The Spectator

Wednesday

The Spectator

Livestream: The Spectator’s post-Budget briefing

Stephanie Flanders, head of economics and politics at Bloomberg joined The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove, political editor Tim Shipman, economics editor Michael Simmons and John Porteous, Charles Stanley’s managing director of central financial services and chief client officer, to give you an insider’s take on the autumn Budget, just hours after it was announced. As the cost of Britain’s debt soars, Rachel Reeves faces tough choices about the nation’s finances. With backbenchers allergic to spending cuts and the tax burden already at a post-war high, her options are shrinking fast. Will she take bold action to tackle Britain’s structural problems and ignite growth – or just scrape through and push the crisis into the future.

Thursday

The Spectator

How many illegal migrants does Britain return?

Condemned leaders Former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, for using lethal force against student protests last year. But on past records, she might yet live to an advanced age. The last national leader to be executed was Saddam Hussein in 2006, during the Allied occupation of Iraq. Other leaders sentenced to death in their country’s courts have fared better: — Emile Derlin Zinsou, installed as president of Dahomey (now Benin) after a coup in 1968, was sentenced to death in 1975. That was rescinded and he returned to Benin in 1990. He died aged 98 in 2016. — Chun Doo-hwan, who led a coup in South Korea in 1979, was sentenced to death in 1996, later commuted to life imprisonment. He died in 2021 aged 90.

The Spectator

Letters: can you ever come back from Siberia?

Cross channel Sir: As a supporter of the BBC, it pains me to say that Rod Liddle and Lara Brown both made excellent points in their articles (‘Agony Auntie’ and ‘Pushing it’, 15 November). It strikes me that the BBC could help itself by appointing journalists to the key BBC News roles who are not also seen as being campaigners. Contrast the consummate professionalism of Hugh Pym, the health editor, with the hyperbole of Justin Rowlatt, the climate editor, who gleefully predicts doom every time there’s a storm. It would be interesting to see what would happen if they swapped roles.

The Spectator

It’s not science if you can’t question it

Follow the Science. The Science is settled. Two phrases which invoke the power of open inquiry to close down open inquiry. Science is not a body of unalterable doctrine, a chapter of revealed truths. Science is a method. It is a means of arriving at the best possible explanation of phenomena through thesis, testing, observation and revision. Science depends on a culture of doubt, as one of the greatest scientists of the last century, Richard Feynman, continually argued. Its conclusions, by definition, are provisional models which are subject to future revision as new data and better explanations arrive. The story of science is a chronicle of old models being superseded and new theories seeking to make sense of our world.

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Portrait of the week: an immigration overhaul, Budget chaos and doctors’ strikes

Home Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, proposed that refugees would only be granted a temporary right to stay and would be sent home if officials deemed their country safe to return to. They would not qualify for British citizenship for 20 years. To avoid drawn-out appeals, a new appeals body would be created. Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects migrants’ ‘right to family life’, would somehow be weakened. Digital ID was invoked for the enforcement of checks on status. Opponents seized upon the possibility that, to pay for accommodation, migrants’ jewellery would be confiscated.

Saturday

The Spectator

Livestream: The Great British Schools Debate

Toby Young, Spectator columnist and founder of the West London Free School, teamed up with historian David Starkey to take on veteran broadcaster and author David Aaronovitch and political commentator Stella Tsantekidou. Locking horns over one of the most divisive questions in education today, they went head-to-head over whether private schools are a stain on Britain’s conscience, and you can watch the livestream here.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The case for decriminalising cannabis

Back to reality Sir: The harms caused by cannabis are not a result of a failure to police it properly (‘Stench of failure’, 8 November). They are primarily because the distribution of it is controlled by criminals rather than corporations. Criminal gangs maximise their profits by pushing more addictive forms of drugs, and their activity wreaks misery on their families and communities. Psychosis is only associated with skunk, which is a more addictive form of cannabis, high in THC relative to CBD. Smokers of this are estimated to be 2.6 times more likely to have psychotic-like experiences than non-smokers. Herbal cannabis is not associated with psychosis; in fact, the high levels of CBD in it have some therapeutic and even antipsychotic benefits.

The Spectator

2726: Two against one – solution

The combined fleets of France and Spain met that of England at TRAFALGAR (13) on 21 October 1805. Vice-Admirals NELSON (30) in the VICTORY (27), and COLLINGWOOD (16dn) faced Vice-Admiral VILLENEUVE (19), in the BUCENTAURE (12), and Admiral GRAVINA (22). A COLUMN was later erected in Nelson’s honour.

The Spectator

Labour isn’t working

Labour: the clue should be in the name. In March, Keir Starmer branded Labour the ‘party of work’. If ‘you want to work’, he declared, ‘the government should support you, not stop you’. Even as his premiership staggers from crisis to crisis, that mission remains. If Labour doesn’t stand for ‘working people’ – however nebulously defined – it stands for nothing. As such, this week’s unemployment figures are more than just embarrassing for Starmer; they are a betrayal of his party’s founding purpose. Unemployment has risen to 5 per cent – its highest rate since February 2021, in the middle of the third lockdown.

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Portrait of the week: BBC vs Trump, a plot against Starmer and a weight loss deadline for North Sea oil workers

Home Tim Davie, the director-general of the BBC, resigned, as did Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC News. Samir Shah, the chairman of the BBC, apologised for an ‘error of judgment’ in the editing by Panorama of a speech by President Donald Trump that made it look as though he was urging people to attack the Capitol in January 2021. This had been criticised in a 19-page memorandum to the BBC board by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser, who also set out failings over Gaza and transgender matters. The leaked memo was published by the Telegraph. Trump wrote to the BBC threatening to sue it ‘for $1 billion’; he later told Fox News it was his ‘obligation’ to take action.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Venezuela’s middle-class exodus

Minimum requirement Sir: Some of Charles Moore’s observations about the minimum wage are pertinent (Notes, 1 November). However, what many also lose sight of (most of all our Chancellor) is that by government raising the minimum wage, those employees who were just above it usually seek pay rises to stay ahead of it, or employers risk losing those staff. This can then have a ripple effect through the whole organisation. It is another reason the Chancellor’s last Budget had such a profound impact on companies and, in turn, the economy at a delicate time. With employers’ NI rises as well, company cost bases have risen significantly, stifling investment, growth and recruitment and leading to our worsening finances and the tax rises that are now on their way.

The Spectator

How popular is the British royal family?

Austere environment Who introduced the word ‘austerity’ into the political lexicon? While chiefly associated with attacks on the Conservatives, and subsequently Reform UK, by Labour and other left-wing parties, it was David Cameron who brought the word back into common parlance. In a speech to the Conservative party forum on 26 April 2009 he declared: ‘The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.’ He went on to say: ‘We’ve made it clear that a Conservative government would spend less than Labour. We’re not frightened of their idiotic ritual chants about “cuts”.’ An analysis by the LSE found that in the election year of 2010, right-leaning thinktanks mentioned ‘austerity’ nearly as frequently as left-leaning ones.

The Spectator

Stench of failure: Britain’s shameful surrender in the war on drugs

The New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was that rare figure in politics – a progressive who followed the facts. The contrast between his grown-up moral clarity and the adolescent ideological posturing of New York City’s latest Democrat darling, Zohran Mamdani, could not be starker. Moynihan was a welfare reformer who knew that incentivising work, not subsidising idleness, was the route out of poverty. He was a resolute supporter of Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, backing the victims of two millennia of prejudice against terrorists and tyrants. By way of contrast, Mamdani demonises that state as a proxy for what he considers the wider western sins of colonialism and exploitation. It was on crime, above all, that Moynihan showed courage.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Train stabbing attack, Mamdani takes New York and the Andrew formerly known as prince

Home The King ‘initiated a formal process to remove the Style, Titles and Honours of Prince Andrew’, who is now known as Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor; his lease on Royal Lodge, Windsor, was relinquished and he made a private arrangement with the King to live on the Sandringham estate. His former wife, Sarah Ferguson, will find her own accommodation. Their daughters remain Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice. Richard Gott, who resigned as literary editor of the Guardian in 1994 after The Spectator accused him of having been in the pay of the KGB, died aged 87. Gopichand Hinduja, the head of Britain’s richest family, died aged 85. Eleven people were taken to hospital after a stabbing attack on a train from Doncaster to London, which began after it left Peterborough.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Books of the Year II – further recommendations from our regular reviewers

Philip Hensher I have a theory that Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels are an ingenious variation on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. If, in a future episode, River Cartwright ascends to his kingdom renouncing Jackson Lamb, and if Catherine tells us of Jackson/Falstaff’s death offstage, don’t be surprised. In any case, Clown Town (Baskerville, £22) is a magisterially accomplished novel and Herron a master of vivid voice, showing himself in a plot of shining, machine-like efficiency. The other novel I adored was Tash Aw’s The South (4th Estate, £16.99) – a ravishingly written account of a brief, obsessive passion between two teenagers during a boiling hot Malaysian summer.

Friday

The Spectator

Livestream: Americano Live – Is America Great Again?

Watch Freddy Gray, The Spectator’s deputy editor and host of the Americano podcast, and special guests Ann Coulter and Peter Hitchens go head-to-head on the highs and lows of Trump’s first year back in the White House, via livestream. Has Trump 2.0 lived up to its promise – or fallen short of the ‘Golden Age’? Is he reinvigorating American democracy – or suffocating it? Has he choked capitalism through his Liberation Day tariffs – or preserved free markets in a new, less globalised era?

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The difficulties of reporting on Gaza

Future proof Sir: Douglas Murray asks why Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech understated the problems (‘Imagine what Enoch Powell might have said’, 25 October). The simple answer is that it couldn’t have said everything, but many of the omissions cited are referred to in Powell’s later speeches. During the 1970 general election campaign in Birmingham, for instance, Powell noted that ‘this country is today under attack by forces which aim at the actual destruction of our nation and society as we know or can imagine them’. He gave many examples of a ‘new psychological weaponry’ rendering the majority ‘passive and helpless’ by asserting ‘manifest absurdities as if they were self-evident truths’.