Society

Using fear to sell products is a powerful strategy. Unsurprisingly, many financial firms have come to rely on fear to fatten their bottom lines. But in 2017, there’s only one word to describe fear-based marketing: desperate. Firms selling pensions, investments, and financial products aimed at the over-50s, such as funeral plans, have traditionally been the worst offenders. The insurance industry also knows a thing or two about using fear to sell. After all, with the exception of a mandated product like car insurance, the raw motivation for buying insurance products is largely fear. None of us plan to drop our iPhones, and yet we buy gadget insurance, just in case.

For technology manufacturers, healthcare is already big business, and, with an ageing population increasingly comfortable with technologies that would’ve been unthinkable even a decade ago, the opportunities to innovate are only going to increase. The Future Health Index, a global report commissioned by Philips, supports the fact that it is not just the UK’s younger generation that are embracing these technologies. However are these products – from popular or trendy FitBits to state-of-the-art imaging equipment – really going to revolutionise the country’s medical care? And will the NHS require a head to toe change of ethos to accommodate them? Spectator editor Fraser Nelson is joined to discuss all this by

Dear Owen, I hear you have finally broken your silence on Venezuela. With that in mind, here are a few questions which you have not answered: 1) In 2008, Human Rights Watch was expelled from the country by force. Why didn’t you feel the need to mention this in any article you wrote? 2) Who paid for that ‘Election Observer’ trip you went on in 2012? 3) Did it ever cross your mind from 2012 onwards that Hugo Chavez referring to Kim Jong-il as a ‘comrade’ he mourned might be a warning sign? 4) Did Chavez’s hero-worship of Fidel Castro and claims that he wanted to turn Venezuela into ‘Venecuba’ ever cause you concerns?

I have been out of the country for a little while, doing my bit to support the Greek economy. I return to find a most surprising subject for the latest two minutes of hate. Lest anyone think I’m just carrying water for a friend I suppose I should say at the outset that I don’t know Kevin Myers, and don’t believe I’ve ever met him. But like many other people I have admired his writing over the years, and think that his book ‘Watching the Door: cheating death in 1970’s Belfast’ is one of the best memoirs of the Troubles that I know. Brave, funny, moving and profound, it is

‘Some wine? How about a beer? Shall we settle into a good old pub?’ I make these suggestions to Ukip’s interim leader, Steve Crowther, as we meet in central London, but he opts for a quiet bistro where he orders a cup of tea. He has a dapper suit, a ruddy, forceful face and a white beard of neatly trimmed bristles. His rat-a-tat laugh resounds across the bar like a well-oiled machine gun. Our intended subject is the Ukip leadership election (hustings this month, results on 30 September), but the n-word elbows its way through and claims our attention. The negotiations. Crowther declines to criticise David Davis and his team,

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopia rules mankind in a way that renders the masses compliant consumers. The apex of medical mind control in the book is soma: a tranquilliser offering ‘a holiday from reality’. Huxley describes how its users’ ‘eyes shone (and)…the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles’.  Huxley’s vision was intended as a nightmare but PricewaterhouseCoopers appear to have taken it as an inspiration. Their new report, Workforce of the Future, predicts what the labour market could look like in 2030. As you might expect, automation takes the starring role and a survey of 10,000 workers across the world presents mixed

The great Mikhail Botvinnik excoriated chess played at fast time limits. Botvinnik believed that classical chess at time limits of, for example, 40 moves per player in two and a half hours each, was the purest expression of the art and science of chess. Radically faster alternatives cheapened and debased the thought processes, he believed. Of course, he also relished adjournments — now outlawed because of the possibility of computer analysis.   Modern chess faces the problem of excessive draws bedevilling elite events at classical time controls. As rapid and blitz chess have developed their own official ranking and rating lists as well as their own world championships (Sergei Karjakin