The Critic
The Critic is a British monthly magazine covering politics, culture and ideas, published in print and online since late 2019. The magazine has a conservative, contrarian outlook and is funded by businessman Jeremy Hosking.
What you will find
Alongside book reviews and cultural criticism, The Critic publishes numerous essays on the British debate over gender. Topics include the closure of the Tavistock gender clinic, the findings of the Cass Review, women's rights and freedom of speech for gender-critical authors.
Why it is included on this list
The magazine offers a good overview of the arguments used by British critics to assess gender policy in recent years. The articles are opinion pieces and represent one side of the debate; the term gender ideology, which appears regularly in the magazine, is itself contested. Those wishing to check the facts can find them under policy by country.
Founding and editorial team
The Critic was first published in November 2019. The initial editorial team consisted of Michael Mosbacher, former editor of Standpoint, and Christopher Montgomery, who was a strategist for the European Research Group. The current editor is Graham Stewart. Ben Sixsmith heads the online editorial team, and Sebastian Milbank is associate editor. The magazine is published monthly from London. At the end of 2020, its circulation was 19,654 copies, of which 8,950 were paid for and 10,704 distributed free of charge.
Owner and political outlook
Jeremy Hosking is a financier from the City of London. He donated to Reform UK, the Conservative Party and Laurence Fox's Reclaim Party. The magazine opposes net-zero emissions targets and what it calls wokeness. The opening editorial in the first issue took aim at a closed-minded approach in universities and established institutions. Contributors include David Starkey, Peter Hitchens, Douglas Murray and Toby Young. In July 2020, The Critic retained historian Starkey as a columnist after he had apologised for a remark about black people. The magazine presented this as resistance to cancel culture.
How to use and assess this source
The Critic is an opinion magazine with a single funder who is himself politically active as a donor. The essays are useful for understanding the reasoning of British critics, for example regarding facilities for women. Facts from an essay are best checked against the underlying report or court ruling. Comparable British opinion magazines on this list are The Spectator and UnHerd. Spiked also belongs in that group.