Society

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

Would I still hate actors’ rants if they all agreed with me?

I feel a bit sorry for Piers Morgan. On Tuesday, Ewan McGregor was due to appear on the sofa with Piers on ITV’s Good Morning to talk about the Trainspotting sequel, but he failed to turn up. Later, the actor explained on Twitter that it was due to the journalist’s remarks about the women’s marches that took place last weekend, in which he described some of the participants as ‘rabid feminists’ and suggested he should organise a men’s march in response. I had a similar experience about five years ago when the actor Matthew Macfadyen pulled out of an interview he was due to do with me. Like McGregor, he

The Spectator

Letters | 26 January 2017

What is a university? Sir: As a former Russell Group vice chancellor, I think that Toby Young’s appeal for more universities (Status anxiety, 14 January) needs several caveats. First, what is a university? Recently some have been created by stapling together several institutions without any substantial element of research and renaming them as a university. There is even some suggestion that research is inimical to good teaching, because some university researchers with a duty to teach shirk it. But the presence of a weighty research community lends a university an invaluable ambience. In America, many colleges that teach only to the bachelor degree are well regarded without possessing the title of university.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 26 January 2017

Home The Supreme Court ruled by eight to three that, without an act of Parliament, the government could not effectually invoke Article 50 to start Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. It argued: ‘If, as we consider, what would otherwise be a prerogative act would result in a change in domestic law, the act can only lawfully be carried out with the sanction of primary legislation enacted by the Queen in Parliament.’ The court said that devolved assemblies did not have to assent to the move. In general, it said, ‘The effect of any particular referendum must depend on the terms of the statute which authorises it.’ The government announced a

Columba

2294: Times Square

Six words (one with American spelling) read clockwise in sequence round the perimeter. Each of seventeen clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer including one extra letter; the extras spell a two-word definition of the perimeter words. Letters in corner squares and those adjacent to them could make STEPS RING, SA.   Across 11    Smooth unionist in reserve (5) 12    Bishop stops goblin making points (4) 13    Smart guy so out of practice (5) 14    Account full of force with a current language (7) 15    Port drunk ahead of opening nearly inducing numbness (10) 17    Confusion in final unit

Columba

to 2291: Seriously?

Bill Shankly said: ‘Some people think football is a matter of life and death … ( I can assure them it is much more serious than that)’. The unclued letters in the grid spell LIFE AND if read downwards row by row, and ANFIELD if read across column by column.   First prize Sandra Peterkin, Edinburgh Runners-up Stephen Gore, Seer Green, Bucks; Ruth Wood, Loscoe, Derbyshire

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books podcast: Cosmosapiens

This week in the books podcast, we’re taking on some big issues. John Hands, the author of Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution From The Origin of the Universe, is in the grand tradition of ambitious gentleman amateurs. His book attempts to answer the fundamental human questions – who are we, why are we here, and where are we going? In doing so he considers everything from the origins of the universe to evolutionary theory. The answers he arrives at fly in the face both of Darwinian orthodoxy and the Standard Model of theoretical physics. Yet he argues that, as an outsider, he’s better placed to weigh the arguments than those labouring in

Laura Whitcombe

Beat bank closures by switching to a better deal

Within the space of a week, it has been announced that another 189 high street banks and building societies will be shutting their doors through the course of 2017. Last week, Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank outlined plans to close 79 branches. On Tuesday, HSBC reported it will close another 62 branches on top of the 55 previously announced. And yesterday, Yorkshire Building Society admitted it will be closing 48 branches, including all 28 Norwich & Peterborough branches as it goes ahead with killing off the brand completely. Existing N&P current account holders have been told to find alternative accounts. The companies have largely attributed the closures to customers increasingly turning

Helen Nugent

RBS, branch closures, economy, housing

Royal Bank of Scotland has set aside £3.1 billion ($3.8 billion) to deal with US claims that it mis-sold risky mortgage-backed securities ahead of the financial crisis. The Telegraph reports that the lender, which is still 72 per cent owned by the taxpayer, now faces a loss for 2016, the ninth year in a row that it has lost money. Yorkshire Building Society Another announcement about branch closures today. Yorkshire Building Society is to shut 48 branches in a move it partly attributes to ‘an increasing desire among customers to transact digitally rather than on the high street’, according to The Guardian. The news follows yesterday’s announcement from HSBC which said it

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The Spectator podcast: Holland’s hurricane

On this week’s episode, we discuss the hurricane that’s headed for Holland, the state of parliamentary sovereignty here at home, and whether taxing horses is really the way to go. First up: with elections in the Netherlands less than two months away, the eyes of Europe’s political pundits are being drawn to the clash between the incumbent People’s Party and the insurgent Party for Freedom, led by the charismatic controversialist, Geert Wilders. Will the Dutch be the next domino to fall to right-wing populism? And what exactly is the deal with Wilders, a man who was banned from travelling to Britain due to his vociferous criticism of Islam? Joining us to discuss are Douglas

Marcus Berkmann

Corduroy

Every Christmas, I ask my loved ones for at least two pairs of corduroy trousers. Off with a sigh tramps my girlfriend, who knows that fashion cycles dictate that corduroy will be ‘in’, and therefore purchasable, only every fourth or fifth year or so. For three or four years corduroy will be invisible. Shop assistants will look askance at anyone who dares even mention it. Then corduroy is rediscovered by whoever decides these things, and it’s everywhere. Cushions are in corduroy. Dogs wear corduroy. I saw a corduroy tie the other day. At such times we corduroy lovers stock up, conscious of the long corduroy-free winter that will inevitably follow.

David Butterfield

Keep the change

Can we do without cash? Since 2015, digital payments in the UK have outnumbered those in cash, and we are invited by the great and the good to cheer this on. The fully cashless era will be magnificently convenient, they say, with goods delivered directly to the door: no fumbling for change, just tap and go. Some London branches of several chains (Waitrose, Tossed, Doddle) don’t accept cash any more. Many others fast-track customers who can pay by contactless means. Businesses and banks want to abolish cash because they have near-pathological fears of the black market and tax avoidance. Yet we should worry about the death of cash, because physical

Simon Barnes

Save our stables!

There are plans in place to tax horses out of British life. Proposed adjustments in business rates for non–residential properties — increases of up to eight times — could make vast swaths of the horsey world unviable. Life will be tough for top-end enterprises like racing yards and stud farms; it will be the end for the many riding schools and livery yards that exist on the far edge of the possible. This is a disastrous way to carry on. The horsey life should have vast and sweeping tax exemption because it helps people to enjoy life more fully and to endure it more steadfastly. It keeps the blues away

Bruce Anderson

Cold War collation

I know an immensely grand aristocratic lady, impeccably mannered, with a regal grace and presence, who cannot be trusted near a tin of caviar. Apart from scoffing far more than her share, she will eventually make off with the tin itself, to lick it clean. Those of us from lesser social milieux should not only treat this as a lesson in etiquette. There are sound environmental arguments for her behaviour. Caviar is so precious, so rare, that it is an ecological crime to waste a single egg. When her ladyship is on the prowl, there is no danger of that. Such thoughts came to me over the weekend, while musing

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Vinyl madness

I was at home enjoying an online episode of Tales of the Texas Rangers when my daughter interrupted me, wanting something on Amazon. Just to explain, Tales of the Texas Rangers was a 1950s NBC radio series featuring Joel McCrea as Ranger Jayce Pearson. There are 90 half-hour episodes available online. Once you tire of binge-listening to these, there are perhaps 200 more episodes of Dragnet and about 400 of Gunsmoke to choose from, the latter featuring the voice of William Conrad (detective Frank Cannon to anyone my age) as Marshal Matt Dillon. Yes, I realise it’s a bit weird using a fibre-optic broadband connection to listen to 1950s radio,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A Berlin Wall moment for political correctness

Because we’re all so obsessed with what it was that made the Nazis tick, we tend to overlook the bigger mystery of how hundreds of millions of people, for a period considerably longer than the lifespan of Hitler’s Germany, remained under the spell of communism. This is a question that Czeslaw Milosz set out to answer in his 1953 classic The Captive Mind. Milosz was a Polish poet, prominent in the underground during the Nazi occupation, who served as a cultural attaché with Poland’s post-war communist regime before quitting in disgust and fleeing to the US, where he taught at Berkeley and achieved eminence as a Nobel-prize-winning dissident exile. What

J. Meirion

Losing patients

For weeks now, we have been reading about a crisis in A&E — a symptom, we’re told, of a funding crisis in the National Health Service more generally. Since I started working for the NHS almost 45 years ago, this has been a familiar theme: the system is creaking, but a bit more tax money should suffice. To many of us who have seen the system close at hand, another question presents itself: what if the NHS were to cut down on waste? And perhaps recover costs from the health tourists who turn up for treatment to which they are not entitled? I first made the case for doing so

James Walton

Adult entertainment | 26 January 2017

The mid-life crisis novel, I think it’s fair to say, is traditionally a male form. But in Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard, the person feeling a bit trapped in what might seem a pretty nice life — while also fretting about how much (or how little) sex the rest of it will contain — is fiftysomething Yvonne Carmichael: wife, mother and all-round radiator of female competence. In BBC1’s adaptation of Apple Tree Yard (Sunday), Yvonne was first heard giving us a brief meditation on the provisional nature of civilised behaviour — a voiceover, it turned out, being delivered as she travelled in the back of a prison van. We then

Lucy Vickery

Seasick

In Competition No. 2982 you were invited to recast John Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’ in light of the news that the poet suffered from acute seasickness.   In his book Sea Fever, Sam Jefferson relates how as an apprentice seaman aboard the Gilcruix, the unfortunate Masefield was struck down by a brutal bout of mal de mer. A diary entry recorded the full horror: ‘I was faint, clammy, helpless, weakly wishing for death or dry land.’   Long lines, as per the original poem, mean that there is limited space for winners, which is a shame. This was a hugely popular comp and there were lots of skilful, witty and well-made

Anthony Sattin

Before the bling

If you read the first volume of John Romer’s A History of Egypt, which traces events along the Nile from prehistory to the pyramid age, you will understand why he thinks Egyptology is not a science. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to be exact about anything when most of your knowledge is based on deduction and when new discoveries can overturn accepted theories. In the 1,000 years covered in this second volume, starting around 2600 BC, would it be easier for Romer to present facts and express certainty — to be scientific? One of the surprises of the pyramid age, as Romer explains very clearly here, is the lack of