Society

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 10 November 2016

A wonderful email has arrived from Airbnb entitled ‘Discrimination and Belonging — What It Means For You’. Having tried to make sense of it, I feel it can mean only one thing with any certainty. And that is that the Airbnb party is over. The web business started by a whizz kid in his New York apartment is about to feed itself to the ravening equality agenda wolves. Sadly, the once proud Airbnb corporation has decided to launch ‘a comprehensive effort to fight bias and inequality in the Airbnb community’. With abject hand-wringing, it says it wants to make sure that any householder joining its site to host tourists in

Doc

2286: B

The unclued lights are of a kind. Ignore one grave accent.   Across   1    Hails a picador, awfully exciting (13) 11    Difficult child had fun playing close to school (7) 12    Father has undone Turk’s head (5) 14    As You Like It — a piece of theatre by Shakespeare (6, two words) 16    Peg checks printer’s error in ‘Home on the Range’ (5) 17    Singer in the nude. Get her off! (4) 20    Wonderful rest is disturbed when everyone comes back in (7) 21    French composer having his bird nicely cooked, for starters (7) 23    Almost rescue girl in open country (7) 24    Some cheap oil upset French soldier (5)

Mike Fotis

Being boring has shielded the insurance industry for far too long

The insurance industry is the boring uncle of the financial services family – a little drab and likely to be found in a basement listening to Daniel O’Donnell on a Saturday night. By contrast, banking conjures up colourful images of Wolf of Wall Street excess, which has helped to fuel a healthy dose of scrutiny. Being boring has shielded the insurance industry from its fair share of scrutiny for far too long. Issues have emerged that don’t receive the level of scrutiny they deserve. Readers of this article will be all too familiar with freefalling savings rates. It’s a bitter pill, but we’ve swallowed it. Meanwhile, car insurance is clearly an

Doc

to 2283: be damned

The unclued lights are PUBLISHING FIRMS. Our apologies for the omission of clue 42 Across. It went missing during the production stage. It should have read: 42 Enticing action Latino attains oddly (13)   First prize Jenny Gubb, Uffculme, Devon Runners-up Philip Berridge, Spalding, Lincolnshire; Mrs E. Knights, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Why the John Lewis Christmas advert is a mess

It used to be the Coca Cola advert that signalled Christmas was on its way. Holidays were coming, and Coke would deliver joy to the world. These days, it’s the John Lewis advertisement that everyone looks forward to. There’s a running theme to these Christmas adverts. A schmaltzy song, a sickly sweet storyline (often with a few animals thrown in, just to make it that bit sweeter), and a happy, Christmassy ending. Hurrah!! This year’s, which was released today, is no different. Personally, though, I’d say that whoever came up with this advert needs a serious dose of reality – and quick. Of course it’s a lovely image; the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed foxes; the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

America elected a man who believes in nothing but himself

In the aftermath of disaster, it is always easy – and perhaps even psychologically necessary – to suppose matters cannot be as bad as they seem. Surely President Trump can’t be as bad as candidate Trump suggested he would be? Perhaps not. And yet, really, why can’t he be? If you thought Trump deplorable on Tuesday morning he is not made more attractive simply because he has won an appalling victory. In any case, the things a candidate says on the election trail remain the surest predictor of what the candidate will do if he wins the election and it does Donald Trump a disservice to suppose he’s any different

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers are saying about Trump’s triumph

Trump’s win sent shockwaves around the world and today’s papers are dominated with news of the one of the biggest political upsets in modern history. Here’s what the papers are saying about Trump’s triumph: The Times describes Trump’s electoral triumph as heralding the start of ‘The New World’. It says that the president elect’s own words yesterday, that he wasn’t the head of a campaign ‘but rather an incredible and great movement’ is perhaps the best way of explaining why he won. The paper says that politics will ’never be the same again’; but whereas some panicky commentators insist that means bad news, the Times strikes a more upbeat tone in

Helen Nugent

Markets, banks, property and the pay gap

It’s the morning after an 18-month campaign – and the markets have started to digest Donald Trump’s surprise election as US President. In early trading, the FTSE 100 index jumped by 49 points, or 0.7 per cent, to 6960. The Dow Jones industrial average is on track to hit a new record high when the US stock market opens later today. Last night the Dow closed near to its highest levels. And, after touching almost $1,340 an ounce yesterday before falling back, gold is up slightly this morning at $1,291. Meanwhile, Dame DeAnne Julius, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, told the BBC Today programme: ‘The difficulty with

Harry Mount

The Marx Memorial Library

There’s a small corner of Clerkenwell where the communist dream never died. The Marx Memorial Library has been in its big, classical 1738 building — originally a school for children of Welsh artisans living in poverty — for 83 years. The library was set up in 1933, the 50th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death. British Marxism and communism have faded, but the library still has a brigade of staunch supporters. Jeremy Corbyn, whose constituency is just up the road in Islington, is a regular visitor. To tour the library is to return to the 1930s when communism was at its height — when Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt were full of gleaming-eyed optimism about the

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Football’s new Special One

Jurgen or José: compare and contrast (and please write on as many sides of the paper as possible). Is there any more charismatic man in Britain right now than Jurgen Klopp? A real Special One and currently sitting on top of the Premier League. He gives good interview, loves his players, loves the fans (they love him back) and is gracious and cheerful in victory as well as the occasional defeat. He is building a Liverpool side that’s playing with buzz, flair and an exuberant joyfulness; a brilliant coach but one for whom football is still clearly a game. When I stood on the Kop in the early 1970s we

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Should I pop a cheque in the post or brave the dangers of online banking?

There’s an electronic device on my desk that looks — through its bubble- wrap — like a cheap miniature calculator. It’s still in the packaging a month after it arrived because I’m irritated by the idea that I have to master a new gadget specifically designed to complicate a familiar action. The thing is a debit-card reader, and I gather I must activate it whenever I want to send money from my bank account via the internet to a new payee. At first that was done simply by typing the payee’s details into boxes on my laptop screen; then it involved waiting for a security code to pop up on

The Spectator

Conditions for surrender

From ‘How to Shorten the War. I. Prisoners’, The Spectator, 11 November 1916: Unless we altogether mistake the mental character of the German military authorities, they will hold that there is only one effective way of dealing with our invitation to a British fireside in a prison camp, and that is by stamping with the utmost ferocity upon any symptom of readiness to surrender… If once we can set one or two plain questions rolling in the German lines, we shall have done what we want to do. ‘Is it worth while to bear this? Are we doing any good by bearing it? Does not the way we are treated give

Cosmo Landesman

Like Uber, but for hippies

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

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Let’s shut out this angry, unrepresentative mob

If you’re aiming to refute the suggestion that you can’t comprehend the difference between mob rule and the rule of law, then I suspect it’s probably a bad idea to raise a mob and lead it marching on a law court. Just my little hunch. Yet here come Nigel Farage and his piggybank Arron (Piggy) Banks with a plan to do just that. When the Supreme Court meets next month, the chaps behind Leave.EU aim to lead a march of 100,000 people to Parliament Square, to remind the chaps in wigs what Britain jolly well voted for. As if that had anything to do with anything at all. So far,

Lucy Vickery

Missing person report

In Competition No. 2973 you were invited to give your thoughts, in verse or prose, on who the Person from Porlock might have been — assuming, of course, that there was such a person. Many thanks to John McGivering, who suggested this excellect competition. Some fingered, as De Quincey did, Coleridge’s doctor and laudanum source. Also in the frame were Jehovah’s Witness, PPI ambulance-chasers and the drugs squad. And many agreed with Stevie Smith: ‘As the truth is I think he was already stuck/ With Kubla Khan … When along comes the Person from Porlock/ And takes the blame for it.’ The winners take £25 each; Frank McDonald nabs £30.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Donald Trump won’t be as bad as you think

For 18 months, Donald Trump was amazingly useful to British politicians. Whatever their party, he provided them with the most magnificent means with which to polish their liberal credentials. In January, when the British Parliament spent three hours debating a public petition to ban Trump from entering the country, we learned from Labour’s Rupa Huq that he was ‘racist, homophobic, misogynist’, from the Conservative Marcus Fysh that he was ‘the orange prince of American self-publicity’ and from the SNP’s Gavin Newlands that he was not only ‘racist, sexist and bigoted’, but ‘an idiot’. So perhaps now that the giggling has subsided, we can get down to a more realistic assessment

Ed West Ed West

Donald Trump played the identity politics game – and won

I feel a strange sense of schadenfreude mixed with a heavy dose of terror and uncertainty now that the American people have elected someone with no experience whatsoever who tweets things like this: Every time I speak of the haters and losers I do so with great love and affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 29, 2014 On the plus side: LOLs at liberals in my timeline. On the minus: Potential global upheaval/depression/war. So, swings and roundabouts. The BBC were just now asking about Trump’s famous plan for a wall with Mexico, still presenting it as a hugely

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Blind tasting

In my line of work, I’m lucky enough to go to a lot of wine tastings – press tastings that is – sometimes as many as three or four a day at the height of wine tasting season. They are what a wine-writing colleague of mine likes to call drinks parties. He lurches about from bottle to bottle, being charming to everyone and consuming as much as he can. He never fails to chat someone up and never manages to trouble the spittoons. He rarely seems to file any copy though and I’m beginning to think that he believes they are simply put on for the benefit of his social

Tuesday

James Daley

Gambling is risky but it shouldn’t be a con

It’s always puzzled me why there’s still such a taboo around gambling in the UK. If you count people who play the national lottery, more than 50 per cent of us have had a flutter over the past four weeks. And if you like to think of playing the lottery as making a charity donation rather than gambling (are you sure about that?), there’s still almost one in three of us who have gambled in the last month. Like most things, gambling needs to be done in moderation. Lose control and it can have disastrous life-changing effects. But the majority of people who enjoy a flutter manage to do so