they promised, create ‘a new social order’. It was also described as Harman’s Law after Harriet Harman, who introduced it in the dying days of Gordon Brown’s premiership but never got around to putting it into practice. Well, this Labour government is about to finish the job – Section 1 of the Equality Act 2010 is go, and it may earn itself a new name: Middle England’s end.

The podium is out, what looks like a government logo fixed in the corner: we are watching the People’s Emergency Briefing, introduced by… Chris Packham. Trying to emulate the Covid conferences, he explains in this government-style briefing that the world is being destroyed by climate change and it is all our fault. The 50-minute film he introduces is based on a briefing at Westminster Central Hall, to which all MPs are invited, and consists of nine ‘experts’ lecturing its audience on how much this country must change to help the world survive, from energy to agriculture and national security – and which, according to the organisers, ‘lots of people cried’ upon hearing.

It was the day after The Spectator’s summer party and I was on my way to something called a death café. After an unknown quantity of Pol Roger the night before, I was already contemplating my own mortality. This death café was being held in a Gail’s in Horsham (after closing time, mercifully for its customers). The coffee tables were shoved awkwardly together in the middle of the shop floor. Eight of us, all women, sat: a healthcare worker, a retiree, a lawyer, two death doulas (we’ll get to them later) and me, at 26, three decades younger than anyone else present. We were there because ‘death positivity’ is having a moment. There are death cafés, death doulas and funeral celebrants who’ll narrate your cremation like a wedding DJ.

A teenager in Wales might want to play video games, hang out with their friends or even, dare I suggest it, read a book. The Welsh government, however, would prefer they put on a headset and confront their ‘unconscious bias’. It has created a £1.2 million metaverse, the ‘world’s first anti-racist virtual world’, to teach Welsh teens about their ‘white privilege’. But this is only one element of an official commitment to end racism by 2030. Not today, not yesterday, but a specific year in the future. The idea for an Anti-racist Wales Action Plan – ArWAP – was born following fervour around the Black Lives Matter movement, and an official plan followed in 2022.

In one sense, Harry and Meghan’s exit from ‘The Firm’ doesn’t matter much. The pair are low enough down the pecking order that they are – or were, at least – relatively minor Royals. But nonetheless, their comments about the Royal Family may have fatally undermined this institution in the eyes of many young people. What could have been an easily dismissible, trivial soap opera – a family arguing, like most do ­– has made the rift between the Royals far worse. Within the space of a two-hour long Oprah interview we have seen the debate about Megxit entirely change. It is no longer a war of words over Royal roles that is the main argument of the day, but one about racism and mental health.

Only after I signed the lease on my house for my final year at university was I told that, this year, all my seminars will be online. As well as all my lectures. Which when you throw in the new ‘Rule of Six’, puts a bit of a downer on clubs and societies and the rest of campus life (online registration for the student newspaper saw just 16 people sign-up, compared to 200 last year). Our library visits have been rationed – when trying to book a seat in the library I discovered that currently there are around 200 seats across all of the university’s libraries, which is about one seat per 190 students (there goes the idea that university is an expensive library membership) – and even digitised lecture hours are being shortened.