Society

Friday

Helen Nugent

Tax bills, Tesco, cash machines and retirement

The taxman’s failure to properly pursue the UK’s richest people risks undermining confidence in the entire system, according to parliament’s spending watchdog. The Guardian reports that the Public Accounts Committee has concluded that Britain’s super-rich appear to receive preferential treatment from HM Revenue & Customs. The MPs’ report, released this morning, scrutinised HMRC’s specialist unit, which collects tax from high net-worth individuals with more than £20 million. It found that ‘the amount of tax paid by this very wealthy group of individuals has actually fallen by £1 billion since the unit was set up’ in 2009 – even as tax receipts rose to £23 billion. Tesco Tesco’s decision to buy

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Capa capitulates

The new book by Thomas Engqvist, Réti: Move by Move (Everyman Chess), about the hypermodern leader Richard Réti, is so significant that it deserves further examination.   Perhaps Réti’s most celebrated victory came against Capablanca, who had come through his 1921 world title contest and the subsequent great tournament of London 1922 without losing a single game. When Réti defeated Capablanca with his new opening system at New York 1924, it was the first game lost by Capa in eight years. It created a sensation.   Réti-Capablanca: New York 1924, Réti Opening   1 Nf3 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 b4 Bg7 4 Bb2 0–0 5 g3 b6 6 Bg2 Bb7 7

Raymond Keene

no. 441

White to play. This is from Réti-Spielmann, Opatija 1912. How did Réti conclude his kingside attack? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 31 January or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.   Last week’s solution 1 Qd8+ Last week’s winner Jim Ward, Coldstream, Berwickshire

Taki

High life | 26 January 2017

 Gstaad The snows came tumbling down just as the camel-drivers headed back to the Gulf. In fact, they never saw the white outdoor stuff. And a good thing it was, too. The outdoor stuff makes everything look so pretty that the glitzy types might have been tempted to return. God forbid. Let them stick to the indoor white stuff. The problem with Gstaad is the local council. They remind me of the EU: they’re intransigent, short-sighted and stick to a losing game. In Brussels they keep passing more and more laws and regulations. In Gstaad, they keep putting up their prices and building more and more apartments. As a gentleman

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 26 January 2017

‘If life is a race, I feel that I’m not even at the starting line,’ I said to the doctor in French. (I’d composed, polished and rehearsed the sentence in the waiting room beforehand.) She was a sexy piece in her early fifties with a husky voice. She listened to my halting effort to describe my depression with a smile playing lightly over her scarlet lips as though I were relating an amusing anecdote with a witty punchline lurking just around the corner. I further explained in French that I had been properly but briefly depressed once before, about 15 years ago. Here my tenses let me down badly, and

Melissa Kite

Real life | 26 January 2017

The problem holding up my house move turns out to be a wiggle. Have you ever had a wiggle? It sounds jolly enough but, believe me, you don’t want to go there. If you have a wiggle in your garden, you had better be prepared for the worst. I had no idea about this wiggle, because when I bought the flat I only had my lawyer scrutinise the Land Registry documents to a normal degree, which is to say I asked him if everything was broadly all right, and when he confirmed that it was I told him to proceed. I have lived in the flat quite happily since 2002

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 26 January 2017

I keep finding myself singing ‘Nellie the elephant’ who, packing her trunk and saying goodbye to the circus, went off ‘with a trumpety-trump, trump, trump, trump’. I’m hoping against hope that Donald Trumpety-Trump will also say goodbye to the circus in Washington and return to the jungle whence he came; for irrespective of whatever he does in government, even if some of it proves to be beneficial, he is unworthy to be president. The president is not only the country’s chief executive and commander-in-chief; he is the symbol of national unity and the protector of the American constitution, and he has already failed in both these last two roles. His

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 26 January 2017

You can always tell a beginner, or a poor player, at the bridge table — they’re the ones who start cashing their tricks as soon as dummy comes down. Any reasonable player knows the importance of stopping to think: of counting winners and losers, and working out a strategy. But it’s the mark of a really good player to never entirely trust their first thoughts. As Tom Townsend once advised me with his usual pithy wit: ‘Think of a plan. Now think of a better one.’ Eric Rodwell makes precisely this point in his brilliant book The Rodwell Files, which I’m reading at the moment. He warns us to double-check

Miriam Gross

Diary – 26 January 2017

Did you know that if you use the f-word while talking to a BT representative, they hang up on you? Here’s how our conversation went when I finally got through after several abortive attempts and ‘holding’ for at least 15 minutes. Me: ‘I’m ringing because the engineer who was supposed to come between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. has not turned up. I’ve been waiting for over five hours. My name is xxx, my reference number is xxx.’ BT man: ‘Could you give me your date of birth and the first line of your address?’ Me: ‘My date of birth is xxx, my address is xxx. This is the third

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 26 January 2017

Q. I recently made an arrangement with a flaky friend from university to go to my gym together. Half an hour after we were supposed to meet she called saying she was at the cash machine looking at her bank balance and she didn’t think she could afford the £20 guest entry fee. She suggested cancelling but I was dressed and raring to go so I offered to lend her the money. She politely declined saying, ‘I don’t like owing people money.’ I volunteered to pay the fee. On the way to the gym she said she was hungry and, opening a wallet stuffed with cash, bought luxury snacks costing

Dot Wordsworth

Carnage

‘This carnage stops here,’ declared the headline in the Daily Telegraph, quoting President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech. My husband tried to make little jokes about it. ‘Would you buy a used carnage from this man?’ was probably the best, by which you can imagine the standard of the others. I wondered when I first read it what slaughter or butchery Mr Trump was referring to. ‘This American carnage stops right here’ were the exact words. Immediately beforehand he had been talking of ‘mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape’, a poor education system and the harm done by gangs

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