Society

Friday

Bernard Ginns

Loyalty doesn’t pay: why insurers need to treat their existing customers better

One of the worst habits of the trillion-pound general insurance industry will be brought to an end in April next year. Even to a cynic, the willingness of many large general insurers to prey on the blind faith of loyal customers is thoroughly distasteful. Each year, they write with their renewal notices, thanking us for our business and saying there is no need to do anything if the policy still meets our needs. ‘This is an automatic renewal,’ they say. ‘We look forward to providing another 12 months of cover.’ How convenient, thinks the time-poor customer, trusting that the insurer which looks his home and car will have his best interests

Helen Nugent

Rail fares, buy-to-let, bank accounts and insurance

In a move certain to dampen any Christmas spirit, the rail industry has announced that train fares will rise by an average of 2.3 per cent from January 2. The BBC reports that ‘the increase covers both regulated fares, which includes season tickets, and unregulated fares, such as off-peak leisure tickets’. The hike in regulated fares has previously been capped at July’s Retail Prices Index inflation rate of 1.9 per cent. But unregulated fares face no cap which means that some unregulated fares will go up by considerably more than 2.3 per cent. Mick Cash, general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, said: ‘This latest fares hike is another

Steerpike Steerpike

Zac Goldsmith’s brother has a tantrum

Last night the Liberal Democrats managed to overturn Zac Goldsmith’s 23,000 majority in Richmond Park. While Goldsmith was visibly downcast over the result, the former London mayoral candidate did manage to put his disappointment to one side as he wished his successor Sarah Olney well in her role. Alas, the same can’t be said for everyone in the Goldsmith clan. Early this morning as rumours began to grow that Olney had clinched victory, Zac’s brother Ben Goldsmith took to social media to brand Olney ‘unimaginably drab’ — ‘even by Lib Dem standards’. With the ‘drab’ Olney going on to beat his brother at the polls, Mr S is unsurprised the

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Overreach

Game eight of the World Championship in New York broke the deadlock of hard-fought draws in the first seven games. Carlsen employed a closed variation of the queen’s pawn opening which had, in the past, been popularised both by Johannes Zukertort and Akiba Rubinstein. The opening merged into a level but still fertile middlegame. At this point Carlsen overreached and after a sequence of sub-optimal moves on both sides, doubtless occasioned by time trouble, the black defence emerged victorious. Carlsen-Karjakin: World Championship, New York (Game 8) 2016; Zukertort/Rubinstein 1 d4 Nf6 2 Nf3 d5 3 e3 e6 4 Bd3 c5 5 b3 Be7 6 0-0 0-0 7 Bb2 b6 8 dxc5

Raymond Keene

Chess puzzle | 1 December 2016

White to play. This position is from Rubinstein-Johner, Carlsbad 1911. How did Rubinstein gain a winning position with a standard tactical device? We regret that because of the Christmas printing schedule, this is not a prize puzzle.   Last week’s solution 1 Nf6+ Last week’s winner Ray Fisher, Buxton, Derbyshire

The Spectator

Barometer | 1 December 2016

Autumn Budgets Philip Hammond announced that in future the Budget will be held in autumn rather than spring. This is not as revolutionary as some have made out. — In his 1992 Budget Norman Lamont announced that there would be two budgets in 1993, one in spring and one in autumn, and that from then on the date would switch to autumn for good. — The Budget was delivered every November from then until 1996. In 1997, Gordon Brown held his first Budget in July, before reverting to a spring date. — Denis Healey also delivered a November Budget in 1974, soon after the second general election of that year.

Peter Jones

Aristophanes on Trump

As self-important comics fantasise about unseating Donald Trump with their wit, they should remember the great Aristophanes. In 424 BC, he presented a comedy about the controversial politician Cleon. He was (apparently) the son of a tanner (ugh!), and was seen by contemporaries, including the historian Thucydides, as a ‘brutal’, ‘insolent’ but ‘very persuasive’ braggart — and all too successful. The play opens with two slaves driven out of their house after a beating by their new master Paphlagon (Cleon); he has risen to power by fawning on and flattering the gullible and senile Demos (‘the people’) and telling outrageous lies about his political rivals. So far, so Trump. In

Taki

High life | 1 December 2016

Richard Spencer made the front page of the New York Times two days in a row last week, and earned a half-page report on the third day. For any of you who have never heard of him — and very few have — he is described by the mendacious Times as the leader of the ‘white nationalist movement’, a movement not too many of us who believe in the white race are aware of. Let’s start at the beginning. After I ‘sold’ the American Conservative magazine to a man called Uns for one dollar — I have kept the cheque and will cash it only if in terrible need —

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 1 December 2016

My mother is a bore magnet. They travel from miles around to sit in the chair opposite hers and tell her every last detail of their lives in a protracted monologue and then they leave. It’s like a surgery. One after another they appear at the door, bursting with a narrative of their incredible lives. If they can’t get there in person, they ring her up and talk about themselves on the phone for hours on end. I suppose it must be a kind of innocence to find the minutiae of your daily life so consistently remarkable that you simply must tell it to a third party. Perhaps I should

Melissa Kite

Real life | 1 December 2016

‘How was your week?’ I asked my friend as we rode our horses to Bookham Common. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Except the other day I got caught in a yellow box. £65.’ ‘Me too!’ I said. ‘Where was yours?’ ‘Kingston,’ she said. ‘Mine was in Raynes Park,’ I said. ‘£65. Junction of Coombe Lane and Durham Road. No idea how I did it. It was at night so I never had a chance. It won’t have been well lit.’ ‘Mine was during the day but I only just got stuck in it. The bumper was overhanging for about three seconds. I’ve requested the video footage.’ ‘Good for you. I paid mine.

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 1 December 2016

Most people who die in Britain are now cremated — more than 70 per cent of them — but there is often uncertainty among the bereaved about what to do with the ashes. When dead bodies aren’t burnt, it is straightforward: they are buried in coffins. But the options for the ashes of the dead are various. They may be interred in a churchyard or a cemetery, they may be planted among the roots of a new tree, and they may be scattered in the countryside, in a river, or at sea. But these are just the conventional choices. Lots of exotic alternatives are also offered. One website about the

Dot Wordsworth

They

‘When I asked the bank,’ said my husband, ‘they were no help at all.’ My attention was distracted from his Kafkaesque predicament, which is both typical and too complicated to explain. Instead I was pondering the reference to the bank as they. This is well established in British English. The bank, Sainsbury’s or England (the cricket team) can be they, or equally correctly, it. Just be consistent. But my husband’s ramblings had reminded me that David Willetts, when talking on the radio about adult education, had said ‘someone in their thirties or forties’. The Willettsian usage has their, a plural personal adjective, referring back to someone, a singular antecedent. I think

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 1 December 2016

Q. I don’t go to my club that often but the other day I found a letter there waiting for me from an elderly cousin, also a member, whose home is in Scotland where he lives alone. The letter announces that he is down south until January and asks whether he might spend Christmas with my family here in London. I am well aware of the meaning of Christmas and have no wish to be mean-spirited, but my wife and I have a relentless social life throughout the year and our children are as yet unmarried, so Christmas Day has become the only time we can be sure of being

Toby Young Toby Young

Snowflakes in the workplace

Last week I was asked to give a talk about generation snowflake. This was at a breakfast organised by a recruitment company called GTI Solutions and the idea was that I would provide an urban anthropologist’s take on this new tribe for the benefit of their corporate clients, most of whom are thinking about how to recruit them and, once they’ve got them, how to keep them happy. This has given me an idea about a new consultancy service I could provide. The main challenge thrown up by employing these new graduates, it seems to me, is that they won’t be particularly good at communicating with members of other generations

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 1 December 2016

It was the best hand I’d had all year — and what’s more, I picked it up while playing rubber bridge for money at TGRs. The pound signs flashed before my eyes: there was no way I was stopping short of game, and the merest squeak from my partner would get me slamming. Well, you can guess what happened next: the bridge gods were having a laugh. In a few short minutes the hand turned to ash. Not only did I go down, cursing my bad luck, but one of my opponents happened to be the brilliant Thor Erik Hoftaniska, whose sharp analytical brain was able to point out almost

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 December 2016

Home Paul Nuttall, aged 39, was elected leader of the UK Independence Party. He said: ‘I want to replace the Labour party and make Ukip the patriotic voice of working people.’ Theresa May, the Prime Minister, was rebuffed by Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, and by Donald Tusk, the President of the European Commission, when she proposed settling the status of British and EU expatriates even before Article 50 was invoked. She made another attempt in talks with Beata Szydlo, the Prime Minister of Poland. There was some interest in a note photographed on papers being carried after a meeting in Downing Street by Julia Dockerill, an aide to Mark

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Diary – 1 December 2016

It is odd when someone you know becomes a world-famous Nazi. You may not recognise the name Richard Spencer, but my bet is you soon will. He’s an American white-power activist who is often billed as the inventor of the ‘alt-right’. In the age of Trump, when everyone is panicking about the rise of extremism and the end of liberal democracy, he commands a lot of attention. Spencer has emerged as a media anti-darling — a hardcore version of the gay British controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos, whom I also know a little. (Hark at my social life.) Milo does the camp feminist-and-Islam-baiting thing; Richard is a full-on white supremacist. They both

Doc

2289: I don’t believe it!

The unclued lights, as a singleton and four pairs with one unclued light doing double duty, are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer. Two of the unclued lights are of three words, one including an abbreviation. All but one of the remaining unclued lights are of two words. Ignore two apostrophes.   Across 10    Help for a newsreader reporting a traffic jam? (7) 11    Museum’s not the first to store English works (7) 13    Wild cat, lithe and muscular (8) 16    Arrest a pirate, holding a mammal (5) 18    Key to centre of rare church installation (5) 19    Speak clearly, one having dined with sister in City area first

Matilda Munro

Revolutionary Cuba’s racism problem

You can tell a lot about a country from its sexual politics. Out one night at La Fabrica, a state-funded arts venue and club in suburban Havana, a friend and I got chatting to a group of local girls. While we were talking, a trio of young black men were doing some kind of coordinated dance routine next to us. ‘That’s cool,’ I said. One of the girls rolled her eyes. ‘I would never dance with a black guy,’ she said, with a nonchalance suggestive of something that subsequently became very apparent. Racism is normal, and everywhere, in Cuba. Since Castro’s death we’ve heard everything about the perceived successes and failures

Richard Ekins

Who’s on the Supreme Court

Ordinarily, the Supreme Court sits in panels of no more than nine. All 11 justices will hear the government’s appeal, to avoid any suggestion that the composition of the panel might make a difference to the outcome. Caution is understandable: judges differ in philosophy, temperament and in how they understand their role. Lord Neuberger has been the court’s president since 2012. He has denied that the UK has a (proper) constitution and asserted that joining the European Convention on Human Rights has been a journey from ‘the dark ages’ to ‘the age of enlightenment’. In Nicklinson, two years ago, he was willing to extend human rights law to try to force