Latest from Spectator
Spectator
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Why Jews aren't enjoying Glastonbury
I've never been to Glastonbury. As more of a heavy metal girl, it's not really my music scene and, frankly, I don't believe in camping. Did it once. Not happening again. That said, I do quite enjoy watching the festival from the comfort of my own home. There are always some bands I already like performing and you can discover some exciting news artists too. Frankly, it's hard to avoid. The coverage tends to dominate almost every aspect of the BBC and it is well underway for this year. Almost every Jewish music lover I know has been dreading this weekend for weeks Unfortunately, but entirely predictably, Glastonbury is set to be an anti-Jewish, anti-Israel hatefest, with Palestinian flags and bile-filled rants galore. Even before the first artists took to the Pyramid Stage, I received a video from a friend that showed people at Worthy Farm dancing around and singing 'free Palestine'. I've also seen some merchandise featuring a bulldozer, body bags and an Israeli flag. There is even a Palestine museum on site. That this is all being done at a music festival, after Hamas massacred so many at the Nova Festival on 7 October, is an utterly grotesque irony. One that is clearly lost on those partaking in such behaviour and feeling pleased with themselves for doing so at 'Glasto'. It made me want to keep the TV off and not watch any of the coverage, but I refuse to let the bullies win. So, with some trepidation, I headed to iPlayer and turned on the dedicated Glastonbury streaming channel. My fears were confirmed within seconds. The first thing I saw was a giant Palestinian flag – almost every subsequent shot featured at least one as well, as the flag wavers placed themselves strategically to get on air. Playing on stage was CMAT, a singer who has already pulled out of playing Latitude Festival because it is sponsored by Barclays and the bank has allegedly increased its investment in arms firms that trade with Israel. Elsewhere, U2 singer Bono's son has performed and a friend on site told me that he dedicated a song to the 'people of Palestine'. It will surely not be the last we see over the weekend. People are, of course, entitled to their views, however misguided they may be. What is not OK is creating an environment so hostile that almost every Jewish music lover I know has been dreading this weekend for weeks, knowing what was about to be broadcast across our screens by the BBC. Missing out on a major cultural event or watching a sea of hate is not a great or fair choice for Jews to have to face. Why should we have to sit around waiting for some smug performer to say something ill-informed or even anti-Semitic? How has it got to the point where you need to Google and check every artist's view on a foreign war before deciding whether or not to take in their set? Sorry to break it to you Rod Stewart, but Benjamin Netanyahu isn't going to change his approach to Gaza because you claim that 'what Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians is exactly what happened to the Jews'. Just play 'Maggie May' instead. And then there is Kneecap. The now infamous Northern Irish rap trio's performances have caused such concern that counter-terror police reviewed footage of them. One band member found himself in court on a terror charge. He will return in August after being granted unconditional bail. Thankfully, the BBC has decided not to show their set on the West Holts Stage, which is likely to take place in front of one of the biggest crowds of the whole week. It is exhausting for Jews to have to constantly approach events like Glastonbury with such a sense of foreboding, but it's the circumstances we have found ourselves in for 20 months now. Saying 'well don't watch it then' is not an acceptable answer. No minority should be forced out of enjoying the arts, whether that is in person or on television, because they fear intimidation or abuse. And make no mistake, waving giant Palestinian flags on national TV is intimidating. It's meant to be. It would be nice if, just for once, performers and audience members alike could put down their flags and Keffiyehs and just worry about the music. Instead, I'll be watching Glastonbury slightly on edge, and remembering all those that went to the Nova festival and never came back.
Spectator
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Henry VIII turned England upside down
Henry VIII, who was born on this day in 1509, is the only English monarch other than William the Conqueror who can claim to have destroyed a society and replaced it with a new one. Catholic apologists like Chesterton are right to see in the Henry VIII saga a sort of secular apocalypse; it was, in Chesterton's words, the 'dissolution of the whole of the old civilisation'. The new England that grew up in its place – by Henry's unwitting patronage – was alien, denatured, dislocating, and altogether more worthwhile than the one that had gone before it. The story of Henry VIII's is the story of an eccentric clique capturing society and recasting it in its own image. From 1529-47 nearly all of England's historic institutions were destroyed. All the things that had given life its shape and meaning were junked: the monasteries torn down and their assets made off with; guilds suppressed; commons enclosed (a fitful attempt by Cardinal Wolsey to reverse this notwithstanding); old customary rights stamped out; the cosmopolitan link to Europe severed. The old mediaeval learning was torn up by its roots and the universities refounded in the study of the Classics. It was England's version of Jacobinism. English society became a series of regulated games in which the prizes were glory and renown But unlike Jacobinism, Henry-ism had no popular backing to speak of. One man's ego; a handful of religious extremists; a few dodgy Giulliani-esque attorneys. These were sufficient to turn the world upside down. Everything that happened in those years happened in the face of settled custom, settled opinion, so-called common sense. The forces that would dominate English life for the next 400 years – Hellenic revival and religious radicalism – were alien ones, the preserve of this small Henrician circle. The reign of Henry VIII was about the conquest of reality by dreams. The England that it gave rise to would recognise no limits but the limits of its own whimsy. The most cherished of these whimsies was Hellenism. Henry VIII's new grammar schools and his reformed universities created a governing elite that looked more to classical Greece and Rome than to the society around them. This is something that went well beyond 'revival' – what took place after 1509 amounted to the splicing of England with the classical world. Later figures like Byron, Charles James Fox, or Alan Clark are unexplainable unless we account for the shrewd paganism that's prevailed in the national psyche since Henry's reign. Grecian stone urns in the badlands of Northumberland, Temples to Venus in Stowe: these were the physical symbols of an alien civilisation being grafted onto the old one. British people were still exclaiming the name Jove at the end of the twentieth century. There are now all kinds of debates about what Britishness really means: 'pretending to be Greek' is probably the best answer. Another cadge from ancient Greece was the spirit of agon – competition. Mediaeval English society was a web of mutual obligations in which everyone had a place. Henricianism destroyed this and replaced it with a competitive free-for-all. Much like classical Greece, English society became a series of regulated games in which the prizes were glory and renown. The England that Henry VIII created was the first to adopt school entrance exams, stock exchanges, adversarial lawyering, markets. It would also invent the Queensberry Rules, along with most of the world's sports. What all these have in common is that they're made-up conflicts regulated by intricate sets of rules and codes of honour. Westminster became the most dazzling game of all. Henry VIII's reign saw the beginning of the process by which parliament was transformed from a boring Diet of burghers into an arena for people's ambitions. As Lewis Namier tells us, by the 18th century, people came to parliament not to represent interests but to cut a figure. Westminster, too, now accepted no limit on its powers of creative invention. The middle ages, viewed one way, was a series of interminable legal disputes between kings, barons and the Church over their rights and the proper scope of authority. The Statute in Restraint of Appeals (1532) called time on all this. In establishing parliamentary sovereignty, it declared that life would no longer turn on precedent-scraping and wrangling over fixed 'rights' that seemed to come from nowhere; that we might, instead, debate and decide things on their merits, revealed to us through reason. The Statute in its full meaning was a thunderclap from the heavens: one of the great triumphs of the human spirit. The social order Henry created had to make unprecedented concessions to talent. Jacob Burkhardt tells us that the tyrants of Renaissance Italy, being illegitimate, could not rely on the church or the aristocracy to help them and had to instead turn to talented individuals of humble origin. Henry faced a similar dilemma: his claim to the English throne was shaky and the break with Rome had made him an international outlaw. It was this isolation that gave rise to 'new men' like Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Audley, Richard Rich, William Paget, and – in the reign of Elizabeth – William Cecil. What began as a temporary expedient soon became a permanent part of the social system. For the next several centuries anyone who was good at their job in England was simply ennobled and made part of the Establishment. With this act, Henry VIII set off the primordial conflict between the 'new men' and the old aristocracy that would shape the country's history for the next 300 years. After the fall of the Pittite regime – the last great flowering of the new men – the cabinet of the Earl Gray (the most blue-blooded in living memory) would pass the Reform Bill of 1832 as a means to finally flush out their old class enemy, birthing liberal democracy in Britain largely out of spite. Amid all this, Henry seems like a man out of time, eerily out of place in his own age. He appears to us as a Subjective Man of the 19th century – full of introspection, rumination, and self-reproach. In him we can see all the defining traits of a modern person. The capacity for romantic love. The prickly amour-propre. The consuming neediness. Henry is familiar to us in a way that the Sun King Louis XIV – who lived 150 years later – is not. When Henry VIII came to the throne, England was a normal European country. By 1700 it was a lunar landscape: its countryside a work of complete artifice, with shaped topiaries, carved hedges and artificial lakes; blasted heaths created by deforestation; farmers replaced with sheep by Act of Parliament; dotted everywhere with imitation Greco-Roman temples. Its neighbours thought its people were dangerous lunatics and had only recently ceased to treat it as a rogue state. By pure will, England had been made as remote and peripheral to the continent as Russia. Does the England that Henry VIII created still exist? The grammar schools have largely been abolished and the last of England's pagan virtues were exorcised by New Labour. The country is once again ruled by dull landowners who believe in human rights. One part remains. Parliamentary sovereignty – the master-mechanism of Henry's system – is still in operation. If the English people should ever tire of their 'Rolls Royce' institutions, their fixed international obligations, or what's being demanded of them in the name of human rights, then they, uniquely in the western world, have the ready means to change them. It'll be there to hand – should the English ever want to turn the world upside down again. The idea that we can examine the values and systems by which we're ruled, find them wanting, and choose different ones; or, really, the idea that the world belongs to the living. That is Henry's ultimate bequest.
Spectator
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Tom Skinner and the triumph of Essex Man
As a teenager, my first husband was an Essex Man. It ended badly – all my fault – but I still retain a fondness for the breed, who I associate with self-made can-do stoicism and optimism; the opposite of, say, Islington Man. An Essex Man is being spoken of as the one to give the ghastly 'Sir' Sadiq Khan a run for his money In recent decades, the county has become known as a glitzy, new-money Cheshire-on-Colne, due to the popular television show The Only Way Is Essex, a 'scripted reality' show in which a mutating cast of likely lads and luscious-lipped ladies make out and break up at bars and barbecues. The girls boast of a taste for Bad Boys with whom they have Steamy Romps, followed by Love Splits and Lonely Hells before Bouncing Back to Show Him What He's Missing while Flaunting Her Curves on a Sunshine Break To Dubai. They never saw a drink that wouldn't look better in a frenemy's face, or a swimming pool that couldn't be improved by pushing a love rat into; they backbite and backstab the way others say 'please' and 'thank you'. Of course I love it! Towie has recently, and rather dismayingly, made a show of talking about Mental Elf issues, much to the detriment of the drama. But these kids aren't really snowflakes. They're the descendants of the actual Cockneys who were resettled in Essex after the destruction of the East End by the Luftwaffe. They inhabit the first hardcore working-class Conservative stronghold of post-war England; in the 2019 election, all 18 seats in the county were held by the Tories with absolute majorities. In the EU referendum, every one of Essex's 14 district councils voted Leave. During the previous century, Essex Man was shorthand for a disillusioned, working-class, traditionally Labour voter who switched to Mrs Thatcher's Conservatives. They did so because they felt that Labour had moved to the Loony Left and cared more about Gaza than Grays. Of course Reform were always going to go big there. Nigel Farage himself has his constituency in Clacton-on-Sea. During his visits, he is mobbed by teenagers for selfies. A year after winning his seat, he remains wildly popular with constituents. You can't say that about many MPs. Reform's success in Essex isn't just about Farage: last month in council by-elections, the party took a seat in Harlow and a couple more in Thurrock. But the hold of the Tories on Essex should not be underestimated; no less than Kemi Badenoch has her throne in North West Essex. It would make the heart of this blue-collar county swell to have an MP of their own become PM. To make matters more interesting, an Essex Man is being spoken of as the one who might give the ghastly 'Sir' Sadiq Khan a run for his money, a phrase which conjures up for me the rampant fare-dodging which is one of the hallmarks of the ruined London Khan has presided over. Tom Skinner was one of the hopefuls in series 15 of The Apprentice; I don't recall him, but that's probably because I'm always too busy drooling unattractively over my pin-up, Lord Sugar. Recently Skinner has taken to X bemoaning the state of the capital: 'Colder…more hostile. It's tense…London don't feel like London no more. The police ain't on the beat. The people are scared. I'm not giving up on it…I still believe in this gaff…but we need change…we need safety.' Anyone can go on social media and moan that fings ain't what they used to be. But what makes this different is that Dominic Cummings reposted the above. He urged the 34-year-old Skinner to run against Khan in 2028 and offered the muscle of the old Vote Leave brigade as back-up. This week, Kennedy went down a storm at a conference in Westminster when he spoke of his love for his country. Asked about whether he would run for London mayor, he told the Now & England conference: 'Anyone could do a better job that Sadiq Khan…we'll see what happens'. The rapturous applause – and the fact that hatred of orthodox politicians in Britain is stronger than it's ever been – means he should certainly consider it. He's definitely got a little something going on that might well appeal to the thoroughly cheesed-off man in the London street. As Niall Gooch wrote in UnHerd: 'Skinner represents a clear contrast to the collapsing post-1997 consensus. He is not a graduate; he has not been formed in or by progressive institutions; he has no interest in the shibboleths of managed decline or conventional Blob thought. His is a commonsensical, man-of-the-people approach — in some respects he resembles Nigel Farage'. Skinner might do well if he ran for mayor, for the simple reason that what public life lacks is Straightforward Men. Everywhere you look you can see male creatures slithering and sliding, obfuscating and liberty-taking, lying and why-o-why-ing; the resurgence of Alastair Campbell sums it up best, but you're spoilt for choice. In 2022, I wrote in this very magazine an essay called In Praise Of Straightforward Men in which I eulogised the I'm A Celebrity… contestant Mike Tindall: 'Tindall's air of calmness is so attractive that it seems neither here nor there that he looks quite like a potato.' It's this quality of good-humoured resilience that we associate with Essex Man. But Tindall, who hails from Yorkshire, proves that you don't have to be born east of the capital to qualify; while the ghastly Jamie Oliver, with his ceaseless posturing and preening, proves that you can be born there and not necessarily be an Essex Man. Tom Skinner recently made a video for X with Robert Jenrick, standing outside a pub talking about 'tool theft'. Apparently this is not as much fun as it sounds, but something which afflicts Ordinary Working People a great deal. The opportunistic air of the pairing would have once irritated me. But because the ghastly Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan are in charge at the moment, I felt warmly towards Skinner. Could he do worse than those two bozos? It's unlikely. Even if he doesn't, at least ordinary folk can recognise something of themselves in a man like Skinner. Skinner even reminds me of my first husband a little, when he was in his robust and roseate youth. So yes, I'm all for Essex Man bringing his admirable qualities to our lawless and loveless capital. Vote Skinner!
Spectator
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Bridget Phillipson can't be trusted to fix Britain's schools
If relationships between Ofsted and schools are already frayed, then we may officially be about to reach the end of the rope. Headteachers are now threatening to quit as part-time inspectors unless Ofsted delays and revises its changes to how schools and colleges are graded in England. Ofsted relies on around 900 part-time inspectors, who are mostly serving headteachers and senior leaders, to assist its 300 officers in carrying out thousands of inspections each year. The new Ofsted 'report card', set to be brought in this September, is a rushed botch job which promises semantic tweaks rather than actual reform. Ofsted was tasked with creating a new system that would reduce the pressure on schools, but this achieves the exact opposite. Rather than a single-word judgement, schools will now be graded on nine areas, with each being ranked as either causing concern, attention needed, secure, strong, or exemplary. By broadening the assessment criteria, the process will become more complex, more onerous, more demanding: once again, schools must demonstrate more and more with less and less time. By taking away academies' freedoms, Labour is embodying the worst of the Left Currently, inspectors are usually only in schools for one or two days, which is nowhere near enough time to make a trustworthy, holistic and contextualised judgement about a school. Before 2005, inspectors were there for at least a week, in teams of up to fifteen people; now, on average, there are around four. Reforming Ofsted was one of Labour's key manifesto promises, and it's easy to see why the government is reluctant to make yet another U-turn. Yet steamrollering ahead with these proposals would be a disaster: not just for teacher workload and our worrying teacher recruitment crisis, but also for the government itself. Why? Because it perpetuates this (ever-more-credible) narrative that Labour cannot be trusted with schools. Education was one of the few success stories that Labour inherited. Schools face significant challenges, but in the last decade England had climbed up international league tables, was ranked fourth in the world for reading, and boasted 86 per cent of schools ranked as either 'Good' or 'Outstanding', an increase of 18 percent. Yet rather than capitalise on this positive momentum, Labour has made a series of increasingly incoherent decisions that seem to validate their critics' accusations that they prioritise ideology over pragmatism. For example, take the clumsy top-down directives, like the decision to cut the Latin Excellence Programme mid-year, or the indecision around whether to cut funding for BTECs. Then there's the state over-reach, like limiting branded uniform items or mandating free breakfasts and tooth-brushing lessons for all primary school pupils. Labour has also continually promised to prioritise diversifying the curriculum and making it more 'accessible' when teachers across the land are screaming instead to look at more urgent issues like attendance and struggling staff levels. With the teacher shortage now at crisis point, an ambitious recruitment drive would have been an open goal for Labour. Yet where are the promised 6,500 extra teachers the government said they would recruit using the money raised by adding VAT to private school fees? Of course, this was never going to happen overnight, but we are almost a year into Keir Starmer's time in office and we still have no idea how Labour plan to reach such a pitifully small target (last year, 13,000 fewer teachers were hired than required, and each year 40,000 teachers leave the profession). In fact, Labour may have actually made the situation worse, as Bridget Phillipson wants to change the law so that all teachers have, or are working towards, qualified teacher status (QTS). We need to protect against cheap, exploited labour, but this new stipulation may discourage outstanding outsiders from joining the profession (especially career-changers looking to make a move later in life). QTS is also no gold-plated guarantee of good teaching, and the last thing schools need is more barriers to entry. There is also the thinly-veiled vendetta against academies. By taking away academies' freedoms (such as not being constrained by the national curriculum or being able to set their own pay scales), Labour is embodying the worst of the Left: its tendency towards command-and-control, justifying centralising everything in the name of 'fairness'. I am a floating voter, and last summer I was genuinely hopeful that a new government may bring a new sense of focus and direction for schools: the revolving door of education secretaries (seven in four years) had left the sector with a feeling of inertia and malaise, a yearning for a new education 'champion'. Yet Phillipson's determination to fix everything that isn't broken – and yet ignore a crucial part of the system that is (Ofsted) – is yet another timely reminder that we should be careful what we wish for.
Spectator
6 hours ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Demographics is the new dividing line on the right
It's an ominous time for a state-of-the-nation conference. Each week, the shores we defended against Hitler, Napoleon and the Spanish Armada are breached by hundreds of foreign men, while asylum seekers make up 'a significant proportion' of those currently being investigated for the grooming of British children. Earlier this month, there were days of violent anti-immigration riots in Ballymena. The five Gaza independents elected last year marked the grim rise of electoral sectarianism in the UK, a trend that is only set to accelerate. Academics and government insiders, despairing at the state of Britain, fret about looming civil war along ethnic lines. 'Now and England', a one-day conference hosted by the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation this week in Westminster, was billed as 'exploring nation, culture, and identity in a time of change and renewal'. In truth, 'a time of decline and crisis' would probably have been more apposite. At the root of each issue lies mass, unasked for immigration and the resultant demographic change. The figures are bleak. On current trends, white British are expected to be a minority in Britain by 2063, according to a recent study by Prof Matt Goodwin; the figure is even sooner for England. The Centre for Migration Control forecasts that if nothing changes, by 2035, one quarter of the population will be foreign-born, with one third of the of the population a first- or second-generation migrant. Fewer than one in four children in Greater London's schools are white British. To the predominantly younger right-wingers in attendance, along with the country, such trends are deeply alarming. Yet do political leaders on the right feel the same way? When Reform's Richard Tice was pressed on Goodwin's demographics projections recently on GB News, for instance, he scarcely seemed bothered. The question of the conference, then, was just how seriously it would take these issues. What is England without the English? Robert Jenrick gave it his best shot with the opening keynote. 'Mass immigration lies at the root of… so many of our problems', he said. Reckless border policies, his own party's included, had eroded our 'sense of home'. He reiterated calls for a legally binding cap on immigration and ECHR reform. It wasn't nothing, but a stump speech was hardly going to break the Overton window. Next came a worthwhile panel on cultural renewal, before the second keynote by Dr James Orr, Cambridge academic and Nat Con grandee. 'England is slipping away', he warned gravely, and the cause was 'hyper-liberalism'. It was a philosopher's way of saying that we had recklessly imported millions of foreigners in the vain pursuit of GDP growth. But it was notable that even this conservative luminary seemed to be dancing around the issue somewhat. It was on the final panel, 'England's Past and England's future' that things came to a head. Danny Kruger MP spoke of Bede, the common law, and the importance of homogeneity, but it all remained rather abstract. Apparently, what we needed was a 'violent rebellion against encroaching ideas' and to 'tame the technium'. A leading light of the class of 2019, Kruger seemed to have forgotten why his party was turfed out with such disgust at the last election. Robert Tombs spoke about historical memory. Rupert Lowe MP ranged widely on statism, Blair's constitutional revolution, the rape gangs and free speech, but demographic change didn't feature. We had all been waiting to hear from Thomas Skinner, the former Apprentice star and small business owner known for cheerily belting out 'Bosh!' on social media and seemingly eyeing a tilt at the London mayoralty (he wouldn't be drawn). But if he had any concerns about immigration and cultural change he never made them explicit, instead preferring populist bromides ('England is about the people'). All of which meant that by the Q&A, the young audience had grown restive. Up stepped one mid-20s professional to speak for England. He noted that while Kruger had spoken of greater localism – 'watching the barley grow' from his Wiltshire idyll – this was hardly much of a solution when demographic change has already rendered some English councils corrupt tribal fiefdoms. Being from Rotherham, he said, he would know. 'So my question is, if we reach a juncture where democracy becomes a zero-sum game between different ethnic and religious blocs, what feasible future is there for it?' It was like a dam breaking: suddenly, thunderous applause and whoops filled the 200-seat lecture theatre, the loudest we had heard all day. (Later, several people went to congratulate him.) Skinner seemed uncomfortable, while Lowe was making notes. Piling on the pressure, there followed the voice of Carl Benjamin of the Lotus Eaters, noting how the central question of demographics had loomed over the whole conference largely unsaid. He then went after Danny Kruger for a remark in his speech that 'anyone can become English', also drawing applause. The panel tried to answer, but it was clear they were on uncomfortable territory. 'I detect a very strong desire for action to restore the basis of our polity lest we lose it altogether', noted Kruger, gingerly. Rupert Lowe offered simply that people who come to Britain ought to speak English and pay their taxes; Skinner had gone out for a phone call. Tombs at least volunteered that we should ban postal voting and cousin marriage. But in his view, the best approach would be to 'clone Katharine Birbalsingh', the headmistress of the ultra-diverse and disciplinarian Michaela School in West London. If you've seen 'little girls with headscarves on reciting Kipling and singing the national anthem' he said, 'you think becoming English is quite possible if you want to do it, and if you're encouraged to do it and indeed required to do it'. Tombs then argued that being English was something that 'we all learn'. This is the nub of the issue: the largely generational divide that is becoming increasingly visible on the British right. There are many who prefer to ignore ethnicity, ancestry and demographics on the grounds that such topics are both immaterial and icky; there are even some who insist, against all the available evidence, that multiculturalism has been a success. On the other hand there are those who are unapologetic about believing that the English are an ethnic group, that England is our home, and that the more diverse our society becomes, the less happy it will be. Such sentiments would have been common sense to most people throughout human history. It is ordinary and natural to identify with one's ethnic group. It is also ordinary and natural for a people to understand itself as a people. Yet for the past 60 years, as woke moral guardrails have expanded throughout our culture, such sentiments have been rendered deeply taboo. If that taboo is now being broken, it is not before time.
