Society

Thursday

Sophie Ibbotson

A watery wilderness

There is a distinct nip in the air as I slide quietly from the riverbank into the water. November may be the start of Botswana’s summer, but in the early morning a fleece is still an essential item of clothing. The hippo have finished their nightly wanderings, returning along the ‘hippo highway’ to their watery abodes. The birds have just woken up, stretching and warming their wings in the sunlight. Their squawks and occasional warning calls mingle with the rustling of the grasses and reeds and the gentle slap of the water against the sides of my canoe. The Gomoti River is at the very edge of Botswana’s Okavango Delta.

Patrick J. Deneen

The end of liberalism

In recent days we’ve seen inspiring demands for liberty from the oppressed citizens of Iran. Our situation in the West today seems the opposite: too much ill-used liberty combined with a soft authoritarianism that we have largely welcomed.  We buy what we want, throw away what we no longer desire, and allow the debt to accumulate.  We enjoy Caligulaesque sexual liberty but no longer marry nor have children.  We eat until we are obese, legalise drugs that take the edge off, consume a degraded popular culture that leaves us stupefied, and alter our brainscapes through unceasing consumption of online ephemera.  Amid these seemingly unlimited personal choices, we can see the

The Spectator

to 2338: Fone

The unclued lights are former and current F1 teams.   First prize Ronald Morton, Basingstoke, Hants Runners-up Revd J. Thackray, Ipswich, Suffolk; Joanne Aston, Norby, Thirsk

David Butterfield

A reason to be optimistic in 2018 – from The Spectator in 1847

2018 will doubtless be a stiff test for the UK – but there’s nothing new in that. When The Spectator ushered in 1847, for instance, its founder and editor R.S. Rintoul (1787-1858) used that year’s opening column to outline the looming challenges and reaffirm the country’s urgent need of strong and capable leadership: The New Year opens for England with heavy clouds in the sky, but with no sunless horizon. Never did the country enter upon a year with more work to be done. Ireland alone presents a task without precedent: England has there to reorganize an old country… The progress of the new Free-trade policy has to be looked

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

There’s one common thread in all these stories about Bitcoin’s success…

Over Christmas, Bitcoin has continued to generate crazy headlines — and crazy profits for those smart enough to sell at the peaks. The price tumbled from above $19,000 to below $13,000 but it did not crash out of sight, as sceptics continue to predict. Meanwhile, from Japan we hear that the ‘wealth effect’ of a million Bitcoin holders who believe themselves richer could be the turbo-boost to consumer spending that Japan’s flaccid economy has been seeking for decades. US news sources express concern about the environmental impact of global computer operations related to Bitcoin, which now consume as much electricity as three million American households or the whole of Denmark.

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Feminists complaining at being called ‘honey’ are a tiresome bunch

Not surprisingly, feminists lost no time this week weighing in behind Emily Lucinda Cole, a Virgin Trains passenger who took great exception to being addressed by a rail employee ‘with that hideously patronising word women shudder at in contexts such as these: ‘honey’’. And indeed, the episode she complained about did suggest that the term wasn’t altogether friendly. When she told her ticket inspector she took exception to the brusque way he checked her ticket (and yes, I’m wondering about that), and that she’d be complaining to the bosses, he told her: ‘You go ahead, honey’. He may have been an overworked Virgin employee fed up with middle-class girls getting

Steerpike Steerpike

Tom Bradby’s bad day at the office

Oh dear. Coming back to work after the Christmas break is hard going at the best of times. So, spare a thought for Tom Bradby, who had a bad day at the office yesterday. The ITV News at Ten presenter was forced to cut the nightly broadcast short after the fire alarm went off. Bradby explained why the programme would have to be cut short – before evacuating the building. He then returned once the incident had been ruled to be a false alarm. As they say, keep calm and carry on…

Bruce Anderson

Evening service

It was a culinary triumph. My hosts do not spend much time in the UK, and are determined to entertain stylishly during their visits. This Christmas they succeeded, blending tradition and radicalism. The planning began in Pall Mall on the third lunching-day in advent. We addressed the major strategic question: satiation. After bird plus pud, there is barely the energy to fall asleep in front of an old film and the rest of the day can be unsatisfactory. In recent years, I have noticed a tendency to deal with this problem by de-fanging the pudding. There is a new girlie-man breed of Christmas puds which lack the embrandied pomp of

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

How to make economists fight like ferrets in a sack

One of the funniest passages of writing I have read in the past few years appears within the pages of Richard Thaler’s memoir Misbehaving. He describes what happens when the University of Chicago economics faculty moves to a new location. The economists simply have to agree among themselves who will occupy each office in the new building. Now in theory, at any rate, this should be a breeze. You have a group of people who should be among the most rational in the world; their discipline, economics, defines itself as dedicated to the study of the ‘allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity’: here is a problem tailor-made for economists

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Nine reasons to be cheerful this year

Since it’s the first week of the New Year I’m going to pretend the bad stuff isn’t happening and focus on the lovely, life–affirming things I learned (or relearned) last year. Here are some of them.   1. There is hope for the youth. Yes, I know we think they’re all grisly little Marxist snowflakes who are going to vote in Jeremy Corbyn, but this is largely a product of brainwashing and poor governance, rather than fundamental malignity. In fact, some of the kids I encountered last year have given me great hope: check out, for example, the two teenagers I interviewed for my podcast, Sebastian Shemirani and Steven Edginton.

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Why cryptocurrencies are the answer

The craze for cryptocurrency can be explained by a host of factors: the allure of getting rich quick; the attraction of off-the-grid accountancy for malefactors like tax evaders and drug dealers (though Bitcoin is traceable); the glamour of the new. Despite blockchain currencies’ wild volatility thus far, I’d still posit that the more underlying attraction is to a reliable store of value. Bitcoin investors may not recognise their motivation as such, but the impulse behind computer-generated currency is revolutionary: to take the production and control of money away from government. Now that we live in a world of 100 per cent fiat currencies — backed by nothing — governments can

The Spectator

Nothing new at New Year

From The Spectator, 2 January 1847: The New Year opens for England with heavy clouds in the sky, but with no sunless horizon. Never did the country enter upon a year with more work to be done. Ireland alone presents a task without precedent: England has there to reorganize an old country… The progress of the new free-trade policy has to be looked after. The public law of Europe is unsettled, and an eye must be kept on that. But with all this Herculean amount of work, the country never had better means of performance. The very urgency and momentous importance of the tasks compel earnest zeal. The decay of

Mark Mason

Read ’em and weep

Subtitles are taking over the world. It’s increasingly rare these days for a video clip to be free of those irritating little bars along the bottom, rendering before your eyes what your ears are coping with quite easily, thank you very much. That interview you clicked on from Twitter? There are the speaker’s words subtitled below. That report on a news website? There are the subtitles again, spelling out everything from the presenter’s narration to the sound effects in the background. Even pop songs have their lyrics displayed. It’s driving me mad. ‘Don’t look at the subtitles,’ comes the reply. But that’s the really annoying thing: you have to look

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Is it possible to defend the Persimmon boss’s nine-digit bonus? Well, let me try

New Year’s Eve was certainly a day for celebration in the household of 53-year-old Jeff Fairburn, chief executive of the housebuilder Persimmon. He was due to receive the first £50 million tranche of shares under a bonus scheme that has won him total entitlements of £110 million. He must have done a terrific job, you’ll be thinking, if shareholders value him so highly. But in fact his winnings (plus £400 million shared by 150 other Persimmon executives) are the freak outcome of a 2012 scheme that was tied to the company’s share price and dividend record but failed to include a cap on how high rewards might go. Then in April

Jon Moynihan

Falling short | 4 January 2018

Hedge funds have already spotted it: Jim Mellon’s latest book, Juvenescence, reviews the new science that will lengthen our lives by 20 years. Through regeneration (stem cell) and repair (DNA) technologies, we’ll soon be living healthily and happily to 110 or more. How soon? Who knows. But the repercussions will be enormous. Major insurance companies will go bust; speculators will make a fortune shorting them; 90-year-olds who bought annuities will become destitute when their annuity provider fails; there will have to be a total rethink of the nation’s state pension age. The annuity recipients; those without savings; company pension funds (many of which are already in negative cash flow): all

Lucy Vickery

Best foot forward

In Competition No. 3029 you were invited to provide a new year’s resolution (or more than one) in verse.   Woody Guthrie’s 1943 ‘new years rulin’s’ have considerable charm: ‘Dont get lonesome; stay glad; dream good; shine shoes; wash teeth if any…’ But perhaps it was Nietzsche who inspired Basil Ransome-Davies’s entry. In 1882, he resolved to become a yes-man: ‘I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers… I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!’   David Silverman’s spin on Thomas Hood’s ‘No!’ was nice. Alanna Blake, George Simmers

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

There’s a much bigger crisis in the NHS than the winter pressures

Whose fault is the current NHS crisis? Today Jeremy Hunt apologised to patients whose operations have been cancelled as a result of serious pressures on hospitals. There are ‘major incidents’ at 16 hospital trusts, and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine is warning that patients who do end up in crowded and chaotic emergency departments ‘are much more likely to have a poorer outcome and even die as a result of their experience’. The Health Secretary said the current situation was ‘absolutely not what I want’, while Theresa May argued that ‘the NHS has been better prepared for this winter than ever before’. The government has not met Simon Stevens’

Sam Leith Sam Leith

John Murray announces new prize for non-fiction in association with The Spectator

John Murray – the publisher of Byron, Goethe, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin, inter alia – turns 250 this year. This week, they’re launching – in association with The Spectator (a stripling at 190-odd) – a new international prize for non-fiction. Entrants, who must be previously unpublished in book form, are invited to submit an essay of up to 4,000 words on the theme of ‘Origin’ (to be interpreted as each writer chooses), together with a proposal for how it might be turned into a book. The winning entry will be published in The Spectator (in print and online), and its author awarded a £20,000 publishing contract with John Murray

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

It’s time to stop burying hard truths about the NHS

The philosophy of the National Health Service, as stated on its website, is that ‘good healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth’. This is why, in theory, Britain’s health service ‘covers everything’. Not this month. Last night, NHS hospitals were made to cancel all non-emergency surgeries until February in order to divert resources to this year’s flu epidemic, which is causing mass overcrowding. As a result, outpatient clinics will be shut down for weeks, and 50,000 appointments have been cut from the schedule. 50,000. Even in today’s world, where statistics are everywhere that number cannot pass by fleetingly. 50,000 patients, often in pain as they wait for a hip replacement,