Society

Thursday

10 Mar 2016

From Hitler to girls in pearls

I’ve heard it said that the ‘countryside’ is an urban idea, a place invented by the late Victorians in order to escape industrialisation. If so, we’re craving it more than ever. Surveys suggest 80 per cent of us now dream of living in a rural idyll. Since foxhunting was banned, riding to hounds has never been more prevalent. Suddenly five million people — most of them city dwellers — are tuning into The Archers, and viewing figures for Countryfile are higher than for The X Factor. But perhaps the most revealing indicator of the allure of the countryside is the enduring appeal of Country Life magazine, which was founded in

The Spectator

Against Churchill

From ‘Colonel Churchill’, The Spectator, 11 March 1916: Colonel Churchill is being found out. The charm, once universal, no longer works, or works only occasionally and on a limited number of those exposed to it… To watch this fevered, this agonised struggle to regain the political fortune which the arch-gambler threw away by his own acts is to witness one of the tragedies of life. But we dare not be compassionate.

Martin Vander Weyer

This great commodity rally doesn’t mean that spring has arrived

All in all, this is an odd moment for an outburst of high spirits: not from me — I’m as phlegmatic as ever — but from commodity investors. The price of a barrel of oil has rallied from $27 to $40 after talks between Saudi Arabia and Russia about restricting supply; one pundit called that ‘meaningless theatre’ but others expect a climb back to $50. In a similar mood, copper prices have risen by almost a fifth — reflecting producer cutbacks combined with a belief that the Chinese downturn in demand might not be so severe as was first feared. Likewise iron ore, which surged so fast at the beginning

Mick Hume

The left will eat itself

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeportationgame/media.mp3″ title=”Mick Hume and Jack May, a founding editor of the Stepford Student website, discuss student censorship” startat=1507] Listen [/audioplayer]In 1793, on the eve of the Terror in France, the royalist journalist Mallet du Pan coined the adage ‘The Revolution devours its children.’ Today, on the left, history is repeating itself as farce. In universities, childish pseudo-revolutionaries are devouring their elders and self-styled radical betters. Last week, student activists at Columbia University in New York mounted a concerted campaign against that notorious neo-fascist puppet Pinocchio. A big blow-up Pinocchio doll had starred in a display by Students Supporting Israel, staged as a counter demo to a fun-sounding campus festival

Max Hastings

American Notebook | 10 March 2016

I have been driving many hundreds of miles across America, interviewing Vietnam veterans for a book. Though I have been doing this sort of thing for 40 years, the fascination of the serendipity persists. I meet an extraordinary variety of people, way outside my usual social round. Some talk in modest bungalows, others in motels, one last week in a conspicuously wealthy gated community. Many rich Americans now live in such places — essentially their own country clubs, fortified by wired perimeters. The one that I visited covered 6,000 acres, with lots of lakes and a golf course. There is excellent food in the clubhouse, skeet ranges, riding stables and

Lucy Vickery

Gray matter

In Competition No. 2938, to mark the tercentenary of Thomas Gray’s birth, you were invited to submit an ‘Elegy on a Country Churchyard’ written in the metre of his famous and enduringly popular poem. Every-one was a winner this week, but frustratingly we have room for only six. Those printed below take £25. The bonus fiver is Chris O’Carroll’s. Time was these mossy stones drew reverent throngs As Sundays called the village to this place, But years have hushed our common prayers and songs. We thrive now on a different brand of grace. Jazz concerts in this yard have we convened, And readings by the poets of the

Camilla Swift

School portraits | 10 March 2016

Sir William Borlase Parents fight tooth and claw to make sure that their house is in the right catchment area to get into Buckinghamshire’s excellent state schools. Many of the former grammar schools — including this one, RGS High Wycombe and Wycombe High School — are now Academies, but they are no less popular or successful. This co-educational grammar is based in the leafy town of Marlow only yards from the Thames. It has its own boat club and school rowing teams regularly win national championships and compete at Henley Regatta. The academic results are superb, too: 82 per cent of last year’s A-level results were B or

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Ladies be good

I wonder if Cheltenham Ladies’ College is still like that,’ I thought, as I interviewed a succession of 1950s old girls recently. Their memories left me reeling, and I felt relieved not to have been a sensitive girl sent to Cheltenham from an outpost of the empire, condemned to spend seven years being hissed at in Gothic classrooms by sarcastic unmarried women. I still can’t decide whether I would have preferred to have had a terrifying time at Cheltenham in the Fifties but be -brilliantly taught, or have gone somewhere relaxed like Southover (which closed in 1988) and have a lovely time but learn nothing. Probably Cheltenham — but only

Ed Cumming

School drinking is the best kind

Last December it was reported that Ampleforth and Rugby schools both have new on-site bars, where pupils are allowed to drink in moderation. ‘We are trying to create somewhere where [the pupils] can let their hair down but we’re all on call,’ said David Lambon, the school’s first lay headmaster. ‘It’s a fine balance with children of that age — they need to be treated like adults and feel independent.’ The only shock was that this was presented as news. Booze and sex are the death and taxes of adolescence: they’re unavoidable, so you might as well find a way to manage them. Schools have had provision around alcohol since

Aidan Hartley

The master Builder who made me

Michael Schützer-Weissmann was the greatest teacher I ever had. When I was 17, I got into trouble at Sherborne, my school in Dorset, after a friend and I each drank a bottle of whisky. I felt splendid, but my friend had to be stomach-pumped. For that the headmaster, Robert Macnaghten, caned me. It was amazing that he managed to hit me six times, because he was famously blind — and had once awarded a detention to a coat hung on a peg at the end of his classroom, mistaking it for a boy refusing to sit down. Caning probably saved me from expulsion, but I was thoroughly fed up with

Laura Freeman

When the slop had to stop

A spirited debate is under way at the Year One lunch table. This class of five-year-old Hackney epicures are discussing the merits of olives. ‘Olives are too disgusting and greeny,’ says Marley, prodding at the offending olive. ‘Olives are too yucky,’ joins in Eduardo, who is carefully hiding them under his knife. But Asar, a boy who obviously has a more developed palate, declares them ‘yummy’ and devours the lot. Olives are just one of the unfamiliar ingredients on plates at Gayhurst Community School on the edge of London Fields in north-east London. There are sticky pork ribs, a tabouleh made with mograbiah (giant couscous), parsley and tomatoes, sweetcorn fritters,

Constance Watson

Is a degree worth the debt?

You’ll never get into a good university if you carry on like this.’ A haunting threat from school days past, but since the coalition trebled university tuition fees in 2010, the question is — do you really want to? The decision to increase fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year was met with anger from students and parents alike. Riots broke out with police arresting 153 people at a demo in Trafalgar Square. Widespread fury was particularly directed at Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who had pledged to vote against any increase in fees — so much so that he was forced to broadcast a public apology: ‘We made

Alexandra Farrelly

The Force is still with me

My initial reaction on learning that my secondary school had compulsory CCF — Combined Cadet Force — on Wednesday afternoons was one of horror. As an ‘army brat’, the child of an officer, I was mortified to be following in my father’s footsteps and completing assault courses and weighted swims every single week. However, my view of the CCF was to change dramatically over the following five years. At 14, I aimed to be the coolest camo-clad teenager for our first day. On the evening before, we lurked in our boarding houses and laboriously pinned in our trousers, practised ‘messy buns’ and pouted in a mirror while sporting red lipstick. Unfortunately,

Ed Clarke

The joy of grammar

A virulent epidemic has in recent years spread across our island nation. I speak not of bird flu, Ebola or the plague, but of grammatophobia: the irrational fear of grammar, its necessity and its teaching in our schools. This has proven both highly contagious and severe in its consequences. The symptoms have never been more apparent than in the hysterical reaction to the government’s new Spag (spelling, punctuation and grammar) test for 11-year-olds. ‘This curriculum is the direct result of a government’s Gradgrind approach to curriculum development,’ thundered Mary Bousted of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in the TES. This Dickensian term is used for anyone with the temerity

Beth Noakes

Queue for boarding

Those whose only experience of packing school trunks is via Mallory Towers, Kingscote or Hogwarts may be relaxed about the rise in boarding-school fees. But with annual fees at some of our best-known boarding schools approaching £40,000, traditional boarding families which don’t include a hedge-fund manager, prime minster or Kazakhstani oligarch may well be casting a nervous eye at the private day school down the road. Or they, and others who prefer a broader social mix, may instead be applying to a different and little-known breed of boarding school. A state one, where tuition is free. Some charge for extended ‘day-boarding’ places (boarding life without the sleepovers), but full or

Mark Palmer

Blazers of glory

Most mornings on the way to work I pass students flowing out of Fulham Broadway tube station en route to the London Oratory School. They are an assorted bunch. Some seem more confident than others. One or two of the boys look immaculate, while others have clearly stirred their cornflakes with their ties. Some of the girls appear remarkably grown- up for their age — but presumably that’s my ‘how-come-policemen-are-getting-younger’ syndrome. What they share apart, obviously, from wishing they were still tucked up in bed, is a uniform chosen for them by the school, which they have adapted with varying success to their own personalities or moods on any given

Ross Clark

Can a school share out its success?

They have enviable results in the classroom and on the sports field. They command substantial fees and send large numbers of pupils to top universities. So why have leading private schools found it such heavy going transferring their success when sponsoring state schools? It seemed the ideal solution to help break down the great barrier between state and private schooling, as well as to address the charge that private schools were not doing enough to justify their charitable status: a leading private school takes a struggling state school under its wing, lends it some expertise, allows it to use some of its facilities and even shares some of its teachers.

Camilla Swift

Blackboard jungle

The world of education is a complex one. There are so many options – public schools, academies, state schools; single-sex ones and co-educational ones – that it’s no wonder people get bogged down. This supplement, kindly sponsored by Investec Wealth & Investment, aims to make things at least a little clearer. When people raise the subject of boarding schools, for example, it’s normally expensive public schools that you think of. But as Beth Noakes explains, there are also state schools that also offer boarding – although you might find the odd frog in the swimming pool. School food is changing, as Laura Freeman discovers when she visits a state primary

Wednesday

9 Mar 2016

James Forsyth

PMQs has lost its sense of occasion, thanks to Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn’s delivery at PMQs today was far more passionate than usual. But his questions were still far too scattergun. Cameron batted them away with almost embarrassing ease. Corbyn’s ineptitude is draining PMQs of its sense of occasion. It is also particularly maddening as there are plenty of things to pick the government up on at the moment — Sunday trading, the EU-Turkey deal, Hinkley Point to name just a few. But the prize for the worse Labour question of the session didn’t go to Corbyn, but his City Minister Richard Burgon who asked Cameron if he would resign if he lost the EU referendum. Predictably, Cameron simply said no.

Helen Nugent

Money digest: today’s need-to-know financial news | 9 March 2016

As the country wakes up to a grey, drizzly morning, news from Moneyfacts paint a gloomy picture for savers. According to the financial analysts, low interest rates and changes to savings taxation are resulting in ‘perhaps the worst Isa season on record’. In the run-up to the end of the tax year, banks and building societies tend to improve their rates in an attempt to attract savers to the tax-free products. But Moneyfacts says that the best easy-access Isa rate is 1.41 per cent, compared to the top rate of 3.15 per cent available five years ago. As for savings in general, there are fears that George Osborne’s overhaul of the