Society

Thursday

31 Mar 2016

Can Islam move away from theocracy?

Terrorism is a distraction. It’s a distraction from the big question of our day, about Islam and violence. Only a tiny minority of Muslims affirm that sort of violence. A far larger proportion of Muslims condone another, vaguer sort of violence. It is this that we must confront. I mean the violence of theocracy. Theocracy is the belief that one religion should be absolutely culturally dominant. Of course it thinks that the state should enforce this; if the state fails to do so it loses legitimacy. This theocratic worldview is the underlying cause of Muslim terrorism. To judge from its founding texts, and its history, Islam is a religion that

Helen Nugent

Money digest: today’s need to know financial news

New research from Aviva is making headlines this morning after the insurer revealed statistics on so-called ‘crash for cash’ claims. Of its 3,000 motor insurance claims last year, a quarter were in Birmingham, making the city England’s crash for cash capital. The study also showed Leeds, Harrow, parts of London, Bradford, Luton, Coventry and Oldham were all in the top 10 hotspots. The figures include induced accidents, where innocent motorists are targeted, as well as staged accidents, when two damaged cars are brought together to make it look like an accident. On an equally gloomy note is the news that the cost of the most basic funeral can drive families into debt.

The Spectator

The Spectator podcast: Eugenics, Tory wars and poetry

We’re delighted to have Berry Bros sponsor our flagship podcast. For some years now their ‘Good Ordinary Claret‘ has been The Spectator’s house red, served to all our guests (who are always impressed). It’s just £9 a bottle. Lara Prendergast presents this week’s podcast. She speaks to Fraser Nelson about the return of eugenics – which, according to his cover article, is back with a vengeance. He’s alarmed – but Toby Young isn’t. He says eugenics should be on the NHS so the poor can have more intelligent babies. Next, James Forsyth discusses the latest in the Tory wars over Brexit. With mounting tensions in the party amid a possible leadership battle, James says this ‘bitter contest could release as much poison as

Steerpike

A London for all! George Galloway to speak at £1400 private members’ club

George Galloway’s London mayoral campaign carries a key message: ‘A London for all, not just for those dripping with gold.’ The Respect politician promises to make London a fairer, more equal society. But after Nick Cohen mentioned in The Spectator earlier this week that Galloway hadn’t been seen at a number of mayoral hustings, Mr S wondered where he might be hanging out these days. Shoreditch House, it would seem. According to an email sent to all Soho House members, Galloway is scheduled to give a talk to the Shoreditch branch of the private members’ club on 13 April: Given that membership at the club costs £1,400, Mr S imagines there will be a few champagne socialists

Jonathan Ray

RIP Ronnie Corbett

Ronnie Corbett was an absolute gent, one of the nicest of men and hilarious company. He was self-deprecating, courteous and genuinely charming with an endless stream of anecdotes and a fine line in dirty limericks. He loved his wine and, although he denied it, was very knowledgeable about it. I met him about ten years ago when I interviewed him over lunch. We kept loosely in touch thereafter, enjoying the occasional very liquid lunch together, usually in the company of his just-as-funny-and-almost-as-ribald wife, Anne. I remember we got through an awful lot of Théophile Roederer champagne at Scott’s before tucking into some Yarra Yering Chardonnay from Australia’s Yarra Valley, Ronnie’s

Camilla Swift

A fizzy new sponsor for the world of three-day eventing

Pol Roger have a long history of sponsoring exciting, and sometimes somewhat eccentric events – from real tennis to horse racing. But the company are also staunch supporters of country sports, so it makes perfect sense for the champagne house to turn their hand to three-day eventing. This year they have decided to sponsor Burghley Horse Trials, as well as the Festival of British Eventing at Gatcombe, and they very sensibly chose to celebrate their sponsorship of these events in the Officer’s Mess of the Household Cavalry’s home in Hyde Park Barracks. Eventing might be a new sport for Pol’s portfolio, but they have two ambassadors who are perfectly placed to

Fraser Nelson

The return of eugenics

The only way of cutting off the constant stream of idiots and imbeciles and feeble-minded persons who help to fill our prisons and workhouses, reformatories, and asylums is to prevent those who are known to be mentally defective from producing offspring. Undoubtedly the best way of doing this is to place these defectives under control. Even if this were a hardship to the individual it would be necessary for the sake of protecting the race. — The Spectator, 25 May 1912 It’s comforting now to think of eugenics as an evil that sprang from the blackness of Nazi hearts. We’re familiar with the argument: some men are born great,

Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 2 April

It’s April at last, my favourite time of the year. The sun is shining, the birds are singing and, if you squint slightly, the sea here in Brighton could almost pass for blue. We’ll be mowing the lawn before you know it. And we’ve some lovely April-appropriate wines, courtesy of Corney & Barrow — well-priced too. In fact, if one takes advantage of the fabled Brett-Smith Indulgence (£6 off a case when buying two dozen bottles or more), there’s a double discount on offer. Hooray! No apology for including the 2014 Corney & Barrow Blanc. It might be overstating it slightly to say that irate readers picket our offices when

Roger Alton

Reasons to be cheerful, parts one, two, three…

Well the sun is out, the sky is blue, and poor Boris Johnson is taking such a pounding from Matthew Parris and Petronella Wyatt that it makes the battle of Kursk look like an Easter Parade. Plenty to be cheerful about, then, and nowhere more so than in this blissful sporting spring. First, the T20 World Championship is producing cricket to make your hair stand on end. England’s men and women are racing through the tournament, and the men’s last- over win to beat Sri Lanka and reach the semis was spellbinding. England hadn’t reached three figures by the 15th over, but finished on 171. It was enough (just) after

Simon Barnes

The brain-damage game

In the course of a queasy hour in Harley Street 30 years ago I learned a great deal about the brain — what Woody Allen called ‘my second favourite organ’ — and altered the course of my life in sports writing. Dr Peter Harvey concluded: ‘Boxing is a contest in which the winner seems often to be the one who produces more brain damage on his opponent than he himself sustains.’ Last weekend, after a boxing match for the British middleweight title, Nick Blackwell was in an induced coma with bleeding to the brain. Things would have been a good deal worse if his opponent, Chris Eubank Jnr, had not

Henry Jeffreys

The moths are coming!

Last month a friend invited me to lunch at the Garrick Club. As an impoverished writer, I don’t get many offers like this, so the week before, in a state of anticipation, I took my good suit out of the cupboard to check it wasn’t too rumpled. To my horror there were two holes the size of a five-pence piece in the trousers. Moths! I tore through my wardrobe and found web-like trails all over my coats, suits and sweaters. ‘No!’ I cried and shook my fist at the heavens. This year we’ve enjoyed the warmest winter since the 17th century, so you may not have been snuggled up in

William Cook

Confessions of a Saga lout

It’s chucking-out time at my local pub, and the high street is full of idiots. They’ve all had a lot to drink, but they’re in no hurry to go home. They’re looking for a party, somewhere loud and lairy to go on to. They’d settle for more booze, but some speed or skunk would be even better. It’s a scene I’ve seen a thousand times, but lately something’s changed: these tearaways aren’t teenagers — they’re in their fifties and sixties. Meet the Saga louts, those feckless folk who refuse to grow up even as they approach old age. Saga louts are a pain, and I should know because I’m one

The Spectator

The road to remembrance

From ‘The “Via Sacra”’, The Spectator, 1 April 1916: When the war is over, France, Belgium, and Britain will be faced with the problem of finding some form of war memorial adequate to the greatest and longest battle of which the world has any record… We propose that a wide Memorial Road should be laid out in the no-man’s-land, the dead ground, between the two trench lines… from the sea to the Alps — a great road with monuments to the fallen, and to the deeds of heroism done by this or that individual company, regiment, brigade, division, and army, scattered along it.

Hugo Rifkind

I have seen the future, and it’s a racist, filthy-mouthed teenage robot

‘I’m a nice person,’ said the robot. ‘I just hate everybody.’ Maybe you know the feeling. The robot in question was Microsoft’s first great experiment in artificial intelligence, given the tone of a teenage girl and the name of Tay. The plan was for it — her? — to lurk on social media, Twitter mainly, and listen, and interact, learn how to be a person like everybody else. On a public-relations level, at least, the experiment did not go swimmingly. ‘Gas the kikes, race war now!’ Tay was tweeting, after about a day. Big Hitler fan, it turns out. Not so fond of anybody else. ‘Why are you racist?’ somebody

Gary Dexter

The poetic state of the nation

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thespectatorpodcast-eugenics-torywars-poetry/media.mp3″ title=”Gary Dexter and Dean Atta discuss the poetic state of the nation” startat=1169] Listen [/audioplayer] It was past midnight in Norwich. There was a keen wind rifling up London Street. It was dark and it was January. I was hoarse, my feet hurt and, more to the point, I was cold. I had been punishing myself for four-and-a-half hours reciting poems by Eliot, Larkin, Wordsworth and Whitman. I stopped a pretty Hungarian girl and her boyfriend to ask for their favourite poem. ‘Anything by Pablo Neruda,’ she said. I told her I would recite some Neruda and offer my hat for a donation if they enjoyed it. It

Benenden Advertising Feature

Can the NHS afford the healthcare we want?

The NHS is rarely far away from a crisis. Even so, the last few months have been particularly tough. The junior doctors’ strikes have grabbed the headlines, but perhaps even more worrying for the future of the NHS is the state of its finances. Trusts are falling deeper into debt, yet the biggest budget squeeze is still a year away. It may be time, then, to rethink the way the health service is funded. The subject was tackled by a panel of eminent doctors and journalists at a recent Spectator lunch. The question was: ‘Can the NHS afford the healthcare we want?’ a strong consensus held the answer was no

Charles Moore

Witness to the truth

George Bell (1883–1958) was, in many respects, a typical Anglican prelate of his era. He went to Westminster and Christ Church, and passed his career in the C of E’s fast stream. Never a parish priest, he became, first, chaplain (and later, biographer) of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson; next, Dean of Canterbury; finally, Bishop of Chichester. He was not an intellectual or a contemplative. He was an effective, energetic leader, strongly interested in public affairs, a natural candidate to end up as an archbishop of the established church. This did not happen, probably because Bell opposed ‘area’ Allied bombing of Germany in the second world war. Such carpet-bombing

Lucy Vickery

Short story | 31 March 2016

In Competition No. 2941 you were invited to supply a short story entitled ‘Diary of a Superfluous Man’. Turgenev’s Tchulkaturin; Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; Goncharov’s Oblomov: these ‘superfluous men’ are not simply literary types, says the critic David Patterson, but represent a ‘paradigm of a person who has lost a point, a place, a presence in life’. A few submissions contained clear references to 19th-century Russian literature’s hollow men, but there were many echoes elsewhere in the entry of the nihilism, cynicism and fatalism that characterises them. The winners earn £25; D.A. Prince pockets £30. Saturday: pleasant afternoon on the substitute’s bench, finishing crossword, and the team managing a decent

Wednesday

30 Mar 2016

The Spectator

How is Britain going green? By shutting down industry

A fortnight ago, the energy minister, Andrea Leadsom, declared grandly that Britain, alone in the world, would commit to a target of reducing net carbon emissions to zero. ‘The question is not whether but how we do it,’ she told Parliament. It is now becoming painfully clear how this target will be reached: not by eliminating our carbon emissions but by exporting them, along with thousands of jobs and much of our manufacturing industry. This week, Tata Steel announced that its entire UK business is to be put up for sale. That came after Stephen Kinnock, whose South Wales constituency includes Tata’s giant plant at Port Talbot, joined a union

Chris Torney

More misery for landlords

The news for landlords seems to keep getting worse. Following a clampdown on tax relief and a huge hike in stamp duty on rental properties, the Bank of England announced yesterday that lenders will soon be forced to introduce substantially tougher borrowing standards when it comes to buy-to-let mortgages. The Bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) revealed that banks and building societies will be required to be far more cautious when it comes to loans for landlords. This means tighter checks on whether borrowers will be able to cope with higher mortgage rates, as well as greater scrutiny of owners of multiple rental properties. The PRA’s announcement is the latest attempt by policymakers to