Society

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Shame on the eco-ghouls exploiting Hurricane Harvey

Here they come, the eco-ghouls, feasting on another natural disaster. This time it’s the floods in Houston. No sooner had Hurricane Harvey caused terrifying waters to consume entire streets and trailer parks than the eco-set was rushing in to try to make moral mileage out of it all. This is climate change in action, they decreed. This is man’s fault, they insist. Our hubris caused this watery horror, they claim, sounding positively Biblical, like Old Testament patriarchs warning the sinful populace that God will punish it with floods. There’s nothing like a natural disaster to remind us how backward environmentalist thinking is. They do it all the time. Come heatwave

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Which way will Lord’s leap?

In the rarefied circles of the sporting establishment a decision will soon be made affecting not just the future of 17 of the most hallowed acres in the land, but the very game of cricket itself. The MCC has been conducting a debate about Lord’s, primarily its redevelopment, with a nod to future expansion of the limited-overs game. This has boiled down to a binary choice for members: the MCC committee’s overwhelming recommendation, unsurprisingly, is for its own ‘Masterplan’, against the outsider, known as the Morley-Rifkind plan. It’s a rum sort of club, the MCC. Primarily devoted, it seems, to keeping people out, it has people on the inside who

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 2 September

So, that’s it then. Summer, I mean. It pushed off without ever having really arrived. There were some bizarrely scorching days in between the chill and the showers, it’s true, but I’ve barely worn my shorts, haven’t swum in the sea, only managed one day at the cricket and the lawn outside is as green as I’ve ever seen it at this time of year. Sigh. These wines have been selected by FromVineyardsDirect.com with autumn in mind, albeit with the vain hope of an Indian summer. If it’s hot, chill the Languedoc Pinot Noir; if it ain’t, then relish its earthy autumnal qualities at room temp. To the vino. I

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Lessons from Houston

The numbers are awesome. In a matter of hours, Hurricane Harvey dumped nine trillion gallons of rainfall on Houston and southeast Texas: at one stage, 24 inches of rain fell in 24 hours. Like all American cities, Houston is prepared for hurricanes and floods — but Harvey was of a different magnitude. ‘We have not seen an event like this,’ the chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, William ‘Brock’ Long declared. It led rapidly to unprecedented flooding in one of the world’s richest cities. The photos from Houston have been heartbreaking. Pensioners have been pictured sitting half-submerged in retirement homes, awaiting rescue. Some 30,000 may be forced into shelters,

Hugh Pearman

Greater Oxbridge

Oxbridge is an ivory-tower state of mind, perhaps, or at least two ancient rival universities, but how about this: in the future the word could describe a fully connected English economic region, a rival both to London and to the great midlands and northern cities. This is the aim of the National Infrastructure Commission, headed by Lord Adonis. This advisory body, a legacy of the Osborne chancellorship, wants to create a 130-mile economic corridor linking the two varsity towns and their hinterlands just beyond the Chilterns. It is running a competition to glean ideas as how to best make the new places in it. A fast cross-country road is planned,

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Let’s redo lunch

As a young sub-editor on the Times in 1926, Graham Greene, future author of The Quiet American and Brighton Rock, had his meals in the office canteen. Elevenpence bought two kippers, a pot of tea and a slice of syrup roll. Plenty to keep a man going through a long subbing shift. Is that ‘pot’ of tea not civilised, with its suggestion of several cups, of the ceremony of brewing and pouring? With a hot main and a hot pudding eaten away from one’s typewriter? Today’s office worker eats al desko. Quick dash to Pret, Eat, Itsu, Leon — it’s as if we haven’t time for more than four letters

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Why is the National Trust hounding hunters?

For the sound of his horn brought me from my bed/ And the cry of his hounds which he oft times led/ Peel’s ‘View, Halloo!’ could awaken the dead/ Or the fox from his lair in the morning. Back in the early 1800s, the legendary huntsman John Peel galloped all over the northern Lake District. His successors are the Blencathra Hunt, a ‘fell pack’ who hunt on foot, but the Blencathra may be the last to hunt on Peel territory. Much of the Lake District is owned by the National Trust, the UK’s largest private landowner, and at the next National Trust AGM, on 21 October, a motion is being

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Oh brave new gender-fluid world…

Later this year, the Advertising Standards Authority will reveal to the world their list of rules designed to wipe out ‘gender stereotyping’ in TV ads. I’m already looking forward to it because the ASA’s first thoughts on the matter, published in July, were fascinating. An ad for baby milk which showed a girl growing up to be a ballerina was deemed quite unacceptable; KFC got flack for featuring one man teasing another for not being manly enough. Stereotypes on TV contribute to ‘unequal outcomes’ in reality, explained ASA’s chief exec. Of course no one wants boys and girls to feel forced to conform — some boys are feminine, some girls

Lucy Vickery

Flavour of the month

In Competition No. 3013 you were invited to submit a poem in praise or dispraise of August.   There was a whiff of collusion about the entry this week, so many references were there to rubbish television, rubbish weather, fractious kiddies, tired gardens, traffic jams; as Katie Mallett puts it: ‘A turgid time of torpor and delay.’   But there were some sparkling, inventive turns. David Silverman was on pithy form:   Oh, thou cruellest month! If August comes, then winter Can’t be far behind.   Honourable mentions also go to A.H. Harker’s well-turned nod to Eliot, to Paul Freeman and to W.J. Webster, a rare but eloquent fan of

Wednesday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

If it feels like you’re spending a fortune on going to weddings, you probably are

As happens every bank holiday, the roads were chock-a-block this weekend with people on the move – many of them heading off to weddings at opposite ends of the country. It can sometimes feel as though weddings cost a fortune; and that’s just going to them, not even having one of your own. Perhaps the reason it feels like they cost an awful lot, though, is because they do tend to be quite expensive for wedding guests. Of course, it’s lovely to be invited to a wedding, and perhaps even the engagements drinks and hen or stag do as well. But the price does tend to hit your wallet quite

Charlotte Gill

Feminism’s obsession with equality sells women short

There was much fanfare last week when Holly Willoughby’s apparent ‘huge £200k pay rise’ meant she’d finally be earning the same as her This Morning co-host, Phillip Schofield. The closing of this pay gap was hailed by some as a victory for womankind, but it seemed a travesty to me. After all, why had there been such a mighty imbalance to begin with? What’s worse, though, was that the whole saga highlighted a bigger problem with feminism: its obsession with equality. The reality is that Willoughby isn’t equal to Schofield. She’s better than him – in a commercial sense – and therefore deserves to earn more. If you doubt me, just take a look at the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Was Kezia Dugdale forced out by the Corbynistas?

Kezia Dugdale was overseeing a revival in her party’s fortunes. She had established herself as a passionate and articulate champion of its values and even the Tories had to admit how impressive she had become in the many debates of Scottish public life. So why quit as party leader now? In her resignation letter, she says she has had a personal re-evaluation after the death of a friend: Earlier this year I lost a dear friend who taught me a lot about how to live. His terminal illness forced him to identify what he really wanted from life, how to make the most of it and how to make a

Tuesday

Ian Stewart

Quantitative easing has made houses hopelessly unaffordable

Financial crises tend to see asset prices collapsing, making housing more affordable. But it’s been different this time because the authorities in the UK, and elsewhere, countered the crisis with low interest rates and quantitative easing. By slashing the cost of borrowing and flooding the system with liquidity, these policies set out to – and succeeded in – inflating asset prices. So we have seen the UK stock market and housing market rising at roughly the same amount in the last ten years. Taken together with weak wage growth, the result is that housing in the UK (as in many other countries) has become less affordable. So what has been

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The Tower Hamlets foster child story sums up a rotten borough

Which, do you reckon, is more repellent – the decision by Tower Hamlets, a borough rotten to the marrow, to place a Christian child with two successive Muslim foster parents of uncompromising Islamic views, or its reaction to the Times’ coverage of the story yesterday, with a council spokesman saying that its fostering service “provides a loving, stable home for hundreds of children every year”? Both, I’d say, are par for the course. There’s nothing wrong in itself for a child to be placed with foster parents of a different ethnicity or religion, provided that the care is respectful of her background and religion – indeed it’s a requirement for the local

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Donald Trump’s ‘The Book of Moron’

The idea for the latest competition came courtesy of Steven Joseph, who suggested that I invite competitors to change a letter in the title of a well-known play and submit a programme note for the new production. David Silverman’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Deaf started well but ran out of steam rather halfway through. Other promising titles that didn’t quite deliver included The Cheery Orchard, A Waste of Honey and The Wind in the Pillows. And no one, regrettably, did justice to The Bugger’s Opera. I admired A.H. Harker’s Cook Back in Anger — ‘an intense investigation of the stresses that competitors in Bake Off and Masterchef bring to their

D Reilly

Mayweather vs McGregor: The naysayers were right

Do we separate the art from the artist? When Billy Jean comes on, do we tap our foot any less vigorously because of what singer Michael Jackson purportedly got up to behind closed doors? The ‘Jesus Juice’ and the out of court settlements on child molestation charges and the many photos of naked children discovered in his belongings? My guess is we don’t. Likewise, do we celebrate Floyd Mayweather’s total mastery of boxing without considering his lengthy history of assaults on women? Perhaps we do. After making mixed martial artist Conor McGregor look utterly ordinary over ten rounds of boxing in Las Vegas on Saturday night to extend his professional

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

We’re losing this cat-and-mouse terror game

I wonder how Mohammad Khan is getting on in his legal action against Virgin Atlantic. Mo — a Muslim, the clue’s in the name — was waiting to board a flight when he started ‘harmlessly’ talking about 9/11. There is no reason to believe he has any connections with extremists, but he was kicked off the flight because of security concerns and had to fly out of the UK with another airline. Although he was later offered a refund, he is now suing, claiming he was ‘racially and religiously profiled’ by the Virgin staff. ‘I know this wouldn’t have happened if I’d been a white man in his sixties,’ Mo

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Is it possible that Macron might just triumph?

The rentrée politique in France next month promises to be the most exciting in decades as the dynamic superstar president Emmanuel Macron, aged 39¾, embarks on his mission to rescue France from its recent ignominy and restore it to glory. No matter that the polls are showing the shine may already be off this particular golden youth, and that a protest movement abruptly halted his wife, Brigitte, from having a formal First Lady role. President Macron marches on into the new political season, as full of confidence in his own abilities as he has always been. Many have been the comparisons of Macron to the Sun King, Louis XIV, and

Saturday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

In pardoning Joe Arpaio, Trump has shown contempt for yet another American ideal

Donald Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio — his first exercise of the Article II prerogative — is not an act of mercy. It does not mend, it provokes. It neither asks for remorse nor enjoins an expression of regret from the recipient. It sets a man who offended society’s laws above the society that tried to hold him accountable. We are the sinners; Sheriff Joe is invited to forgive us. Thus has the President of United States contorted moral reasoning and constitutional propriety.  Arpaio is a former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, where he made a name for himself as a tough cop on the illegal immigration beat. He sought out