The Spectator

Terror at the gates: John Power on the dangers of Shabana Mahmood’s new asylum scheme 🔸 Douglas Murray: The joke’s over for Walliams and Brand 🔸 Tim Shipman: Pat McFadden’s Neet solution 🔸 James Heale: Will Farage go down with Trump? 🔸 Olivia Potts: The polyamorous side to pineapples Read more | spectator.com

Having been told by a colleague last year that I was 'The Spectator's fiercest Trump critic' (it was a less competitive field back then) I worried whether I would pass unchallenged into the US or languish in a cell at Philadelphia airport, owning up to phrases such as 'the madness that has overtaken America' trawled from a deep-state database. There was no immigration queue because there were few arriving foreigners, but the hostile tone of the 'purpose of your visit' question had me clenching in anticipation of the rubber glove. Anxiety was unfounded: next came 'Have a nice stay!' and two hours later I was dining at a pavement table of the Parc bistro in leafy Rittenhouse Square. We might have been in provincial France, except no one had set fire to the nearby City Hall. I attend a gathering in the US every other November, in the week of national elections. After Trump's 2024 victory, I was amazed to find business as usual in Atlanta, even though Georgia was a swing-state battleground. Los Angeles in 2008 felt different, but Obama-mania swiftly evaporated. The truth is that most Americans care a great deal about the price of gasoline and groceries but a lot less than media coverage might suggest about which party wins federal power. ✍️ Martin Vander Weyer Article | spectator.com/article/americ… | @VanderWeyer

Could Labour's proposed conversion therapy legislation threaten free speech and leave parents at risk of criminal prosecution? Lara explains how the proposed Conversion Practices Bill could leave parents facing up to five years in prison if their child feels 'serious alarm or distress' at being refused a breast binder, a chosen name or a referral to a puberty blocker trial. Watch in full | youtu.be/YJ9SrkWek0M @michaelgove @lara_e_brown

Salman Abedi's family fled from Gaddafi and was given refuge in Britain. Our generosity towards his family did not stop him from blowing up 22 people and injuring hundreds of others at the Manchester Arena. Huda Ammori, born in Bradford to a Palestinian father who was displaced in 1967, co-founded Palestine Action, which has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation while a Supreme Court appeal is pending. She has previously accused Britain of condoning 'the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people'. The 2023 Shawcross Review into Prevent recommended extending the Prevent Duty – which requires specified public authorities to 'help prevent the risk of people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism' – to immigration and asylum. The Conservative government accepted this in principle but to date no action has been taken. This means there is no legal responsibility for those working in the asylum system to flag people who are at risk of radicalisation. ✍️ John Power Article | spectator.com/article/terror…

Jensen Huang runs Nvidia, the corporate giant that sells the chips the United States counts on to beat China in artificial intelligence. American intelligence agencies, the New York Times reports, believed that a woman close to him had been recruited by China's spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, to collect intelligence on him. Officials who saw the intelligence believed the two were having an affair. She also worked for one of his company's biggest customers in Asia. Alice Huang was an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore company that rents out the use of Nvidia's AI chips to Chinese firms. Its Malaysian affiliate bought at least $4.8 billion of Nvidia-equipped hardware in under two years, according to trade records. On 8 November, Huang admitted to his staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife, though he didn't name the woman. The New York Times reports that he told Nvidia's board it was her. ✍️ Geoffrey Cain Article | spectator.com/article/the-to…

The PM's influence is also a factor in Milburn's recommendation that the responsibility for running his schemes should fall on local authorities, since they are better connected to local businesses. 'That gets away from the problem about Whitehall departments working with one another properly and in a joined-up way,' says McFadden. None of this will remove welfare as a political issue. On Tuesday, Kemi Badenoch outlined details of how the Tories would slash £36.1 billion from the benefits budget, most of it by excluding foreign nationals and those claiming for mild mental health conditions or routine back or joint pain. McFadden believes voters will buy a more nuanced argument. 'I look at my opponents, many of whom didn't change the system, running around with ever-greater claimed numbers of welfare savings. ✍️ Tim Shipman Article | spectator.com/article/it-is-… | @ShippersUnbound

Lara recalls her earliest memory of Russell Brand when she watched an anti-drugs video he made for schools, finding him unkempt, intensely irritating and unfunny. Watch in full | youtu.be/YJ9SrkWek0M @michaelgove @lara_e_brown

The Prime Minister slipped up in several parts of his statement: he almost annexed Krakow to Ukraine and, even more worryingly, nearly promoted Sir Chris Bryant to home secretary. Mrs Badenoch, perhaps smelling blood, asked why it was that the PM – a supposed critic of neoliberalism – had entrusted his ten-year plan to the junior Excel monkeys of the Boston Consulting Group. In his reply Mr Burnham was back on firmer ground; namely, meaningless statements of intent without any firm commitment to action. 'I'm determined to give stability and leadership,' he warbled. He did claim that it was his aim to present the plan to the House before it rises for its festive recess. What a Christmas present that is: MPs must be on the 'very naughty' list. ✍️ Madeline Grant Article | spectator.com/article/burnha… | @Madz_Grant

Our governing class has a problem with history. It perhaps goes without saying that we are led by an interrelated subset of the myopic, the self-indulgent and the self-interested, all lacking hinterland. Imagine the Junkers if they did Parkrun. But it bears repeating that history poses a particular challenge to them, exposing the insanity of much of their worldview. Nothing illustrates this more than Lisa Nandy's recent blundering attempt to use Remembrance Sunday to champion Labour's EU reset – specifically, the decision to rejoin the Erasmus scheme. In a press release, the Culture Secretary announced 'as we mark Remembrance Sunday, Erasmus+ will give a new generation the chance to build connections across Europe' which, she added, 'veterans' service helped to secure'. ✍️ Madeline Grant Article | spectator.com/article/the-gr… | @Madz_Grant

The battlefield is said now to have entered a 'mothership' era, where larger carrier drones transport and release smaller 'parasite' drones deep behind enemy lines. The zone, once safe for field hospitals, logistics hubs and troops, is now lethal. Soldiers move only during bad weather. Into this scene now inject GM animals, vast muscled and armoured dogs and wolves with enhanced senses, acting in tandem with lethal drones, hunting humans. You can't jam a dog's signal, or knock its satellite out. World War 3: Megafauna Strikes Back. Once upon a time that would have been a joke. ✍️ Mary Wakefield Article | spectator.com/article/get-re… | @MaryWakefield

The bogey is off. In recent years Britain's economy has experienced an annoying trend: growth in the first half of the year which completely died off in the second. Not so this year. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show GDP expanded by 0.7 per cent between July and September. Over the last year it means the economy is 1.9 per cent larger. The growth in the last quarter was made up of a 0.9 per cent expansion in services and 0.1 per cent in production. The construction sector, however, shrank by 0.7 per cent. ✍️ Michael Simmons Article | spectator.com/article/britai… | @Simmons__

What could our government do, should a crisis of confidence in Britain's creditworthiness hit us out of the blue next year? This may not be the likelihood, but anxiety in the bond markets must be a possibility real enough to trouble those in government who plan for contingencies. Imagine that Sir Stephen Timms's or Alan Milburn's proposals for solving the problem of our almost a million Neets, however tentative these prove to be, face a mutiny on Labour's back benches. Or imagine (more likely) parliamentary trouble with the government's Spending Review, scheduled for next year. Indeed, trouble may already have started: it now looks as if this has been postponed until the autumn. ✍️ Matthew Parris Article | spectator.com/article/no-one…

Well, here we are, Q4 2026, and I am at the supercomputer site in Loughton, Essex. I don't know what a 'live' supercomputer site is meant to look like, but I don't think it is this: a barren canvas of rubble, enclosed by fencing, with weeds poking through the concrete. No one I ask has seen anything happen here, but a passer-by tells me he did see a digger once. The company has promised that the £2 billion investment will result in 250 jobs, but there seems to be just one at the moment: a man on his phone sitting in a VW Golf by the entrance. It is almost two years since Keir Starmer promised to 'mainline AI into the veins of the UK'. The hyperbole was no doubt meant to hammer home just how earnest, how effusive, how keenly felt the government's techno-zealotry was. ✍️ Angus Colwell Article | spectator.com/article/britai… | @AngusColwell

The Free Speech Union (FSU) has fought more than 7,000 cases since 2020 and, frankly, I thought I'd seen it all when it comes to the police overreacting to an 'offensive' remark. Surely, the Met dispatching five armed officers to arrest Graham Linehan when he got off a flight from America for a tweet is the absolute nadir? But no. We were in court last week defending a man who was being prosecuted for saying something verboten while driving his car. The only person who heard it was his four-year-old son, yet he was charged with 'threatening or abusive behaviour' with a racial aggravator. The story begins in April last year, when our member – let's call him Craig – was driving his son back to their home in Glasgow after a day out at an amusement park in Falkirk. ✍️ Toby Young Article | spectator.com/article/beware… | @toadmeister

The Spectator does not have partisan allegiances, but it does have household gods. There are thinkers whose work imbues our reasoning – few more important than Isaiah Berlin. Berlin's principle that a culture of liberty would involve a recognition that there are incommensurable goods is one of the bases of a civilised society. Some freedoms – of religious belief and speech – will be in contention with society's desire to advance or protect the rights of others. Statesmanship consists of the arbitration between these goods, and for those who believe in liberalism, like The Spectator, the bias will always be in favour of freedom. That is why this magazine believes that in the realm of personal sexual relations, adults should be free to choose how they live and whom they love. David Cameron's legislation to guarantee marriage rights to gay people was an extension of liberty. It was brave and right. ✍️ The Spectator Article | spectator.com/article/labour…

Another dismal gun massacre swung the bright but brief searchlights of news towards Poland a week ago. I could write a whole separate article on these rather frequent murders and the foolish attempts to claim they are political when they usually aren't. But my point is different. Much more important things are happening in Poland and nobody in Britain pays much attention. The country is locked in a dispute between parties and ideologies which lays bare a new (or more accurately restored) political dynamic of historic significance. This conflict led Poland's president recently to abort a foreign trip mid-flight, in order to return home and storm through police lines into a courthouse to protest at what the government of his own country was up to. If Emmanuel Macron had ordered his presidential Dassault to turn back in the middle of a foreign visit to do hand-to-hand battle with domestic opponents, we'd pay attention. But when the same thing happens in a country at least as important to our continent's security, we ignore it. ✍️ Peter Hitchens Article | spectator.com/article/why-th…

Many of Restore's cheerleaders paddle in the internet's murkier waters, while Reform dismisses the party as a Tory plot. But it would be foolish to pretend that Restore has no appeal: MPs of all parties report it coming up on the doorstep. In July, I walked the streets of Clacton with Farage. A smiling young couple with children came to one door. 'I like that Rupert Lowe,' said the husband. Restore leaflets went out here a fortnight ago, ahead of a potential by-election: 'Clacton deserves better than the circus Farage and Reform have put its residents through.' Among Conservatives, there is now hope of an inflection point. The party's next steps rely on targeting two groups: voters earning £50,000 upwards and centre-right women. Internal Tory discussions about targeting Reform sometimes focus on perceptions, however subjective, of respectability, service and that old British bugbear, class. This is something the Tories believe potentially divides Restore voters from Reform. ✍️ James Heale Article | spectator.com/article/will-n… | @JAHeale

The age we are in has two especially dangerous traps awaiting its comedians. The first is that in-group comedy is now virtually dead. Thanks to smartphones and social media, an 'in-group' joke is likely to be discovered at any moment by an 'out-group' for whom the joke was never intended, with the result that members of the out-group will try to stop the in-joke. That is probably the case with Chappelle's Charlie Kirk joke, though Madison Square Garden does seem quite a large venue to try out an 'in-joke'. The second and even more perilous aspect is that the public doesn't know what it wants and probably never did, as evidenced by the evaporation of Brand's and Walliams's one-time fans. ✍️ Douglas Murray Article | spectator.com/article/the-jo… | @DouglasKMurray

Joe Martin is a member of the Welsh Parliament who finds himself in a pickle: he's been banned from speaking in the Welsh Parliament. The Senedd's presiding officer Huw Irranca-Davies handed down the ban after the Reform MS asked the Welsh Government to address 'demographic replacement of white British people'. Minister Heledd Fychan objected to the premise, telling the chair: 'We cannot differentiate between people of different religions, different sexuality, different skin colour. We are a government for everyone here in Wales.' Irranca-Davies, elected for the Labour party, generously allowed that 'it is always possible to raise legitimate policy matters in relation to immigration', but said Martin's question had been 'unnecessarily provocative and deliberately offensive' and had 'detracted from the dignity of the Senedd'. ✍️ Stephen Daisley Article | spectator.com/article/let-re… | @JournoStephen

A Nigerian woman who watched Boko Haram militants kill her husband after he identified himself as a Christian will be joining a delegation today delivering a petition with over one million signatories to 10 Downing Street. The letter is calling for 'greater protection for Christian communities in sub-Saharan Africa, justice for victims and help for survivors rebuilding their lives'. In October 2014, Afordia and her husband were travelling by car in Adamawa State, in north-east Nigeria, when men in uniform stopped them. The couple initially mistook the men for Nigerian soldiers before armed men emerged from hiding and ordered them out of the vehicle. ✍️ Hardeep Singh Article | spectator.com/article/why-do…