Society

Friday

12 Aug 2016

How more data can make you more wrong

In a one-day international against Australia last year, Ben Stokes was dismissed for ‘obstructing the field’, a rule rarely invoked in-cricket. The bowler had thrown the ball towards the wicket (and hence near Stokes’s head) in an attempt to run him out. Stokes raised his hand and deflected the ball. After some discussion between the two on-field umpires, and a referral to the third umpire, Stokes was given out. What was most interesting was the difference in the conclusions people reached depending on whether they watched the replay in real time or in slow motion (you can find both on YouTube). Seen at speed, his raising of his hand looked

Jeff Prestridge

Bank branch closures are destroying our communities

We are fast approaching a time when massive tracts of this fine country of ours (greenfield, brownfield, urban, rural) will be bank-free zones. Villages and towns stripped of their last bank. Goodbye pub, goodbye convenience store and now goodbye bank. Yes, ultimately goodbye community. Last week’s disappointing report from the Competition and Markets Authority on how to breathe fire into the static current account market will do little to arrest this decline in the bank branch. Its authors seem besotted with the digital age, prattling on about a future dominated by digital banking and open competition. It’s as if the bank branch was already a thing of the past. Over

Helen Nugent

Holiday price hikes, car insurance and inheritance tax

The pound has been in the doldrums this week, and is trading near a one-month low today. Traders are betting on further monetary easing from the Bank of England. According to The Guardian, sterling has fallen nearly 3 per cent since the Bank unveiled a bigger-than-expected stimulus package last week and dropped to $1.2952 this morning, after hitting a one-month low of $1.2936 yesterday. Holiday costs Holidaymakers have been warned that the cost of their summer breaks will rise next year because of the recent fall in the pound, the Daily Mail reports. Travel giant Tui, which owns Thomson and First Choice, warned British holidaymakers that because a number of its

Thursday

11 Aug 2016

The Spectator

Letters | 11 August 2016

The hate is real Sir: It is clearly an exaggeration to call Britain a bigoted country (‘We are not a hateful nation’, 6 August), but downplaying the recent wave of xenophobic and racist incidents across the UK as ‘somebody shouting something nasty on a bus’ is equally wrong. Verbal abuse in itself is worthy of condemnation, yet the character of recorded harassment is actually much more serious. In the past few weeks, Poles in this country were shocked by vulgar graffiti (West London; Hertfordshire; Portsmouth) and hurtful leaflets (Cambridgeshire) urging them to ‘go home’ in most offensive ways possible, while a family in Plymouth fell victim to an arson attack.

Taki

High life | 11 August 2016

Gstaad ‘He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, that daring young man on the flying trapeze.’ As everyone knows, life’s unfair, but this is ridiculous. An American daredevil falls out of an aeroplane at 25,000 feet without a parachute and manages to land on a postage-stamp-size net without a scratch. The poor little Greek boy falls off a balcony ten to 15 feet high, lands on gravel and breaks many bones in his body. Being encased in plaster is similar to living under a strict dictatorship, North Korea, for example. There’s no crime, no muggings, but as far as doing what comes naturally, fuggetaboutit. Self-doubt and

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 11 August 2016

At 11 p.m. I sneaked away from my boy’s wedding party to my ground-floor accommodation in the hotel to write for an hour. For two days I had been in sole charge of my boy’s two young sons and sneaking away when possible to snatch half an hour here and there to write last week’s column. But with little or no success. The pair were fanatical for my uninterrupted attention and neither would countenance such a ridiculous waste of our precious playing time. ‘Now look here, chaps,’ I’d said to them on day one. ‘Grandad has had enough of playing games and he is going into his office to do

Melissa Kite

Real life | 11 August 2016

The builder boyfriend colicked for a week after eating a falafel kebab as he and I sat up all night with the colicking pony. And unlike the colicking pony, who was attended to by the vet and given intravenous Buscopan, the colicking builder boyfriend moaned and groaned in agony, untreated. If he had a GP he couldn’t remember who or where it was. He has not sought any kind of healthcare, nor seen the inside of a hospital, since a gang of thugs broke both his arms when he was a ten-year-old boy growing up on the mean streets of Balham. (That was the real Balham, before the independent hipster

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 11 August 2016

A hoo-ha has broken out in the city of Oryol, south-west of Moscow, over a proposal by the officials there to put up Russia’s first ever public monument to Ivan the Terrible. This 16th-century czar had some major achievements to his credit — particularly the expansion of Russia’s territory and welding it into a united state — but seems nevertheless to deserve most of the excoriation that history has bestowed on him. There is some uncertainty about whether he actually killed his son and heir as is usually claimed; but he was definitely drunken and paranoid and given to wild swings between spasms of violent cruelty and bouts of self-loathing

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 11 August 2016

Here’s a bridge tip you won’t find in a book — one which the wonderful Gunnar Hallberg gave me. You’re declarer and a suit is led; dummy comes down with something like 8643, and it obviously doesn’t matter which card you play. Instead of routinely playing low, you should ask for a ridiculous, random card — say, the six. ‘The six?’ your partner (dummy) will ask, looking confused. ‘The six,’ you should repeat, emphatically. This has the effect of 1) making the opponents think you’re a scarily good player, and 2) distracting them from their defence while they try to work out why you might need to ‘unblock’ that particular

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 August 2016

Those who want to revive grammar schools are accused of ‘bring backery’ — the unthinking idea that the past was better. But many of their accusers suffer from the rigid mindset of which they complain. They say that grammar schools ‘condemned most children to failure at the age of 11’, and that, even at their peak, grammars catered for less than 20 per cent of the school population. Why assume that the return of grammars must re-create either of these things? Grammar schools grew up, historically, in different ways and at different times. Then, in the mid‑20th-century mania for uniformity, they were standardised and, in the later 20th-century mania for comprehensives, almost

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 11 August 2016

Home The government floated the idea that individuals might receive payments in areas where fracking was approved, or where housing developments gained permission. Grammar schools might also be revived, it was suggested. Failing to go ahead with the Hinkley Point nuclear power station could damage China’s relationship with Britain, its ambassador Liu Xiaoming wrote in the Financial Times. A 19-year-old Norwegian of Somali origin was arrested after the fatal stabbing of an American woman in Russell Square, London. Tanveer Ahmed, 32, from Bradford, was jailed for life or a minimum of 27 years, after admitting the murder of Asad Shah, an Ahmadi Muslim by religion, outside his shop in Glasgow,

Toby Young

The problem with grammar schools

By rights, I should be one of those Tories who is passionately in favour of grammar schools. After all, I went to one myself. My attachment to them should be particularly strong because before arriving at William Ellis in Highgate I went to two bog-standard comprehensives and failed all my O–levels apart from English Literature, in which I got a C. The only other qualification I left with was a grade one CSE in Drama. William Ellis was the making of me. Had I not got in, I doubt I would have ended up at Oxford. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not a passionate opponent of grammar schools either. I wouldn’t

Dot Wordsworth

Honorificabilitudinity

My husband told me with glee that Nicholas Byfield had a great big stone ‘like flint’ in his bladder, weighing 33 ounces, which ‘exceedingly afflicted’ him for 15 years, until it killed him in 1622, aged 44. It did not stop him writing about the Epistle to the Colossians and remarking that Christ’s divine nature is ‘incircumscriptible in respect of place’. This is doubtless true, but most interest has focused on the length of the word. In 1900 James Murray, the great editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (to the new history of which by Peter Gilliver I keenly look forward), completed the section I–Infer. ‘Those who are interested in

Raymond Keene

Surreptitious subversion

After the vote to leave the EU it is time to reclaim the good old English names for traditional openings such as the Ruy Lopez and the Centre Counter. Foreign subversion has gradually altered the correct name for the Ruy Lopez (1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5) to the less evocative Spanish Opening, while the Centre Counter (see this week’s game), which was good enough for Howard Staunton when he played Paul Morphy, was quietly changed on the continent to the Scandinavian Defence. I see no reason whatsoever why our Viking cousins should be able to lay any claim to the naming of this defence. This week, a

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 11 August 2016

Q. I live in Balham but work in Mayfair. Twice recently I have had to take whole days off work to wait in for deliveries of online purchases that could only be scheduled for ‘some time between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.’ My son says this is the hidden price I must pay for shopping at low-cost outlets. I have a cleaner but she doesn’t work a 12-hour day. What do other people do? —J.F., London SW12 A. Other people have had the sense to make friends with retired neighbours. Many of these long for the chance to get away from their partners and sit quietly reading in a neighbour’s

Raymond Keene

no. 421

White to play. This position is from Steinitz–Chigorin, World Championship (Game 4), Havana 1892. How did White finish off? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 16 August or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qxc8+ Last week’s winner Feliks Kwiatkowski, Haywards Heath, West Sussex

Pabulum

2273: Numbers

Clockwise round the perimeter from 3 run the titles of three items (1, 6, 3, 1, 4, 2, 1, 4, 1, 4, 3, 4, 5, 6, 3, 4) from the same source, the title of which is epitomised by the four unclued lights. Ignore two apostrophes. Across 8 Slowly cycling with a bouquet? (5) 9 Party hit the roof in court (6, hyphened) 10 Man feels relaxed and gets angry no more (8) 12 Poet’s precious metalon the other side of Scotland (4) 14 How airlock puzzled tireless toiler (10) 15 Silkworms stupidsort uses (8) 20 Dish with oomph is round cuddling that man (7) 21 Small group of cells

Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: 2016 H1

The UK magazine industry publishes its circulation figures today, and there is good news for The Spectator: the highest sales ever in our long and illustrious 188-year history. Our web traffic has hit an all time high: we broke 4m monthly unique users during the referendum campaign, which is quite something for a ‘paywalled’ publication. But traffic comes and goes. What matters is whether the new readers like what they see and, when they encounter the paywall, decide to join us. They are now doing so in record numbers. As a result our subscriptions are soaring. Our print sales figure now stands at 56,632 for the first half of this

David Gelber

The first favela

Where are you going?’ demanded the boy on the wall. A walkie-talkie clipped to his denim shorts crackled, but there was no sign of a weapon. ‘The English Cemetery,’ I answered. He slid down. ‘You need to go back that way. Take the road on the right.’ The street in question was a dustbowl where diggers flattened the ground for the tramlines that should have arrived in time for the Olympics. But no, he insisted, there was no way of reaching the cemetery through the favela. There are favelas and there are favelas, and the mesh of houses, shacks and alleys that extends across Morro da -Providência, above the English

James Delingpole

Christopher Biggins and the fall of civilisation

Suppose you’d invited me round to dinner to celebrate my engagement to your daughter, which do you think would be more offensive? If a) I got violently drunk, threatened all the male guests, abused the women doing the catering, shoved my tongue in my hostess’s ear, hurled a bottle through the window, felt up all the bridesmaids under the table, then retreated to the jacuzzi to shag your daughter’s best friend? Or b) if I made a mildly tasteless quip about the Holocaust? There’s only one correct answer and it is, of course, b). We know this thanks to the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother, whose makers have peremptorily