The Critic
The Critic is a British conservative monthly magazine on politics and culture, published since November 2019. The magazine was funded by the businessman Jeremy Hosking (source).
What you can find
The magazine publishes opinion pieces on gender care, including on the closure of the Tavistock gender clinic and on the Cass Review; one example is the piece The Scottish Tavistock.
Why it is on this list
The magazine gives an impression of the arguments with which British critics assess gender policy of recent years. The pieces are opinionated and represent one side of the debate. If you want to check the facts, you will find them under policy by country.
Founding and editorial team
The Critic first appeared in November 2019. The first 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 leads the online team and Sebastian Milbank is associate editor (source). The magazine is published monthly from London. According to circulation figures for November and December 2020, circulation was 19,654 copies, of which 8,950 were paid and 10,704 were distributed free (source).
Owner and political colour
Jeremy Hosking is a financier from the City of London. He is a donor to Reform UK, to the Conservative Party and to Laurence Fox's Reclaim Party. The magazine is regarded as an opponent of net-zero climate targets and of what it calls wokeness (source). The opening editorial of the first issue targeted a closed way of thinking at universities and established institutions. Contributors include David Starkey, Peter Hitchens, Douglas Murray and Toby Young. In July 2020 The Critic kept the historian Starkey on as a columnist after he had apologised for a remark about Black people; the magazine spoke out against cancel culture in doing so.
How to use and weigh this source
The Critic is an opinion magazine with a single funder who is himself politically active as a donor. The British newspaper Morning Star called the magazine, together with Standpoint and UnHerd, "rich men's megaphones" (source). The essays are useful for getting to know the reasoning of British critics, for example on provisions for women. Facts from an essay are best checked in the underlying report or court ruling. Comparable British opinion magazines on this list are The Spectator and UnHerd. Spiked also belongs in that group.