Leading article
The creeping criminalisation of causing offence
At a time when resources are scarce, the Merseyside Constabulary must have thought long and hard about its recent advertising…
Vaccines are working – so why isn’t society reopening?
When the Prime Minister sets out his ‘roadmap’ for easing Covid restrictions on Monday, it will be against a backdrop…
Universal Credit and the future of the welfare state
Amid the many failures of public policy during the Covid crisis, one success has gone largely unnoticed. The Universal Credit…
Sturgeon and the impunity of the SNP
Scottish politics tends to go through long bouts of single-party dominance. In the 19th century, the Liberals were in charge.…
Quarantine and the freedom paradox
Who would have thought, this time last year, that the British government would be planning to detain British nationals at…
To reopen schools, we need to vaccinate teachers
At the start of the Covid-19 crisis, Chris Whitty often made the point that a pandemic kills in two ways:…
A tighter lockdown risks being a less effective one
When lockdown was first proposed in March, one of the many arguments against it was that people would tolerate being…
Sir David Barclay, 1934-2021
When Sir David Barclay, along with his twin brother Sir Frederick, bought The Spectator in 2004, the magazine came as…
What have we learnt from this pandemic?
So great have been the government’s failures over Covid that it would be easy to forget to give credit where…
Ring out, wild bells: 2021 will be a year of renewal
Save for those old enough to have lived through the second world war and its immediate austere aftermath, it would…
Why we can be confident in the safety of Covid vaccines
At the beginning of the Covid crisis, some expressed the hope that a pandemic might at least bring a divided…
The government is sending the high street to an early grave
Does it matter that Debenhams and the Arcadia group have gone under this week, taking 25,000 jobs with them and…
The Conservatives are losing the fiscal high ground
Every country was blindsided by the pandemic; few governments responded to it by borrowing as much as Britain. The figures…
Denial is not a strategy, Prime Minister
The psychodrama in No. 10 is badly timed. The government has used emergency powers to ban meetings, church services and…
Boris won't be forgiven if he caves on Brexit now
It now looks increasingly likely that lockdown will end on 2 December, after all. The decision to impose further restrictions…
No one has made a clear and logical case for this lockdown
The benefit of having a lockdown announced some days in advance is the ability to savour what is about to…
A Biden victory would be no great boon for Britain
It is remarkably uncommon for a US president to fail to be re-elected. It has happened just twice in the…
We deserve to know what Sage is saying
At the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis it was easy to see why the Prime Minister was so keen to…
Britain is a successful melting pot – and the government should say so
When the Black Lives Matter protests struck London in the same week that Public Health England published a report into…
Now the Tories must make it their mission to repair the country
The centrepiece of Boris Johnson’s speech to Tory party conference this year was his Damascene conversion to the merits of…
The lockdown battle of Marseilles is a warning for Boris
From the vantage point of Downing Street, Boris Johnson may feel reassured that the further measures against Covid-19 he imposed…
Iran hasn’t earned the right to bear arms
Hard though it is to remember now, 2020 began with a very different dark cloud on the horizon. For a…
Labour’s identity crisis
On the face of it, there could scarcely be better conditions for a revival of the Labour party. Even before…
Ministers need to defy the instinct to lockdown
One of the many ironies of the past few months is that young people, while least affected by the virus,…
How Boris can get Britain back to work
This week was built up by the Prime Minister to be the moment that would mark the return of economic…
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