Society

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

I nourish my dream of a fat pill

As good conversation should, the talk meandered from the serious to the playful. One of the serious topics was overseas aid. A generation ago, Peter Bauer, as fine a scholar as ever, addressing himself to that subject, produced a lapidary dictum: ‘Much overseas aid is a subsidy from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.’ Recent DFID ministers such as Alan Duncan and Andrew Mitchell insist that there have been improvements. Others are sceptical. Announcing that we will spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid can create a moral hazard. There is pressure to spend the money: less pressure to ensure that it is wisely

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A vicious reaction to a very bad word

Having a nigger in the woodpile and a skeleton in the closet are closely related problems, although subtly different. In the first case it is a problem which is lurking, hitherto unseen, but which may pop up very soon to cause mayhem and mischief. In the second case it is a problem which has been hidden from public gaze quite deliberately but which may yet emerge, clanking and rattling, to ruin one’s life. Both terms are capable of giving grave offence. The first because it probably dates from the time at which some white people enslaved some black people (about 150 years, give or take), as opposed to the time

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

To buy cheap art, buy architecture

Of the 375,000 listed buildings in England only 2.5 per cent are Grade I. Half are churches; many are otherwise uninhabitable, such as Nelson’s Column or the Royal Opera House. There are perhaps only 2,500 Grade I listed buildings in England in which you can feasibly live: these include Buckingham Palace and the Sutherland gaff. Eighteen years ago, when we had twins and decided to move out of London, my wife discovered a four-bedroom apartment in the roof of a Robert Adam house a mile outside the M25. To our astonishment, it was barely more expensive than ordinary housing of similar size nearby. I recently asked my neighbour, an economist,

Simon Barnes

Is Johanna Konta British?

Have you been cheering for the excellent Johanna Konta at Wimbledon? Go, Jo! Or should that be Go, Yo? Johanna (pronounced Yo-harner) was born to Hungarian parents in Sydney and came to Britain when she was 14; her parents moved to Eastbourne while she went to train in Barcelona. She became a British citizen in 2012. Is she really British, then? Or is she a Plastic Brit, exploiting our great nation for what she can get? Greg Rusedski came from Canada to represent Britain at tennis in 1995, aged 22, even wearing an ill-advised Union Jack bandana. The Lawn Tennis Association (Britain’s national federation) later tried to persuade Novak Djokovic

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The Taylor report is wrong to suggest cash in hand is fundamentally dishonest

Would a cashless world be a better place, morally or fiscally? Matthew Taylor, in his relatively uncontroversial review of work practices and the ‘gig economy’ published on Tuesday, proposed that the £6 billion ‘cash in hand’ economy of payment for window cleaning, gardening, leaflet distributing and similar simple tasks should be regularised and brought into the tax net through the use of apps and other digital payment platforms. Would that really be a good thing? The first point to be made is that it’s probably going to happen anyway over the next decade — at least if we go the way of Sweden. There, cards and phones are almost universally

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Let’s keep up the Moggmentum

‘We need to talk about why the internet is falling in love with Jacob Rees-Mogg, because it’s not OK,’ warns a recent post on the Corbynista website The Canary. Its anxiety is not misplaced. Polite, eloquent, witty, well-informed, coherent, principled — Jacob Rees-Mogg is the antithesis of almost every-thing the Labour party stands for under its current populist leadership. And far from putting off voters, it seems to be a winning formula. Even sections of the elusive and generally very left-wing youth vote appear to be warming to the idea that our next prime minister shouldn’t be (alleged) man-of-the-people Corbyn but yet another plummy, Old Etonian millionaire… This ought to

Sebastian Vella

Letter to my uncle (contd)

Dear Uncle James Thank you for your thought-provoking comments on my last letter (8 July). I accept that personality played a part in my deciding who to vote for. However it also seems to me that your own criticism of the Labour party is centred around personality — i.e. based on Jeremy Corbyn’s personal view of socialism rather than the actual policies put forward by the Labour party, which are not socialist. I agree that socialism hasn’t worked in the examples you’ve given. However, I don’t think that this is relevant to us today since a Labour government would not turn the UK into a socialist dictatorship. When it comes

David Adams

Free as a jailbird

Food programmes are having a strange effect on me: I watch them and feel nauseated. Masterchef, The Great British Bake Off, Great British Menu, half a dozen others. In the past I’ve watched and loved them all, sharing the exhilarating triumphs and gut-wrenching despair of the trembling hopefuls. A thousand times I’ve held my breath with them, waiting for the axe to fall: ‘The person leaving us this week is… Wendy.’ Cue the tears and blotchy, shell-shocked face — and that’s just me. But lately something’s changed. I noticed myself finding the way the experts and chefs talked about the food vaguely distasteful, and the feeling grew stronger. It came

Jonathan Mirsky

The lesson of Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo, China’s only Nobel Peace Prize winner, has died, eight years into his 11-year prison term. He was the greatest champion of democracy in a country where there are many others also detained by the Communist Party, which insists those convicted are not dissidents but criminals. Tried in 2009 for subversion, Liu had just been moved under police guard into a hospital and diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer. While his original sentence aroused an international outcry, followed by the award of the prize in Oslo — where his chair was empty — the news of his fatal illness provoked demands that he be allowed to go abroad for possible treatment. Liu himself said

Mark Mason

Southwold Sailors’ Reading Room

The Southwold Sailors’ Reading Room is a gorgeous bit of Inside. Like any coastal town, Southwold has an awful lot of Outside, which it can throw at you very hard and very fast. So the small redbrick building tucked away near the seafront is both charming and useful. It was built in 1864, in memory of Captain Charles Rayley. He’d been in the Royal Navy since Trafalgar, fighting pirates in Borneo and privateers in the West Indies, one of whom gave him a sabre cut across the cheek. When Rayley died his widow commissioned the Reading Room as an alternative to Southwold’s pubs, a place where sailors and fishermen could

Lucy Vickery

Laughing matter

In Competition No. 3006 you were invited to submit a sonnet that takes as its opening line Keats’s ‘Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell:’ (This was a sonnet Keats chose not to publish but transcribed into a long letter he wrote over a period in early 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats, his brother and sister-in-law.)   The challenge drew a pleasingly large, inventive and witty entry which saw you deploy a range of sonnet patterns (there are some 30 variations of the form in The Oxford Book of English Verse).   In an especially closely contested week, Julia Munrow, J. Garth Taylor, Chris O’Carroll, Susan McLean,

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Emily Thornberry succeeds where Corbyn fails at PMQs

Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions could have been memorable purely for the novelty of Emily Thornberry deploying a tremendous amount of sass in her questions to Damian Green as the pair stood in for Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. But it was also memorable because as well as leaning across the despatch box and delivering one-liners in comedy voices, the Shadow Foreign Secretary also asked some good, searching questions about the government’s position on Brexit, particularly on what would happen practically if there was no deal. Unlike Corbyn, who has always struggled to ask questions on Brexit at this session because of his own ambivalence about the matter, Thornberry is quick

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Damian Green quizzed on Theresa May’s disappearing act

During the election campaign, Tory MPs were queuing up to be snapped with Theresa May and the Prime Minister’s face was plastered all over Conservative party leaflets up and down the country. Now, though, it seems May has become something of an embarrassment to the Tories. The Prime Minister might be just about managing to stay in office but her photograph has been wiped clean from the party’s website – a fact pointed out by Labour MP Toby Perkins during PMQs today: The Conservative website prior to the election result: The Conservative website after the election result: Much to the embarrassment of Damian Green – who was standing in for the

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Pope Francis is behaving like a Latin American dictator – but the liberal media aren’t interested

At the end of June, Pope Francis dismissed Cardinal Gerhard Müller from his position as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) – arguably the most important position in the Catholic Church after that of the Pope himself, since the CDF is in charge of doctrine. Müller was given no notice that the Pope was breaking from tradition by not renewing his five-year mandate – and no explanation. A few days later, on July 4, he explained what had happened in a long phone call to his friend Cardinal Joachim Meisner, one of four cardinals who had challenged Francis on the question of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics. Meisner was horrified to hear the

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: the hard left’s hatred of Uber is an excuse

The likes of Uber and Deliveroo are shaking up the jobs market in such a way that one of Theresa May’s first acts as Prime Minister was to commission a report into the future of work. Yesterday, as the PM opted for a much-needed relaunch, that report came out. The likes of Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Labour frontbencher, made their minds up quickly: the report was a missed chance and we shouldn’t use companies like Uber until they clean up their act. Here’s what the papers had to say: We should feel ‘lucky’, says the Sun sarcastically, that ‘Labour’s preachy politicians’ are leading us on the path ’towards the high moral ground of

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Shadow business minister admits to using ‘morally wrong’ Uber

Oh dear. This morning, Rebecca Long-Bailey risked alienating the three million people who use the Uber taxi app, when she said that it was ‘morally unacceptable’ to do so. While the shadow business secretary cited concerns with the gig economy as her reason for doing so, it seems not everyone in her team agrees. Somewhat embarrassingly, Long-Bailey’s shadow business minister Chi Onwurah has just appeared on All Out Politics on Sky News, where she revealed that she was a user of Uber – and, actually, thought there were plenty of positives to the taxi app which allows drivers to choose when and how they work: CO: These services bring real benefits to

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Self-employed workers don’t need rescuing

‘Workers,’ says Matthew Taylor, whose report into modern practices is published this week, ‘should be treated as human beings, not cogs in a machine’. How very grand – and how fatuous. His entire report, commissioned by Theresa May in one of her first acts after becoming Prime Minister last July, is pointless, based on the false premise that there are millions of Brits beavering away in Victorian conditions for little money in insecure self-employment. Actually, we’re quite happy, Matthew. The vast majority of us are self-employed because we like it that way. We are not looking for a job, nor extra hours. According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS),

Monday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Of course a man hasn’t had a baby. Let’s not pretend otherwise

You know a Man Having Baby story really would be a story if it were true. But the latest Man Mother story is only true if you accept the notion that the mother in question really is a man. And that depends on whether you go down the whole notion that being transgender involves biological reinvention, rather than hormonal/surgical intervention plus credulity and the creative use of language. Two people with wombs, ovaries and XX chromosomes, conventionally known as women, have had babies. As it happens, one of them has taken drugs to suppress lactation on the basis of an unwillingness to breastfeed, but, you know, it took drugs to

Saturday

Hannah Lucinda Smith

Cypriot reunification still seems a distant prospect

In the early hours of this morning, the tired-looking Secretary General of the UN took to the stage in Switzerland to announce the first major failure of his tenure. “I’m very sorry to inform you that despite the very strong commitment and engagement of all the delegations and different parties, the conference on Cyprus was closed without an agreement being reached,” said Antonio Gutteres. The week-long talks in the mountain resort of Crans-Montana were the culmination of two years of negotiations to try to stick Cyprus back together. It is a daunting task: although tiny, with an area less than half the size of Wales and a total population of

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Donald Trump is cutting the Fulbright programme, but I won’t miss it

Now Donald Trump really has done it. He’s cutting nearly half the budget of the Fulbright programme, the fund that has paid for 12,000 Brits to travel to the US to study and for a corresponding number of Americans to come here. Given that the beneficiaries include people who’ve done terrifically well for themselves – alumni and alumnae include Bill Clinton, Yvette Cooper, Onora O’Neill, Liam Byrne MP, the philosopher, and, er, Sylvia Plath – there has been a corresponding fuss. Some of the beneficiaries have written to The Times to suggest that the cuts will “devastate the programme and damage irrevocably the most successful cultural diplomacy initiative in the