Society

Thursday

Henry Jeffreys

Notes on… Champagne

The British are notoriously cheap when it comes to wine; the average bottle price is around £6. On one wine, however, we’re happy to spend five times that: champagne. We love champagne, and champagne producers love us: Britain is their biggest export market and it’s only getting bigger: up by 4.5 per cent last year. In fact, champagne as a dry sparkling wine was created specifically for us. Until the mid-19th century, most production from the Champagne region was still red wine. French connoisseurs thought the fizzy stuff rather vulgar. Bertin du Rocheret, a wine merchant, compared it to ‘beer, chocolate and whipped cream’. It would have been a rich

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 20 October 2016

Kenya A woman’s bottom cheered me up recently. The lady was walking ahead of me in a Kenya street and she was wearing a kanga — a local garment worn like a bath towel and printed with colourful geometric designs. A kanga is traditionally emblazoned with a Swahili proverb or scrap of esoteric advice, making it a bit like a wearable fortune cookie. This one had written neatly across it: Huwezi kula n’gombe mzima halafu ukasema mkia umekushinda — which roughly means, ‘Don’t eat a whole cow and then say you’re defeated by the tail…’ Persevere! Never give up! That was the message I took home to the farm. I

Matt Ridley

Climate of ignorance

Global greening is the name given to a gradual, but large, increase in green vegetation on the planet over the past three decades. The climate change lobby is keen to ensure that if you hear about it at all, you hear that it is a minor thing, dwarfed by the dangers of global warming. Actually, it could be the other way round: greening is a bigger effect than warming. It is a story in which I have been both vilified and vindicated. Four years ago, I came across an online video of a lecture given by Ranga Myneni of Boston University in which he presented an ingenious analysis of data

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Hope, fights and grammar schools

A typical Kentish town, with its grammar school at one end and its secondary school at the other, is a throwback to the Bad Old Days, or the Good Old Days, depending on what your views are on academically selective state education. If Theresa May’s plans go ahead, the whole country might look something like this. In my childhood home town of Sandwich, Kent, the two schools, Sir Roger Manwood’s grammar school and the Sandwich Technology School, have staggered going-home times to avoid the fights on the station platform that used to happen every afternoon. Their uniforms are tellingly different: the Manwood’s students wear smart blazers and ties, the Tech

James Bartholomew

Carney must go

Oh dear. Mark Carney is irritated. His proud independence has been challenged. The Prime Minister had the temerity to admit that she was not altogether thrilled with his ‘super-low’ interest rates and quantitative easing. These policies meant that people with assets got richer, she pointed out. ‘People without them suffered… People with savings have found themselves poorer.’ Mr Carney found this intolerable and haughtily rebuffed her, saying, ‘The policies are done by technocrats. We are not going to take instruction on our policies from the political side.’ Back in your box, Mrs May. Carney’s in charge! As they clash, it is increasingly hard to remember what a bright day it

Patrick Marnham

Japan Notebook | 20 October 2016

Tokyo is visual chaos everywhere, the antithesis of the Japanese interior. It is a multilevel jumble of overpasses, neon signs, electric pylons, railway lines and traffic lights. The pavements are empty, not a pedestrian human in sight. And the leader of North Korea is still lobbing ballistic missiles right over Japan and cackling away about his collection of nuclear warheads. Drinking beer in a sushi bar in Ginza on our first night, I ask my neighbour whether people are worried by the behaviour of the lunatic child across the water. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘I am far more frightened by our prime minister. He really is dangerous.’ Shinzo Abe is proposing to repeal

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The most persecuted minority at universities

A few columns ago, I told the mortifying story of how I totally died at the Oxford Union. Today I’m going to tell you how I managed to avoid the same fate on a more recent trip to the Cambridge Union, where I spoke in a debate and opposed the motion: ‘This house would open its doors to refugees.’ Partly, I was just better prepared. One of the benefits of a public-speaking disaster is that it makes you particularly loath ever to repeat the horror. I can’t say I spent any longer on my speech. What I did do, though, was co-ordinate much more with the rest of my team

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Ghosts of the seasons

Forget killer clowns. Halloween was once a very different affair from the Americanised gorefest it is now. In its-original Irish form, as when I was growing up, it was an opportunity for children to dress up in their parents’ clothes, wear a mask and a hat and go begging from door to door for nuts, apples or money for bobbing — viz, sticking your head in a basin of water to dive after coins and apples. There was barmbrack — a sort of yeasted fruitbread you ate on the night — which contained a ring to predict who would be the next to marry (that dates it) and, in old-fashioned

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

How clever are ravens? I asked at the Tower

On Tower Hill, by the east wall of Beauchamp Tower where Robert Dudley was imprisoned for a year, a raven called Merlin hides behind a yucca plant. I know she’s there because the Ravenmaster told me. He knows she’s there because Merlin (a female) and he are bonded and they keep tabs on each other throughout the day. As he walks across Tower Green, he whistles to her, and in reply, from the shadows, comes a low, metallic, caw. Ravens pair up for life, for the most part, and Merlin, who dislikes the other ravens, has chosen Chris, the Tower of London’s Yeoman Warder Ravenmaster, as her mate. As he

Lucy Vickery

Ig Nobel

In Competition No. 2970 you were invited to supply an extract from an Ig Nobel Prize-winner’s speech that describes the ‘achievement’ (invented by you) being honoured. The Igs are spoof awards handed out annually at Harvard for scientific achievements that manage to be both hilarious and thought-provoking. In 2014’s Neuroscience category, for example, the award was scooped by Jiangang Liu et al. for their contribution to our understanding of what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. And just last month, Egyptian urologist Ahmed Shafik was honoured in this year’s Reproduction category for his work testing the effects of wearing

Wednesday

Rachel Springall

Inflation rise means more bad news for savers – but you can chase down a half-decent return

So, inflation has gone up. Unexpectedly, it rose to a 22-month high of 1 per cent this week, with the full force of a weak pound and other rising prices fuelling the leap. This means more bad news for savers who are already concerned about the eroding power of inflation on their cash. The rise caused a bit of a shock, as many economists had predicted a much smaller increase to 0.8 per cent, up from 0.6 per cent the month before. Now adjusted analysis shows we could see inflation exceeding the 2 per cent target as soon as next year. What does this all mean for savers? Well, there is currently

Nicholas Farrell

The Calais Jungle ‘child refugee’ conundrum

You just have to look at the faces of the migrant ‘children’ who have begun to arrive in Britain over the past couple of days from the Jungle in Calais to realise that many are not children. Just as I did when I visited the illegal shanty-town a couple of weeks ago and met a man from Afghanistan who said he was a boy. I found him inside a remarkably solid timber shack which had the words  ‘Welcome Restaurant’ painted above the door. He was one of a dozen or so men, sitting about on divans and chairs, watching a cricket match between Pakistan and the West Indies on a large flat-screen

Helen Nugent

Annuities, unemployment, property and fraud

The Treasury’s decision to abandon plans to let pensioners raise money by selling their annuities has been welcomed by the pensions industry. The controversial idea was first aired in March 2015 by the then Chancellor George Osborne as part of his plan for ‘pension freedoms’. Despite deciding last December that the plan would go ahead next April, the Government has now changed its mind. The Government admitted that too many pensioners might be lured into selling their annuities – an income for life – in exchange for a lump sum. The Association of British Insurers (ABI) said it was the ‘right decision’. Meanwhile, Paul Green, director of communications at Saga, said: ‘This is

David Whitehouse

The alluring prospect of life on Mars

If you happened to be standing today on the reddish sand of Meridiani Planum – a vast, flat, expanse just south of the Martian equator – you might well spot a dark spec in the distance against the peach-coloured sky, moving towards you. In the next few hours, the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli probe will make its final, six-minute decent through the Martian atmosphere. If it succeeds in touching down safely, the probe will be one of the very few to make it to the Martian surface. But after a journey of 500 million kilometres, it’s only then that the probe’s work will really start: scientists hope the Schiaparelli lander

Tuesday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Home Office’s dirty laundry aired at select committee on child sexual abuse inquiry

On Monday, Amber Rudd found herself in a difficult position in the Commons over the Home Office’s blunder-ridden child sexual abuse inquiry. In response to an urgent question from Lisa Nandy, she was forced to confess that despite her previous statements, she had known that Dame Lowell Goddard quit as chair amid allegations of racism rather than loneliness. Now onto its fourth chair, Alexis Jay, MPs are fast losing patience with the inquiry. While Rudd has the undesirable task of taking the heat over an inquiry set up by her boss Theresa May, today it was the turn of Home Office staff and inquiry members to offer their version of events to the Home Affairs

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Don’t listen to the doom-mongers: A rise in inflation isn’t some kind of crisis

It takes quite a determined Cassandra to see the rise in Consumer Prices Index (CPI) from 0.6 per cent in August to one per cent in September as some kind of crisis, not that that will stop the holdouts of the Remain campaign from trying to do so. When CPI fell below one per cent at the end of 2014, you might remember, there were dark warnings about the threat of deflation – with the horrors that would imply for borrowers, who would see the real value of their debts increase. Now, some are trying to present a rise to one per cent as bad news, with former Monetary Policy

Helen Nugent

Inflation, self-employed, online fraud and housing

The annual rate of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index rose to 1 per cent in September, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics. That’s up from 0.6 per cent in the year to August. CPI tracks the cost of 700 household goods and services. Investment manager Thomas Laskey from Aberdeen Asset Management said: ‘The worrying factor is that today’s figure represents only a tiny part of sterling’s steep drop, and no effect from the second big tumble earlier this month. Such a large fall in the currency will bring with it higher import costs and we’re likely to see much higher inflation in the months

Monday

Helen Nugent

How to have the most wonderful Christmas time: rein in your spending

There’s always one. One colleague, friend or family member who starts banging on about Christmas months in advance. One smug person who risks a punch in the face for boasting ‘I’ve done all my Xmas shopping’ before the clocks have gone back. Thanks all the same but I don’t want to know how many days it is until December 25. I have no interest in seeing the M&S festive range. And I have zero appetite for a sneak preview of the John Lewis Christmas ad. Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas and all that it entails. The bulging stocking (yes, my mum still does this), the tin of Quality Street, the

Helen Nugent

Housing, the economy and estate planning

Britain’s economy faces a ‘prolonged period’ of weaker growth as consumer spending slows and business curbs investment, according to a report published on the BBC website. Although the EY Item Club think tank predicts the economy will grow 1.9 per cent this year, it expects that performance to fizzle out as inflation rises. The economy’s stability since June’s Brexit vote was ‘deceptive’, EY said. Meanwhile, a senior Bank of England official told the BBC that inflation may surpass its 2 per cent target. The Bank’s deputy governor Ben Broadbent told Radio 5 live that sterling’s weakness would fuel inflation, but that controlling prices with tighter monetary policy could hit growth and jobs.

Sunday

Roger Bootle & John Mills

Why we should celebrate the fall of the pound – and keep it low

The fall of the pound has been the political event of the week, but is it all bad news? Many thanks to Civitas for allowing us to republish the below essay, an extract from a pamphlet (pdf) about the merits of a low currency and case for keeping the pound at its new competitive levels.  Many people in the market and much of the commentariat are currently concerned with the recent weakness of the pound on the exchanges. They are barking up the wrong tree. The real sterling crisis is that the pound has been too high. Accordingly, the Brexit-inspired bout of sterling weakness was extremely good news for the