Society

Thursday

21 Apr 2016

Long may we laugh at our absurd demagogues

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke warned that ‘pure democracy’ was as dangerous as absolute monarchy. ‘Of this I am certain, that in a democracy the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority whenever strong divisions prevail,’ he wrote. He compared demagogues to ‘court favourites’ — gifted at exploiting the -insecurities of the powerful, whether the people or the monarch. For Burke, the risk of democracies being captured by demagogues then degenerating into tyrannies was a good argument against universal suffrage. The multitude would always be susceptible to being swayed by feeling rather than reason; they could no more be

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 21 April 2016

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor, said that if Britain left the European Union, households would be on average £4,300 a year worse off. He quoted a Treasury analysis that said the British economy would be 6 per cent smaller outside the EU by 2030 than it would have been. ‘Remain’ campaigners were treating voters ‘like children who can be frightened into obedience’, Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary, said, and declared that Britain could be part of the European free trade zone but ‘free from EU regulation which costs us billions of pounds a year’. Kenneth Clarke, the former Chancellor, said that David Cameron ‘wouldn’t last 30 seconds if he lost

Columba

2257: A spree

An excerpt from a poem (-eleven words, one hyphened, in ODQ) reads clockwise in the perimeter from the top left corner. Each of four clues contains a superfluous word; these words combine to give the poet’s name. The poem’s title, which is concealed in the grid and must be highlighted, indicates the action required to create each of three unclued lights, and 18 plus 24. All these lights are words in Chambers; one is doubly hyphened. Letters in corner squares and those adjacent to them could give POWER I HEAT UP. Across 10 Struggles, holding weak opinions (5) 12 Theory of earth’s formation, terribly foggy one,

Columba

To 2254: Ecofriendly

To create entries at 5, 9, 20, 29D and 41, answers to clues in italics become TREE-HUGGERS (15), embracing sallow, fig, argan, oak and dita. Definitions of the entries are 16, 12, 8A, 3 and 35. First prize Gerry Fairweather, Layer Marney, Essex Runners-up Lewis Corner, South Fremantle, Western Australia; C. & A. Snelson, Middlesmoor, Harrogate

Laura Whitcombe

Record equity release figures mean we’re failing an ageing population

The Equity Release Council is rubbing its hands with glee this morning. Its latest figures reveal £393.9 million was lent over the first three months of the year, making it the best first quarter on record. But it seems to me that this is no cause for celebration. Equity release – or a lifetime mortgage – is somewhat of an extreme form of secured borrowing. It enables over-55s to borrow money against equity they have in their home and the cash can be used for any purpose the borrower likes, such as home improvements, holidays, new cars or helping their family. Typically there’s no interest to pay upfront but instead

Helen Nugent

Money digest: today’s need-to-know financial news | 21 April 2016

Millions of current account customers are languishing on terrible rates. Now new research shows that the number of Britons switching accounts has hit its highest monthly level. According to Bacs, the payments body, a total of 124,615 ditched their bank for pastures new in March, up 10 per cent compared to this time last year. Santander, Nationwide Building Society and Halifax were the biggest winners in terms of those switching in. Santander made a net gain of around 51,000 customers using the seven day switching service between July and September – far higher than any other provider. Kevin Mountford, head of banking at MoneySuperMarket, said: ‘The latest current account switching figures are

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Forget about Shakespeare. We should be celebrating Charlotte Brontë

Major anniversary of her birth today, on 21 April. A ‘national treasure’, epitomising a certain kind of stoical, homely, female Britishness. Revered and adored by millions. Her family home a major tourist attraction. A life dedicated to self-sacrifice and the service of others. Plainly but elegantly dressed: not a follower of fashion. Rather severe-looking when not smiling. Yes, I’m thinking of Charlotte Brontë, and so should we all be, in this her 200th anniversary week. The third of six children of the Revd Patrick and Maria Brontë, all of whom died long before their father did, she wrote a revolutionary novel so grippingly, movingly brilliant that people still love it

Jonathan Ray

How wrong can I be?

Jonathan Ray reckons size matters and finds himself wrong footed by the supermarkets. So there I was at my birthday supper. Marina, bless her, had done all the grub and I’d done the wine. We had 20 folk round the table, some keen on their wine and some keen on, well, just drinking. Indeed, the ones with the most highly polished drinking boots seemed pretty indifferent as to what it was exactly that they drank so long as they drank something. We started with a selection of fine English fizz that I had amassed during my whistle-stop tour of the wineries of West Sussex and Surrey (see Browsing and Sluicing…)

Simon Barnes

The fairytale factory

It’s one of the oldest stories of them all, deeply embedded in our nature and our culture. In some ways it’s the story that defines our humanity and we have told it a thousand times in a thousand different ways. It’s in the Bible with Joseph and his coat of many colours, it’s King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, it’s the ugly duckling, Cinderella, Great Expectations, Moll Flanders and Jane Eyre. It’s Clark Kent becoming Superman, it’s Harry Potter leaving the cupboard under the stairs to become the greatest wizard of them all. It’s Rags to Riches. And it’s the tale of Leicester City. Sport retells all our

The Spectator

Duty calls

From ‘The Volunteer Training Corps’, The Spectator, 8 April 1916: If we were the Government, we would state plainly that in the opinion of His Majesty’s advisers no man over military age of good physique will be doing his duty to the nation who does not join a Volunteer battalion… it should be clearly understood that he was not performing his proper duties as a citizen, and that even if the state did not think it worth while to compel him to perform them, he would be a proper object of public censure and contempt.

Douglas Murray

A poem for Erdogan

At the end of last month, a German comedian appeared on German television and read a poem mocking Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey. Jan Böhmermann’s satire was directed, among other things, at the laws President Erdogan has been using to lock up his critics. Turkey — which David Cameron is still fighting to bring into the EU — now has some of the world’s most repressive speech laws. Numerous journalists have been arrested for ‘insulting’ President Erdogan and he has even been known to ban Twitter in the country when corruption allegations against him and his family have surfaced online. Yet until Mr Böhmermann came on the scene, one might

Rory Sutherland

How to do better at darts – and life

I have always been intrigued by the scoring systems for different sports, and the degree to which they contribute to the enjoyment of any game. As a friend of mine remarked, had tennis been given the same scoring system as basketball it would be tedious to play, and even worse to watch. Once you glanced at your TV and saw Djokovic leading Murray ‘by 57 points to 31’, you would shrug and change channels to something more gripping, like an unsubtitled version of Last Year at Marienbad. Tennis scoring isn’t quite socialist — one player can demolish -another — but in such cases the contest is over in a mercifully

Bruce Anderson

Riders and diners

Not quite nil humanum a me alienum, but I have always been interested in other people’s trades and worlds. That was one reason why I enjoyed the late Woodrow Wyatt’s invitations to the annual Tote board lunch. I always found myself on a table with racehorse owners and trainers. When they realised that I barely knew the difference between a fetlock and a bridle, they became politely distant, until they discovered that I was a political journalist, which made them barely politely suspicious. Politicians they disdained. As for hacks, they only took notice of the ones that they could ride. That said, I am sure that they would have paid

Rod Liddle

Moderate Muslims are not particularly moderate

‘What’s in the news this week?’ I asked my wife as she browsed the first newspaper we had seen for a whole week, having hitherto been blissfully disconnected from the rest of the country, without phones or the internet. ‘Muslims, largely,’ she replied, flicking from page to page, ‘a bit on in-and-out, but mainly it’s the Muslims.’ Oh, good. A perpetual optimist, I had rather hoped that during our week away the frequently promised Islamic Reformation might have taken place and peace and enlightenment spread all those many miles from the jungles of Banda Aceh to the dilapidated terraces of Kirklees. But nope, apparently not. They were still up to

Claudia Massie

The delights of Hieronymus Bosch

If you hope to inspire an appreciation of Renaissance art in your children, look to Hieronymus Bosch. Ideally, your children will not be sensitive types, nor prone to nightmares, but if they can handle a little, or indeed quite a lot, of fantasy, Bosch will blow their tiny minds. My four-year-old lad, Luca, definitely not a delicate chap, was deeply impressed by ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ when I showed him reproductions. He remains unmoved by Leonardo and bored rigid by Giotto, but Bosch snared him. I should hunt down a full-size poster and hang it in his room. I read somewhere that Leonardo DiCaprio snoozed beneath one as a

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 21 April 2016

Laikipia I sip my Tusker beer on the veranda, staring at the elephant. He’s not the elephant in the room. He’s the elephant on what should be my croquet lawn. I thought he might go away, but he hasn’t. Instead he’s brought his friends — more and more of them as time goes by. They say the elephant will become extinct within a few years. Across Africa, poachers are decimating elephants — just not here, where they apparently feel safe enough to crap on my sward. Today, the fashionable argument promoted on Twitter, and followed by princes and prime ministers, is to burn all stockpiles of seized ivory in

Lucy Vickery

Much ado about nothing?

In Competition No. 2944 you were invited to imagine what characters from Shakespeare’s plays would have made of this year’s fulsome celebrations of the 400th anniversary of his death and supply a verdict on behalf of one of them. How would the Bard himself have reacted to all the fuss, I wonder. In the expert opinion of Professor Gordon McMullan, director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London, he would have welcomed the publicity but been ‘baffled by the celebration of him as a person because at that time they didn’t have our obsession with biography or the idea that plays are a reflection of the life of

Liam Mullone

Stress point

In the 1920s, the anthropologist Margaret Mead studied the people of New Guinea. She noticed that they hunted birds and squirrels but not flying squirrels. The tribesmen explained that they didn’t like flying squirrels: a thing should be either a bird or a squirrel. They wanted nothing to do with the dirty things. And while New Guineans of the 1920s were not leaders of scientific inquiry, Mead concluded that they were quite unstressed at work. Bear with me, because I think the flying squirrel may just be the answer to the stress epidemic that is killing us. Apparently, we’re dying of work-related stress. The media, psychologists and union leaders say

Wednesday

20 Apr 2016

Tom Slater

Edinburgh University staff are now under surveillance, thanks to the Home Office

Another British university has been revealed as a mini GDR. And this time it’s not the fault of those speech-policing students’ unions. The University of Edinburgh – which recently hit headlines after its students association banned head-shaking – has been slammed for an Orwellian new practice designed to keep tabs on its staff. Under a new scheme, reported in Times Higher Education, university staff will be required to report their whereabouts ‘when officially at work, but not in their normal place of work’. The provisions, originally meant to apply only to staff from outside the EU, have been extended to all 13,000 employees, in an effort to ensure they are applied

Helen Nugent

A brief respite for motorists

Ah, the put-upon motorist. Fees to park outside your own house, potholes littering the streets, road tax, MOTs, and the biggest liability of all: insurance. Last year insurance premiums soared by 14 per cent. That’s an £81 increase in just 12 months, bringing the average annual comprehensive car insurance policy to £671, according to Confused.com. Analysis by the price comparison site found that every single region in the UK saw double-digit annual price increases in their car insurance costs over the past year. And that’s just the average. Last time I renewed my car insurance, my existing insurer quoted around £1,500, more than double what I was previously paying. I drive a