Society

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 7 April 2016

Forgive me if I feel a little depressed at the moment. There are a lot of contributory factors — among them the massacre of my ducks by an otter, the unstoppable rise of Donald Trump, and of course the European Union referendum campaign. This last is especially dispiriting, as I am tired of it already and there are still nearly three months to go before the vote. The first propaganda letter plopped through my letterbox last week, and doubtless it will be the first of many such. It was from the ‘Leave.EU’ campaign and its only effect was to strengthen me in my decision to vote to stay in. Written

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 7 April 2016

However wicked tax evasion is and however distasteful some tax avoidance may be, people should imagine a world without tax havens and see if they really want it. The prime reason that tax havens exist is that taxes in most countries are too high. If they did not exist, the competitive element would be reduced, and taxes would go up even more. The EU constantly complains about ‘unfair tax competition’, by which it really means just tax competition itself. Tax avoidance is what most of us try to do (see next item). Resentment about it is largely because the rich find it easier to achieve than the rest of us.

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 7 April 2016

Well done to Janet and her team for their victory at the London Easter Congress. My own team — David Gold, Peter Taylor and Ingar Hansen — were lying first equal at one point, but ended up slipping to tenth after Janet and her crew beat us in our head-to-head match. I seem to have been jinxed by the number 10, as David and I came tenth in the Pairs too. I wish I could say we didn’t have much luck. The trouble is, the hand that sticks in my mind is one where we got very lucky indeed: I made a poor lead against a slam but our opponent

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 7 April 2016

Q. What should a host do when a guest says something so embarrassing in front of the assembled company that conversation grinds to a halt? Is there a way to pretend the gaffe never happened and jump-start the chatter? A dear friend (who drinks too much) recently regaled the dinner table with some excruciating information about her marriage. Everyone was struck dumb and I could not think how to break the conversational paralysis. —Name and address withheld A. The expression ‘But why bring this up now?’ can often stop a self-saboteur in her tracks. If the damage has been done, however, the host’s duty is to trump the indiscretion with

Dot Wordsworth

Dreadlocks

‘Why are you filming this?’ ‘For everyone’s safety.’ Those are the last words in a 46-second video that was watched by more than three million people on YouTube last week. The question was asked of the unseen cameraman by a black woman who had been haranguing a white youth at San Francisco State University for wearing dreadlocks (or the best he could manage with his weedy hair). I’ve written about being safe in universities before, but this incident focused on cultural appropriation, which is a new crime discovered by people who think it in fact misappropriation to adopt the cultural expression of another ethnic group. Search me. Of course the

Toby Young Toby Young

A big hand for the two-faced tax hacks

Something odd happened at the Guardian after the paper’s editorial staff were basking in the glow of their just-published splash about the Panama papers. They were understandably excited, having sat on the revelations for months, and were about to put flesh on the bones of the stories that had broken on Sunday evening about the elaborate tax-avoidance schemes of assorted Tory bigwigs. The Guardian was one of 107 media organisations that had been secretly going through the cache of 11.5 million documents stolen from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and these were the golden nuggets: disclosures guaranteed to cause the government maximum embarrassment and — an added bonus —

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 7 April 2016

Home Sajid Javid, the Business Secretary, said that the government would like a buyer to save Port Talbot steelworks. ‘We’re going to also have to offer support to eventually clinch that buyer and to give this steel plant a long-term viable future,’ he said. Andrew Tyrie, the chairman of the Commons Treasury Select Committee, said that he expected to learn by the end of this month the proportion that remained active of the 655,000 National Insurance numbers granted to people from the EU in the year up to September 2015. An online survey by Opinium for the Observer on the forthcoming EU referendum put the ‘leave’ side at 43 per

Fieldfare

2255: In the pink

Four unclued lights (eight words in all) form a phrase describing an activity. The other unclued lights give the author, and names of three participants   Across   9    Grow variable and impressionable (4) 10    Country in bad state, one further reduced (9, two words) 17    Watch acceleration in speed, say, when reversing (5) 18    Nothing bad about fruit (5) 20    In Venice perhaps time one takes a marine group (7) 21    Second day in twelve for one in pod (7) 23    Start to collapse with low sound, and fall to bits (7) 24    Caught by piece of chain in prison (5) 25    Beer-lovers see no point in one taking

Taki

High life | 7 April 2016

   New York Even after all these years, I’m still at times floored by the scale of the place. And it’s always the old reliables that stand out: the silvery arcs of the Chrysler Building, the wide avenues, the filigree of Central Park, that limestone monument to power, the Rockefeller Center. Curiously, the recent trend for tall, slender and glassy housing among money-laundering Russians and Chinese does not mix with the city’s motto of ever bigger and grander. It’s as if the transparency of the glass structure is teasing the authorities about the origins of the owners’ wealth. Come in and take a look, we have nothing to hide. Last

Fieldfare

To 2252: Writer deploys me

The works were Striding Folly (anagram of 11/22), Whose Body? (36/1D), The Nine Tailors (2/48), Strong Poison (9/30) and Gaudy Night (17/46). DOROTHY L. SAYERS (diagonally from the SW corner) was to be shaded. Title: anagram of LORD PETER WIMSEY who features in all five works. First prize Mark Rowntree, London SE10 Runners-up Mrs S. Macintosh, Darlington, Co. Durham; G.S. Nicholls, Hillesden, Bucks

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The crusade against FGM shows that a hierarchy of virtue still exists

Although you might not think so, female genital mutilation is a welcome subject to many on the left, because it is one of the few areas in which they can be rude about what they would never, in other contexts, dare to call ‘backward’ cultures. In their hierarchy of virtue, women’s rights trump even those of people oppressed by post-colonialism. Though I am not on the left, I’m against FGM too. But there are a couple of points to think about. One is that FGM is not an inexplicable primitive oddity: it is part of a wider culture which sees sexual relations in a completely different way from the choice-and

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Rejoice! Ian McEwan has withdrawn his penis remark

He has recanted! The blasphemer, the thoughtless pricker of moral orthodoxy, has backtracked! Rejoice! Yes, novelist Ian McEwan, who had the temerity to question the transgender ideology has now clarified his comments. He has declared that transgenderism is actually something to be ‘respected and celebrated’. He has seen the light. He has been corrected. He has ‘acknowledged the hurt’ he caused, says Stonewall, by which it means his foul mind has been given a moral spring-clean. If you want to see what illiberal times we live in, and how profoundly punishing the politics of identity can be, look no further than this mad McEwan story. His sin was to have raised a couple of

Ross Clark Ross Clark

No, the NHS isn’t killing off A&E doctors at a young age

The junior doctors’ dispute has been characterised by a series of extraordinary claims by the BMA. At one time the union claimed that doctors were going to suffer a real-terms pay cut of 26 per cent – a claim debunked by the respected Channel 4 Fact-checking team. A pay calculator on the BMA website which claimed to show doctors losing money was later removed. Yesterday, in a piece for The Spectator, junior doctor Calum Miller made an extraordinary claim that ‘A&E doctors have a lower life expectancy than poverty-ridden countries like Afghanistan and Haiti’. The World Bank gives a figure for life expectancy for Haiti at 62.70 and Afghanistan at 60.51. So

Laura Whitcombe

Reckless conservatism: don’t blow your fortune in cash

Savers are wasting a fortune by keeping their money in cash only. They may as well be burying the £735 billion they’ve collectively put by in a sock in the back garden for all the good it’s doing them. The figure was revealed by investment platform Selftrade, which also found that 62 per cent of savers leave their money in cash. Of those who have bank and building society accounts for the money they squirrel away, two-thirds keep it in their current account, just over half use ISAs and 16 per cent have a piggy bank. Only a quarter of British adults hold investment products, according to the company, and only

Helen Nugent

Money digest: today’s need-to-know financial news | 7 April 2016

Millions of internet users face costs of up to £60 a year to keep their email address if they switch broadband provider. Others risk losing their account altogether if they switch. This is according to Thisismoney.co.uk which reports that BT is tripling the amount former customers will have to pay to keep their BT email address when they switch provider. The charge used to be £1.60 a month but from May it will be £5 – a massive £60 a year. Meanwhile, a new study suggests that the new state pension – which came into force yesterday – would cost retirees around half a million pounds if bought on the open market. The new

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: Ex Labour advisor calls on Corbyn’s enemies to act

Jeremy Corbyn’s enemies within the Labour party are known to be dreaming about a time after his leadership. But why aren’t his opponents doing anything about getting rid of him? According to former Labour party advisor John McTernan, they should do it sooner rather than later. Speaking on the Spectator podcast this week, McTernan said: ‘If you’re going to assassinate someone, you chop off their head, you then chop them into pieces and bury them around the town. You don’t argue to yourself about the who right candidate is and when the right time is. He is the cause of his own assassination. No other cause is required. If you

Andrew Gilligan

Robocop returns

To the casual glance it looks like a normal police car — same markings, same lights, same faces at the wheel. Only the two small yellow circles, one at each of the top corners of the windscreen, tell you that this is a mobile armoury. It will often be a BMW X5: a SUV’s suspension copes better with the weight of the weapons, the gun safe, the ballistic shields. Inside, the occupants will be wearing Glock 17 pistols and have access to weapons which could include, in ascending order of bullet size and ‘penetrative power’, the Benelli Super 90 shotgun, Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, the G36 carbine, the

Simon Jenkins

Letting terror win

There is nothing a government in a remotely free country can do to stop a suicide bomber in a crowded space. As a weapon, he has the precision of a drone missile. The only preventive task open to the police and security service is to penetrate and destroy a terrorist cell in advance. This means assiduous intelligence. It has clearly held the key to disarming some 50 ‘terror plots’ known to the police over the past decade. Every lesson in counter-terrorism warns against overreaction. But David Cameron seems oblivious to this truth. He appears to have no faith in the police to protect British citizens from terrorism. His reaction to

Bruce Anderson

A gentleman of Bordeaux

There was a moment during the war when De Gaulle was being more than usually impossible. Roosevelt, furious, asked Churchill to convey his feelings. The PM summoned the Frenchman, who arrived, took off his kepi and sat down. Churchill launched into him. Unfortunately, the tirade was not recorded. By all accounts, few prosecution cases have been expounded more forcefully. It was a masterpiece of eloquence which lasted for 45 minutes. Throughout, de Gaulle was impassive: not a flicker of facial muscle, let alone emotion. Churchill came to a final flourish, then stopped and glared. In response, de Gaulle rose to his feet, put on his kepi, saluted, turned and left.