Society

Thursday

Lucy Vickery

I quit

In Competition No. 2974 you were invited to submit a resignation letter from God.   Despite mankind’s attempts to kill Him off, God has continued to bounce back. ‘The Almighty,’ as Terry Eagleton puts it in his book Culture and the Death of God, ‘has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of.’ But what if He decided one day that He’d had just about enough of us all (Gexit, as Ken Stevens termed it)?   Now seems as likely a time as any, so it’s over to you. The winners take £25 each. Over the years, the human race has been taking part in a momentous democratic process. It is right

Wednesday

Helen Nugent

Black Friday: do your homework before hitting the shops

There are some American imports for which we should be thankful. Not Donald Trump, obviously. Other things, though – the motor car, baseball, Dolly Parton, chewing gum, and, erm, crayons. On the other hand, there are a number of US products we could do without. I’m thinking here of evangelical preachers, sub-prime mortgages and Spam. Then there’s Black Friday. While this day of frenzied shopping has been part of the American calendar for decades, it’s a recent UK import. Always falling on the day after Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday of November – so the 25th for us Brits), Black Friday’s hype spirals year after year. Shops promote it heavily, claiming that

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Stop Funding Hate: a nasty, elitist campaign for press censorship

Intolerance wears a progressive mask in the 21st century. Students hound political undesirables off campus in the name of ‘protecting diversity’. Adverts are banned from the London Underground in the name of women’s rights. Rappers and other hotheads are barred from Britain on the basis that their utterances are ‘not conducive’ to our good, progressive way of life. And now assorted leftists and tweeters are seeking to punish tabloid newspapers, to starve them of big revenue, in the name of promoting tolerance. Yes, intolerance – in this case of the redtop press and its right to say what it wants – is tolerance. Stop Funding Hate is a new campaign

Helen Nugent

First-time buyers, Black Friday, tax avoidance and unemployment

First-time buyers need more help to put an end to the decline in home ownership, according to a report from the chief executive of one of Britain’s largest housebuilders. Long-term building targets were also needed to avoid ‘kneejerk’ policy moves, the Redfern Review said. According to the BBC, the study found home ownership rates in England dropped from 71 per cent to 64 per cent over 12 years, with the steepest fall among young people. Labour commissioned the report. It said the findings revealed a ‘lost generation’. Among 25-34 year olds, the rate of home ownership fell from 59 per cent in 2003 to 37 per cent in 2015. The

Royal Academy of Engineering

How to solve the engineering skills crisis

UK engineering is facing an insidious threat to its success – a chronic failure to get enough young people to become the engineers and skilled technicians we need. Post-Brexit, the UK is likely to face greater challenges than before in recruiting enough professional engineers and technicians to meet industry’s needs. As engineering contributes 20% of the UK’s gross value added (GVA), it is vitally important for our future prosperity and economic growth that we address this problem as soon as possible. So what can we do to plug the skills gap? One of the biggest barriers to the uptake of engineering as a career is how it is perceived. If

Tuesday

Daniel Jackson

Can the liberal worldview survive?

There is a latent consensus among political scientists and highbrow columnists that the liberal era is over and that, following Brexit and Trump, we are entering a period of neo-nationalism. This consensus will develop further if, as I suspect she will, Marine Le Pen wins the French presidential election next May. Two recent editorials in the Economist demonstrate how quickly this is happening. In July, it was argued that ‘the new divide in rich countries is not between left and right but between open and closed’. Last week, we were told that ‘the long, hard job of winning the argument for liberal internationalism begins anew’. The challenge to liberalism is still seen

Jeff Prestridge

It’s time for Tesco Bank and its rivals to up their IT game

Cast your mind back to Saturday, 5 November. It is 8.30 am in Edinburgh and Tesco Bank boss Benny Higgins is sitting down to breakfast. The taxi he orders every weekend has picked up the papers from the local newsagent so he can flick through them over salmon and scrambled egg. Higgins likes his taxis. He spent £18,000 swanning around London in them between March and October 2015. He also likes his reading. He’s a voracious absorber of anything from Robert Graves and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Raymond Carver. Hence the pile of papers. Children flick in and out of the breakfast room – he has six of them. Life could

Monday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Will feminists be kind to Melania Trump?

It was a race between the first dude — Bill — and the first nude — Melania. And in the end, the first nude won, appearing next to her husband in the early hours wearing a white jumpsuit straight out of Charlie’s Angels. It may seem unfair to judge Mrs Trump so early on, but judged she will be. She awaits her turn, just as Hillary Clinton once did. How will she fare? Well, liberal American voters will want targets, and she looks like one. People are already making jokes about Michelle Obama writing Melania’s first speech, to save her the trouble of plagiarising again. There is so much for

Helen Nugent

We must improve financial education in schools

When I was at school in the, er, 1980s, there was no such thing as financial education. Yes, we had maths lessons but they focused on the hypotenuse and mastering scientific calculators. I still break out in a sweat at the thought of trigonometry. Since my day (when all this was fields etc etc), the curriculum has changed significantly. No more Home Economics – I think it’s called Domestic Science now – and I’m guessing that ballroom dancing has been replaced by something altogether more modern. I also suspect that the fledgling word processing lab at my high school has morphed into a 21st century cutting-edge centre where coding lessons

Helen Nugent

Energy profits, pensions, financial education and housing

The Government is to investigate claims that energy providers are pocketing larger profits than they have previously admitted, according to The Sun. The newspaper says that gas and electricity firms may be netting six times more than they state. But trade group Energy UK rejected The Sun‘s claims, saying they were ‘a misrepresentation of the facts’. However, using figures published in a report commissioned by Energy UK from the accountancy firm PwC, The Sun says that suppliers could be making a 24 per cent profit margin. This compares to a 4 per cent profit margin on the price of a typical dual fuel bill which has been recorded by the regulator, Ofgem. Now the business

Sunday

Yuan Ren

Inside China’s ‘secret’ churches

 Beijing A strong coffee always perks me up on a smoggy day, especially when I can drink it somewhere clandestine — like an ‘illegal’ church. Seek, and you shall find — but when it comes to Christianity in China, you’re likely to get a bit lost. Without being told where it was, I could have spent a lifetime walking past the anonymous, seemingly empty office block, never knowing that inside it was abuzz with religious activity. A discreet sign in the lobby is the only indication that a Sunday service is in progress. In other parts of the world, a church announces itself to the faithful with a cross on

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Nietzsche was right – liberal democracy is flawed

It’s time to consider Nietzsche’s view of liberal democracy. It couldn’t work, it couldn’t bind a nation together, he said. Why not? Because of its excessive moral idealism. The belief in equality and social justice, which he rightly saw as deriving from Judaism and Christianity, would lead to fragmentation. For politics would be dominated by various disadvantaged groups demanding respect. Any sort of unifying ethos would be treated as oppressive, the ideology of the ruling class. If virtue lies in weakness, and victim status, healthy politics is doomed. It is emerging that he was largely right. Progressive politics, which affirms the liberal or humanist vision, seems to be collapsing. And

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: the Person from Porlock unmasked

The request for your thoughts, in verse or prose, on who the Person from Porlock might have been (assuming, of course, that there was such a person) drew a large and inventive entry. Many thanks to John McGivering, who suggested this excellent competition. Some fingered, as De Quincey did, Coleridge’s doctor and laudanum source, but also in the frame were Jehovah’s Witnesses, PPI ambulance-chasers and the drugs squad. And many of you agreed with Stevie Smith’s assessment, in her poem ‘Thoughts about the Person from Porlock’: ‘As the truth is I think he was already stuck With Kubla Khan. He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished, I shall

Toby Young Toby Young

Oh, the shame of not being Pointless | 12 November 2016

I give an after-dinner speech occasionally called ‘Media Training for Dummies’. That may sound condescending, but the dummy in question is me. It’s a compendium of anecdotes about my disastrous media appearances, each more humiliating than the last. At some point I’m going to turn it into a PowerPoint presentation, interspersing the talk with clips so the audience can see that I’m not exaggerating. Until recently, my most embarrassing moment was in New York in 1995, when I took part in a spelling bee broadcast live on the radio. I was the first contestant and my word was ‘barrette’. I’d never encountered this before — it’s the American word for

Cosmo Landesman

There’s nothing new about the sharing economy – it’s the swinging sixties all over again

On the same day I put my spare room on Airbnb I also had my first cabshare experience, courtesy of Uber. When I mentioned this to a young friend of mine, he patted me on the back and said, ‘Welcome to the sharing economy!’ The sharing economy is one of those buzz terms that everyone uses these days — but what exactly is it? Apparently, it refers to a whole range of online goods and services that instead of buying and owning, we can borrow, rent or have access to — sometimes free, usually for a price. Likewise, we can be the ones providing these goods or services, and make

Friday

Rachel Springall

Loyalty doesn’t pay when it comes to your reward card

It’s that time of year again. Mindful of the impending big Christmas shop, people start counting up credit card reward points in the hope of turning them into vouchers and cash. But they could find that their loyalty hasn’t paid off. Reward credit cards can be a useful alterative to debit cards because they offer a little something extra on each spend, such as points. However, not all cards are as rewarding as they seem. In fact, shoppers could be earning very little each time they use their card if the rewards are limited to where the money is spent. In addition, some cards charge considerably higher interest rates than

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Donald Trump’s victory has made social media unbearable

When I woke up on Wednesday morning it was to the news that Donald Trump was the next President of the United States, and, at the top of my Instagram feed, to a photograph of a pair of shiny silver ballet pumps. ‘Wearing sparkly shoes to make today just a teeny bit better,’ was the caption. I scrolled down through other photographs in my usual mindless morning way. A greyhound, already the most doleful looking of dogs, in her basket and the caption: ‘Thank God she neither knows nor understands. I envy her peace’. A toddler, still in his pyjamas, tousled, sleepy, fawn-in-the-headlights eyes: ‘What kind of world will he

Helen Nugent

Price rises, BHS, current accounts and property

Bicycle prices could rise following the Brexit vote, because the cost of importing bikes from Asia has increased. The head of Halfords Jill McDonald said the retailer was in talks with its suppliers following the pound’s fall. ‘For bikes bought in Asia in US dollars, we are seeing prices beginning to move.’ According to The Guardian, McDonald also said Halfords, the UK’s biggest bike seller, was better positioned to tackle price rises than smaller businesses because 90 per cent of the bikes it sells are own labels. Evictions More than 100 households were evicted each day from their rented homes in England last year, according to figures from the Ministry of Justice. The BBC reports that

Steerpike Steerpike

Louise Mensch adds one more Twitter gaffe to her list

Here we go again. As the world mourns the death of Leonard Cohen — the great songwriter — at the age of 82, Louise Mensch has managed to add yet another Twitter gaffe to her ever-growing list. On hearing the news, the former Tory MP took to her social media to hail it as proof of America’s ‘enduring greatness’ unlike… Russia, which by comparison is ‘joyless’: Alas there is a snag with her latest piece of Putin-bashing — Leonard Cohen is actually Canadian. This is just one in a series of social media blunders: 2. Last year she attempted to demonstrate the ‘sewer that is Jeremy Corbyn’s support’ by pointing out that Twitter’s autocomplete

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Magnus vs Sergei

The World Championship in New York begins this week. In the run-up, the defending champion, Magnus Carlsen of Norway, has been the heavy favourite to retain his title against Sergei Karjakin, formerly representing the Ukraine but now playing for Russia. Their lifetime score at classical time limits, under which the New York contest will be conducted, is notably loaded in favour of the incumbent.   As a final preview, here is a win by Carlsen against the former champion Vladimir Kramnik. The notes are based on Cyrus Lakdawala’s in Carlsen: Move by Move (Everyman Chess), a useful compendium for those considering Christmas gifts for chess enthusiasts.   Kramnik-Carlsen: Wijk aan Zee 2008;