Society

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 25 August 2016

Next week I’m going to Ladakh for a travel gig. Me neither — never heard of it. So I heaved out my Victorian world atlas and found it at the apex of India, northwest of Kashmir, and sharing a border with Tibet. Then I went online to find books about the place. Choice was limited. I bought A Journey in Ladakh by David Harvey (‘Extremely entertaining, a classy travel book and a palpitating fragment of a spiritual autobiography’ — David Mitchell, New Society); I bought Ancient Futures by Helena Norberg-Hodge (‘The book that has had the greatest influence on my life… about tradition and change in a remote corner of

Melissa Kite

Real life | 25 August 2016

‘How did I get here?’ I think dazedly. I am sitting in the Big Yellow Self Storage in Balham being interviewed, there is no other word for it. The person interviewing me is a relentlessly cheerful girl who wants to know everything, there is no other word for it, about me before she rents me a storeroom. But not only that, she wants to know everything about something she is ominously calling ‘my storage needs’. As I deliberate on the prices and options, she announces: ‘This is about making sure it’s the right decision for yourself.’ I want to store a piano for a month. I’m not choosing a pension

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 25 August 2016

The 6th Duke of Westminster, who died this month, was living support of the claim that wealth doesn’t make you happy. He was as rich as can be, but said he wished he hadn’t been. The dukedom, and the billions of pounds it brought with it, came to him unexpectedly. He had been brought up on a farm in Northern Ireland and wished he had stayed there and become a beef farmer. Instead, he inherited a great property empire in England and around the world, as well as various estates that allowed him the pleasure of game shooting, but otherwise gave him little but grief. He was overwhelmed by the

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 25 August 2016

There’s been a fair amount of moaning about the English Bridge Union’s decision to move the week-long ‘Summer Meeting’ — one of the most popular events in the bridge calendar — from Brighton to Eastbourne. The decision was purely financial: Brighton is far more expensive. On the other hand, Brighton is a buzzy, vibrant town and was hugely popular with our younger players, who we desperately need to encourage. Whereas Eastbourne… let me put it this way: a couple of years ago, Eastbourne became the first place in the country to have an average age of over 70. The jury is still out, but I’ve just come back from the

Dot Wordsworth

Pelican pie

Revisers of OED have made a pig’s ear of pelican pie, I fear. I’ve been reading for pleasure Peter Gilliver’s The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (reviewed last week). I’m up to 1904, when James Murray complains he ‘could have written two books with less labour’ than it took to compile the entries for pelican and penguin. Pelicans enjoyed life for centuries without the British seeing one. John Trevisa, a sort of 14th-century John Aubrey, wrote in 1398 that there were two kinds: one a water bird, the other loving the wilderness. He got this indirectly from St Jerome’s commentary on Psalm 102: ‘I am become like a pelican in

Toby Young Toby Young

The yawn supremacy

The BBC has published a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century, compiled after consulting academics, cinema curators and critics — and, as you’d expect, it’s almost comically dull. The list contains numerous turgid meditations on the spiritual void at the heart of western civilisation by obscure European ‘auteurs’ and not a single Hollywood comedy. It’s as if the respondents mistook the word ‘best’ for ‘boring’. To give you an idea of just how absurd the list is, it doesn’t include any of the billion-dollar blockbusters from Marvel Studios — no, not even Guardians of the Galaxy — but does have two movies by the impenetrable Danish

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 25 August 2016

Home Virgin Trains released videos showing that there were seats available when Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, was filmed sitting on the floor of a railway carriage saying: ‘This is a problem that many passengers face every day, commuters and long-distance travellers. Today this train is completely ram-packed.’ He then continued his journey in a seat. The RMT union called two more days of strikes for guards on Southern. Sir Antony Jay, the co-writer of the series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, died, aged 86. British competitors returned from the Olympic Games in Rio with 67 medals, of which 27 were gold, beating their performance in the

Columba

2275: Frame of reference

Seven words read clockwise round the perimeter, in alphabetical order. Each of eighteen clues contains a misprinted letter in the definition part. Corrections of misprints spell two words; the first defines six words in the perimeter, and the second defines the last word in the perimeter. Letters in corner squares and those adjacent to them could make OUR TREK MAGIC.   Across   11     One in for good Russian pie (5) 12     Running miles away from parade (4) 13     Pats gold part of bridle (5) 14     I’m after support with appeal for part of estate in Scotland (7) 15     Coping with burden again (10) 17

Columba

to 2272: Holiday time

21 and 41 are definitions of SUMMER; RECESS defines each of the other unclued lights.   First prize Rhiannon Hales, Ilfracombe, Devon Runners-up Julie Sanders, Bishops Waltham, Hampshire; Roger Sherman, Richmond, Surrey

Toby Young Toby Young

In praise of free schools

Congratulations to all those free schools who got their GCSE results this morning. We don’t yet have the full picture, but early reports are good. Top marks to Tauheedul Islam Boys’ High School in Blackburn, a free school that opened in 2012. Ninety-five per cent of its pupils achieved five A* to C grades in their GCSEs, including English and maths, a metric known as ‘5A*–CEM’. To put this in context, last year’s 5A*–CEM national average was 56.1 per cent. Another school that has done well is Dixons Kings Academy in Bradford. It was one of the first 24 free schools to open in 2011 – it was originally called

Talk Talk

Act now to help Britain get the broadband it deserves

Which do you think are the issues that tend to dominate MP’s postbags? Brexit? Immigration? The state of the NHS? All likely contenders – but a more surprising suggestion might be the state of Britain’s broadband service. Up and down the country people struggle to get a decent connection – something that in the 21st century has become almost a vital part of running a company, doing schoolwork, or even doing the shopping. The Countryside Alliance, for one, has long been urging the government to make fixing the state of our rural broadband a priority – but it’s not just in rural areas that people complain about poor internet. In

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Spectator’s accidental all-women cover

Just before The Spectator went to press yesterday, my colleague Emily Hill pointed out that I’d just taken away the only male name away from the cover: all seven of our coverlines were stories written by women. Did I really want that? I hadn’t thought about it until then, and for a while I did consider engaging in tokenism and slapping a man on for the sake of it. But why bother? Spectator readers don’t really care about gender, just good writing. The result is Ariane Sherine, who writes our cover story,  hails as the first all-woman cover in The Spectator’s 188-year history. But this wasn’t a patronising attempt at a

Mark Piggott

Freedom is our best weapon against Isis

Of all the guff churned out about Isis, the refrain that we are engaged in a ‘clash of civilisations’ and ‘battle of ideas’ is uniquely moronic. Isis doesn’t want civilisation. As for a battle of ideas – what ideas? Isis doesn’t have any, unless you count an apocalyptic fight to the death in Dabiq or Rome. We are reliably informed that Isis includes some very intelligent people who spend years planning terror attacks. Yet it took the, ahem, ‘conflicted’ Mohamed Bouhlel – that brave warrior who defecated on his own daughter’s bed – months to plan his terror attack, which consisted solely of getting in a lorry and putting his foot

Ariane Sherine

The reason why women aren’t often funny

The Edinburgh Fringe festival is drawing to a close. Female comics including Bridget Christie, Jayde Adams, Zoe Coombs-Marr, Kate Lucas and Michelle Wolf have been receiving scores of five-star reviews. Coombs-Marr, Wolf and Adams are nominated for Edinburgh Comedy Awards this year, Sofie Hagen won Best Newcomer last year, and Bridget Christie won the main Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2013 – despite female comedians only accounting for fewer than 15 per cent of the circuit. And yet people persist in saying that women aren’t funny. Nearly every female comedy performer I know has experienced an audience member saying post-gig, ‘I don’t normally like women comedians, but you made me laugh.’

Helen Nugent

Rule changes could scupper full state pension payouts

Pensions: about as easy to understand as the theory of relativity. Successive governments have pledged to simplify and clarify the UK pensions system. Each one has failed. If anything, the financial ins and outs of our retirement have become ever more complex. Now the powers that be have made changes to the state pension. If, as is likely, the new rules pass people by, many risk missing out altogether. So, what’s happening? In a nutshell, ministers have increased the number of years of national insurance contributions needed to qualify for a full state pension. From April this year, individuals are required to have 35 years of national insurance payments under their

Helen Nugent

Tax, housing, credit cards and the bank holiday weekend

Some people are being hit with an unexpected tax bill after unlocking their money from a pension pot, according to Citizens Advice. Others are facing reductions in welfare payments owing to the income received by releasing the funds. ‘Pension freedoms’ began in April 2015. Since then, anyone aged 55 and over has been free to withdraw as much as they like from their pension pots, subject to income tax. A report by Citizens Advice looked into the cases of 500 people who have accessed their pension pots. Of those, 9 per cent had unexpected tax issues and 6 per cent found that their benefits were affected. Nearly twice as many people used the money

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Spectator Podcast: Marriage for one

An increasing number of women are entering into the institution of marriage with their dream partner: themselves. In her cover piece this week, Ariane Sherine investigates the women who have brought a new literalism to saying, ‘I do’. But is this just a quirky fad? Or are we witnessing a profound social change? Lara Prendergast speaks to Ariane and Spectator editor Fraser Nelson on this week’s Spectator podcast. Ariane tells Lara: ‘There are an increasing number of women who have decided, because they don’t have a man – or maybe some of them don’t want a man – that if they can’t find Mr Right, well, I’m going to embrace

Steerpike Steerpike

Nigel Farage tells Trump rally to take heart from Brexit

As everyone in Britain knows, Brexit became a real possibility only once Nigel Farage was elbowed out of the leadership by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. But you can forgive Farage for pretending otherwise in his six-minute speech to the Trump rally as he tried to make out that Brexit and Trumpism are the same kind of thing. In fact, Brexit is a prime example of how a country avoids Trumpism. The kind of referendum that puts people like Farage out of work, and puts parties like Ukip out of business. Anyway, Farage seems to have learned from the campaign experience and borrowed Boris’s habit of addressing his audience as ‘folks’. David Cameron will be

Ed West Ed West

The gender pay gap isn’t just about sexism

‘More work needs to be done,’ is what people say whenever some unachievable social goal is shown to be another 200 years away. And it was said a lot this week after it emerged that women still earn 18 per cent less than men on average. As the Guardian reported: The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) also found that the gap balloons after women have children, raising the prospect that mothers are missing out on pay rises and promotions. That was echoed by a separate report yesterday suggesting that male managers are 40 per cent more likely than female managers to be promoted. What’s odd is that almost nowhere in the supposedly