Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Disciplined brutality

From ‘The Crimes of Germany’, The Spectator, 29 January 1916: It would be a relief, a partial solution, if only one could say that the Germans broke loose from their officers and their habits in a lust of blood and violence. But the terrible fact is that throughout the war we have heard no word of any German regiment being out of hand, or doing otherwise than their officers or the highest authorities desired. They have been a perfectly disciplined army — disciplined to spread red ruin, to oppress, and to bully with a mechanical docility.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Mr Bear is back: sit tight because he may be with us for a while

Like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, we’ve just been savaged by a bear but we’ll probably survive. Leading UK-listed stocks have fallen 20 per cent from last April’s peak after a six-year climb, and the FTSE100 chart has taken on a saw-toothed downward trajectory that suggests, to those who rely on such indicators, that there are further falls to come. The end of quantitative easing and the US Federal Reserve’s first interest-rate rise in almost a decade set the direction of travel. The sinking oil price, combined with worries about a global debt build-up, darkened the mood. Repeated bouts of mayhem on the Shanghai bourse, though little or nothing to

Matt Ridley

South Georgia Notebook

The terrible news that Henry Worsley had died just 30 miles short of crossing the Antarctic continent unsupported reached me just after I returned from the South Atlantic. We had been in the very stretch of ocean that a relative of his somehow navigated for 800 miles in a tiny boat with Sir Ernest Shackleton and four crew members after their ship was lost in the ice 100 years ago. Unlike them, we were warm and cosy in the Pharos SG, a government vessel that supplies the bases and patrols the well-managed fisheries of South Georgia. We passed the cove where the six men landed and ate baby albatrosses and

Lucy Vickery

Doublespeak

In Competition No. 2932 you were invited to submit up to 16 lines of verse that are the fruit of a collaboration between two poets. This week’s brief was open to interpretation. Some of you submitted centos (poems comprised of lines from existing poems); others imagined a pair of poets co-writing a new work incorporating the styles and/or themes of both and elements of existing poems. Some match-made poets with similar preoccupations; others saw the attraction in opposites. It was a clever and engaging entry and narrowing it down to just six was a protracted and painful process. The following would have been worthy winners had there only been more

Wednesday

Simon Barnes

This could be the year that sport dies of corruption

Like religion, sport can take any amount of passion in its stride. It’s indifference that’s the killer. Sport can be bubbling with incontinent hatred, poisonous rivalries, ludicrous injustice and the most appalling people doing the most appalling things: but as long as people still care, as long as the sporting arguments still echo, as long as newspapers are read from back to front, then sport’s future is safe. But now, as we look forward to an Olympic year, a Wimbledon with hot British contenders in the men’s and the women’s competitions for the first time in damn near 50 years, a summer with a thrilling England cricket team, an England

Melanie Phillips

It’s dangerous and wrong to tell all children they’re ‘gender fluid’

This is the cover piece of this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow: Once upon a time, ‘binary’ was a mathematical term. Now it is an insult on a par with ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘homophobic’, to be deployed as a weapon in our culture wars. The enemy on this particular battleground is anyone who maintains that there are men and there are women, and that the difference between them is fundamental. This ‘binary’ distinction is accepted as a given by the vast majority of the human race. No matter. It is now being categorised as a form of bigotry. Utterly bizarre? Scoff at your peril. It’s fast becoming an enforceable orthodoxy, with children

Tuesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

A select committee revelation: the doors were painted red 20 years ago

The whole purpose of parliamentary select committees was supposed to be to help inform policy-making. Instead, they have sunk to becoming rather vulgar kangaroo courts used by wannabe barristers of the backbenchers to boost their egos. It took about five minutes at today’s session of the Commons Home Affairs Committee to establish that neither G4S nor Jomast (the landlord which provides properties in Middlesbrough for the housing of asylum-seekers) have a policy of deliberately painting front doors red in order to help identify the occupants as asylum-seekers. Only 59 per cent of properties in the town occupied by asylum-seekers are red, it turns out. Moreover, the doors have been painted

Kim Sengupta

If only the Government had listened to Henry Worsley

Dust swirled up from Lashkar Gar airfield in the sunshine towards the blue skies; convoys were forming, line after line of bulldozers, oil tankers, 4×4 cars bristling with guns and men in wraparound sunglasses. The American private security company, DynCorps, had come to town to start Afghanistan’s opium war. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Worsley watched the build up with a mixture of anxiety and distaste. “We will need to liaise with them, just to make sure we do not go anywhere near those areas. Our position is quite clear, we are not going to get involved in eradication,” he said. This was in March 2006, Britain was about to deploy a

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Irony alert: ‘rabid feminists’ want themselves removed from the Oxford English Dictionary

As if to make a massive display of their dearth of self-awareness, Twitter feminists have spent the past few days nagging the Oxford English Dictionary over its definition of the word ‘nagging’. They have also rabidly denounced its definition of ‘rabid’. And they have deployed shrill lingo to slam its definition of ‘shrill’. To nag a dictionary in a shrill and rabid way over its entries for ‘shrill’, ‘rabid’ and ‘nag’ suggests feminists’ irony deficiency has reached life-threatening levels. Or maybe they’re having a cosmic laugh. Never have I been more tempted to view the new, media-led feminism as a Chris Morris-style send-up of buzz-killing liberals than I have while reading

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why can’t the Swedish authorities be honest about crime and immigration?

It’s hard to recognise Sweden from the news reports we’re reading nowadays. Yesterday, a 15-year-old at an immigration centre stabbed and killed one of its female employees in Mölndal, near Gothenburg. It’s the kind of story that shakes the country to its core. Sweden has taken a staggering number of unaccompanied children – some 20,000 in the past four months – so the government has to act in loco parentis. To keep them out of trouble, as well as educate and accommodate then. It’s a very tough ask, a job that many Swedes fear is simply beyond the competence of government. In such circumstances, appalling things can happen. A police spokesman had

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Shivnarine Chanderpaul: The Last Man

And then there were none. The retirement of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the great Guyanese batsman, is the end of an era. He is the last of the old guard; the last of the great heroes from a time before the razzle-dazzle of the new 20/20 cricketing era. The last connection, too, to the time when the West Indies inspired terror, not pity. He was the last of my own Hornbys and Barlows; the last of the 1974 cohort to slip into the night. The torch will now be carried by other, younger, men. Many of them will prove to be wonderful but it will not be quite the same. My contemporaries no longer

Monday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Did we really have to hear all about Crispin Blunt’s sex life?

A year or so back my friend and colleague Hugo Rifkind wrote a very good piece in which he argued that the issues concerning gay rights should not be resolved simply by an elongated ‘eeeeuw’. In other words, heterosexual distaste at the practices of homosexuals should not determine general policy towards this minority. A good point and well made and I agreed with much of it. But it shouldn’t stop the rest of us going ‘eeeeuw’ from time to time, nonetheless. So, Crispin Blunt MP feels hurt because laws proscribing amyl nitrate (or ‘poppers’) would criminalise the entire gay community. A jar of poppers and a tube of ‘lube’ are always

Steerpike Steerpike

Seumas Milne breaks the first rule of spin: never become the story

Given that the first rule of spin doctoring is to never become the story, Seumas Milne hasn’t had a great few months. First Corbyn’s director of comms became the story after several Labour MPs blamed him for this month’s reshuffle shambles. Now, Milne is in the firing line over his links with Vladimir Putin. After an inquiry found that Putin ‘probably’ approved the murder of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 in the UK, a photo of Milne and Putin shaking hands began to do the rounds. Now Labour grandee Lord Soley has hit out at Milne, claiming the former Guardian columnist is a ‘friend of tyrants’. The pair met when

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Google obeys tax laws, and gives us awesome services for free. Why complain?

If Google hoped for some good PR in offering £130 million to settle UK tax claims dating back to the Labour years, it was a miscalculation: Labour regards the offer as “derisory” and the BBC is leading its news bulletins the better to sock it to its rival. Why did Google bother? It has run up against the standard anti-business narrative: that the social worth of businesses can be measured only by how much cash they give to the government. In fact, Google provides its services to millions of Britons (worth at least £11 billion, by some estimates) at no cost at all: this is its contribution to society. As for its contribution to the

Friday

Ed West Ed West

Donald Trump is capitalising on America’s declining middle class

While watching MPs in the House of Commons debate banning a politician they find disagreeable, my first thought was to wonder how this chamber once ruled one-quarter of the globe. If Trump becomes president we could not ban him from visiting; if he doesn’t, he doesn’t matter anyway. Either way, having controversial or even obnoxious opinions does not make someone a danger, and we do not need ‘protection’ from them. It is all the more embarrassing when you consider that this country has hundreds if not thousands of genuinely dangerous extremists living here. I’m not sure what to make of this; my instinctive reaction to Trump is that he is rude and

Raymond Keene

The Islamic world has always had a chequered relationship with chess

The news that the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has issued a fatwa against the game of chess should come as no surprise. There has always been a chequered history of relations between Islamic clerics and practitioners of the world’s most popular board game. Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh is the most powerful Sunni religious figure in Saudi Arabia and issued the fatwa while answering viewers’ questions during his weekly television broadcast ‘With his Eminence the Mufti’. The show was first broadcast in 2014, ‎but the Grand Mufti’s censorious condemnation of chess, during which he compared it to the pre-Islamic Arab game of Maisir, has only this week achieved prominence. According to the Mufti,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Why it’s better to be poor in England than in Scotland

Myths endure forever. Take, for instance, the myth that Scotland is a more equal, egalitarian, kind of place than England. It is an idea much-cherished north of the border and a stubbornly persistent one too. Helpfully, it’s also resistant to evidence, allowing Scots to maintain the pretence that, as the late John Smith once (complacently) put it, ‘The Scots are a more moral people‘. Awkwardly, however, it’s better to be poor in England than in Scotland. At least that’s one conclusion to be drawn from today’s Guardian report on the background of university medical students. While 54 percent of Scottish medical students are from the wealthiest 20 percent of postcodes, just (a

Steerpike Steerpike

Home Office staff fail their own ‘langauge’ test

This week the Prime Minister warned that migrant spouses who fail language tests could be made to leave the UK. Alas David Cameron distracted from his message with two language gaffes this week which led Mr S to ask whether he should be deported. Now it appears the problem has spread, with members of the Home Office also struggling with basic English. A Home Office press release has been sent round offering details on the language test migrant spouses will be asked to complete. However, the brain behind the email has managed to misspell ‘language’: Whoops. Home Office announces a new English language test for migrants…. and spells language wrong pic.twitter.com/No4HZQfffi —

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Green sentimentalists forget something: nature is utterly brutal

Wild Lone is one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. It was published just before the last war and it doesn’t pull its punches: mothers are slaughtered with their babies; brothers and sisters are eaten alive; callous parents look on indifferently as their sick children die slowly beneath them; the few survivors almost invariably succumb to disease, cold or starvation. Every child should read it, for it tells you how the world really is. The natural world, I mean. It was written by one of the last century’s great amateur naturalists, Denys Watkins-Pitchford, under his nom-de-plume ‘BB’ and it purports to be the biography of a ‘Pytchley fox’ called

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Pauline conversion

Paul Keres, the Estonian grandmaster and many times world championship contender, was born a hundred years ago this month. His record against world champions was very impressive: he defeated all nine in sequence from Capablanca to Bobby Fischer. Keres was probably the strongest player, pace Nimzowitsch, Rubinstein and Korchnoi, never to have won the world title. The hallmark of a Keres win was a flowing initiative, often directed towards the opposing king, frequently converted into victory by a shattering sacrifice. Here he is at his best. Keres-Spassky; Riga 1965 18 d5! Despite the two pawn deficit, Keres has a huge initiative against Spassky’s disorganised and undeveloped position. 18 … Kf7