The Spectator

Barometer | 17 May 2018

Gammon vs gammon

Controversy raged over whether calling an angry, white, right-wing man a ‘gammon’ is racist. The insult is first recorded in Charles Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby in 1838.   But what of people really called Gammon?
— There are about 2,500 Britons with that surname, which originated in Cornwall. Their politics are not all right-wing: in the 2017 Cornwall county council elections a Jacquie Gammon stood for the Lib Dems.
— In the US, two Gammons are recorded as delegates at National Conventions: Lemuel Gammon representing Colorado for the Democrats in 1916 and Gussie Gammon representing North Carolina for the Republicans in 2008.
— Not all Gammons are white: 7.3 per cent of those in the US are African-American and 2.2 per cent are Hispanic.


Caught at sea

Operation Atalanta, the EU’s mission to tackle piracy off Somalia and the Horn of Africa, may relocate its headquarters from London to Spain after Brexit. How is the fight against piracy going? Incidents worldwide have fallen in recent years:

2013: 264
2014: 245

2015: 246

2016: 191

2017: 180

The waters off Somalia are far from the world’s most dangerous. Incidents in 2017 closest to the coast of:

Indonesia: 43
Venezuela: 12

Nigeria: 33
Bangladesh: 11

Philippines: 22
Somalia: 5


Source: ICC International Maritime Bureau

Neglected diseases

The government announced an extra £65 million in research funding for brain cancer in memory of Tessa Jowell. How much research money goes to cancer compared with other big killer diseases?

£ spent per 1,000 life-years lost
Cancer 482
Heart disease 266

Dementia 166

Stroke 71

£ per £1m of health costs
Cancer 129,269
Heart disease 73,153

Dementia 4,882

Stroke 8,745

Source: Nuffield Department of Population Health

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