Society

Thursday

Mark Mason

The perfect pub

Whenever one of those news stories appears about how many pubs have been forced to close in the last year, I always think of George Orwell. He would have had the correct reaction: lots of pubs are forced to close because they’re terrible. Yes, the pub is a wonderful British institution, with a long and noble history — but that doesn’t mean that any individual pub has a God-given right to stay open forever. If a landlord waters down his beer and scowls at his customers, as plenty of them do, they’ve only got themselves to blame when the bailiffs come knocking. We know Orwell had strong opinions on the

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Eugenics for your email

You won’t read much about Sir Francis Galton nowadays because, while it’s inarguable that the man was a giant in scores of scientific fields (many of which he invented), it is hard to deny that he was a teensy-weensy bit racist. That he wrote a letter to the Times in 1873 entitled ‘Africa for the Chinese’ is probably as much as you need to know. At the moment, I can’t find my copy of his 1869 book Hereditary Genius; possibly, along with the rest of my vast library on eugenics, it’s at Der Roryhof, my holiday home perched high on a crag overlooking the Bavarian Alps. But I remembered it

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Adoption begins at home

Would you open your home to a migrant child? If the reaction to the drowning of three-year-old Alan Kurdi is anything to go by, thousands of families across Britain are ready to welcome Syrian refugee children — including an impressive number of politicians. Bob Geldof has offered space for three families in one of his spare houses. Walking past the two empty beds in my spare room, I felt the same tug: why couldn’t those beds have two little heads nestling on the pillows, safe after years of horror? It’s the same instinct we feel when a toddler tumbles over on the street and his face crumples up into tears:

Patrick Marnham

France’s fight on the right

A year has passed since Nicolas Sarkozy announced his return to frontline politics, and the political landscape in France is still recovering from the shock. His rivals for the leadership of the French right have watched while their cordially disliked ex-leader consistently outmanoeuvred them. They had made the mistake of believing in the sincerity of Sarko’s farewell speech in May 2012 when, following his defeat in the presidential election by François Hollande, he said: ‘From now on I will seek to serve my country in other spheres.’ Delighted by his departure, his colleagues seized the opportunity to reform the UMP, a coalition of the Gaullist and the anti-Gaullist right devised

Bruce Anderson

Stewed Siena

The Indian summer was still fending off the mists and mellow fruitfulness. But the autumn term was about to begin; the season’s changes would soon be manifest. So it was a day for anecdote and recapitulation; for telling amusing August tales, behind which lurked deeper meanings. A couple of friends had been to the Palio, as everyone should, once. I remember being surprised that several hours of mediaeval pageantry could hold one’s attention, which it certainly did: but more than once? No one would watch Psycho twice. I also remember being surprised that the young of Siena would spend weeks rehearsing: hard to imagine that happening here. The spectacle ends

Leo McKinstry

Out of the ashes | 10 September 2015

As a nation, we are learning to accept that our firemen are more and more redundant. The Fire Brigades Union fights austerity at every turn; its spokesmen say that every reduction in station numbers or jobs is a threat to public safety. One of their campaign posters even showed David Cameron and George Osborne alongside the words, ‘They slash. You burn.’ But the statistics undermine the union’s manipulative language of doom. The cuts have been matched by a continuing decline in dangerous fires. According to figures released at the end of last month, the fire brigades attended 495,000 incidents in the year 2014–15, a decrease of 42 per cent compared

Trevor Stammers

Lethal temptation

‘I want to die. Please help me.’ It was 2 a.m. in the good old days when patients had 24-hour cover by their own GPs. I knew Martin well. His bladder cancer had been diagnosed the year before, but more recently it had spread to the lymph nodes in his pelvis and he had run out of effective treatments. Martin had borne his illness with stoicism so far but on this night he was in terrible pain — both physical and existential. He asked to die more than once, and each time his request scared me, but not for any obvious reason. What alarmed me about Martin’s death wish, both

Lucy Vickery

Bennboozled

In Competition No. 2914 — which was inspired by a speech given by the late Sir Keith Joseph in which he said that the government was trying to ‘Bennboozle’ the country — you were asked to submit coinages inspired by today’s politicians, supplying full dictionary definitions and illustrative examples of their use. As is often the case with this sort of competition, many of you were thinking along similar lines. Charles Curran, Barry Baldwin and R.M. Goddard all coined harmanise though with varying definitions, and kendalliance and corbynate also cropped up several times. I liked Basil Ransome-Davies’s faragiste (a chancer or failed opportunist, one who does not live up to

The Spectator

A Russian revolution

From ‘The situation in Russia’, The Spectator, 11 September 1915: A new Russia has been arising within the old while the war has been going on. We have heard little of it, but we believe that the changes are deep and wide. A people cannot fight for liberty and justice without discovering that those ideas daily react upon their own practice. We read in fragmentary messages of the parties in the Duma calling a truce to their old differences, of political indulgence to the Jews, of more freedom to workmen to organise themselves, and so forth. This new heart in the nation knows that it must cease to beat if Germany should win

Kim Sengupta

Monumental heroes

Leptis Magna was deserted when I last visited — no wonder. Tourists daren’t visit Libya these days and so I had the ruins to myself. I climbed the steps of the vast Roman theatre, looked out to where the Wadi Lebda meets the sea, then stopped. Men with AK-47s. My immediate fear was that they were Islamic State. Isis move closer to Leptis Magna every day and it would make sense for this most spectacular site to be next on their hit list. Their last great coup was on the other side of the Med, when they blew up the Temple of Baal Shamin in Palmyra, known as ‘the Pearl

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

All those boardroom codes still can’t catch rogues and incompetents

Sir Adrian Cadbury, who has died aged 86, is remembered as the author in 1992 of a first stab at a corporate governance code for public companies — which thereafter were expected to show ‘Cadbuarial correctness’ in the separation of chief executive and chairman and the powers of non-executive directors. Cadbury’s work was taken forward by the 1995 Greenbury report, the 1998 Hampel report, the Higgs review in 2003 and a subsequent drawing-together into a ‘Combined Code’. Finally Vince Cable, as business secretary, left his own mark by setting a target of 25 per cent women on FTSE100 boards by this year. So we now have a fat compendium of

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The NHS was great for Girl, but I still don’t like it

When Girl came off the horse it didn’t look like a bad fall. More like an involuntary and rather hurried dismount. She’d landed on her feet, that was the main thing, so I wasn’t initially too concerned when she lay writhing and yelling on the grass. Nasty sprain I thought. Give it five minutes… But five minutes later she was still on her back, still in pain, and I began to worry. Mainly for my darling Girl’s sake, of course, but partly for my own. ‘Oh God oh God,’ I thought. ‘She’s supposed to be going back to school tomorrow. I am going to be in such shit with her

Wednesday

Adam Holloway

We can’t just base our refugee policy on what makes us feel better

People across Britain wept when we saw the picture of little Aylan Kurdi’s body on a Turkish beach. We later heard of his brother and mother dying  – and his family’s story of fleeing from Islamic State, and of their year in Turkey before boarding a smugglers’ deflating dingy. Many scream out in empathy that something must be done, that we must assimilate more refugees to help the desperate and stop the dying. I completely agree with the need for real action to help them – but l also think the Prime Minister completely right when he says that receiving ever more people is not the answer. In fact, I believe EU countries are completely crazy if they give ever-growing numbers of refugees and migrants,

The Spectator

A British ‘kill list’ does exist. We used it in Afghanistan

The following article is by an ex-serviceman who served in Afghanistan. They’re making a list, they’re checking it twice – and Number 10 will know whether you’ve been naughty or nice. And if you’ve been very naughty, you’d better watch out for a metallic glint in the sky. Britain doesn’t have anything called a ‘kill list’, but it does have something called ‘JPEL’ – whose existence the government will neither confirm nor deny. The ‘Joint Priority Effects List’ is not new, nor is the very use of such a list. As with Special Forces operations, the UK government – with good reason – will consistently refuse to comment on its existence. Intelligence work is

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The Queen has proven herself to be a shrewd asset manager

One person who has never shown much interest in corporate correctness is Her Majesty the Queen — but if you had been able to buy shares in 1952 in the royal ‘firm’ of which she has been executive chairman these past 63 and a half years, you would have made out like Warren Buffett. When she succeeded her father, the royal ­finances were not a matter for public discussion: the first estimate of her private wealth, at £60 million, did not appear in the press until 1969. More recently, a consultancy called Brand Finance came up with a figure of £44 billion as the value of the entire monarchical enterprise,

Sughra Ahmed

Take it from a Muslim: British coronations should be Christian

In 2012 as the Jubilee celebrations began, I was honoured to meet the Queen twice. At Lambeth Palace, three Muslim colleagues and I presented Her Majesty with a decorative frame with Quranic text embroidered on a cloth that had once been used to cover the holiest of Muslim sites, the Kaaba. I met her again shortly afterwards, when she came with the newly-married Duchess of Cambridge to Leicester cathedral to begin her Jubilee tour. Our meeting came sixty years after the young princess became Queen Elizabeth II, following her coronation in Westminster Abbey with St Edward’s Crown. The service was three hours long and attended by 8,000 guests. It now feels like it belongs to a

Steerpike Steerpike

Bob Geldof reveals George Osborne’s Band Aid PR stunt

Last night’s GQ awards were a tame affair. Russell Brand wasn’t on hand to make Nazi jokes at the expense of a sponsor and the magazine refrained from awarding a philanthropy award to Tony Blair for a second year in a row. They did, however, award a gong to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for being the ‘politician of the year’. Sir Bob Geldof presented George Osborne with the award, but not before he had described Osborne as having the reputation for being the ‘most machiavellian politician’. The musician and philanthropist then proceeded to tell an anecdote about Osborne’s charitable gesture last year when he returned VAT on sales of the Band Aid 30 Ebola single to the charity. The deal clincher?

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why does the left care more about Islamophobia than anti-Semitism?

Why do leftists care more about Muslims than they do about Jews? If that sounds confrontational, consider this: this week, the Met Police released the latest hate-crime figures for London. They show that offences against Jews have risen by 93% over the past year, while offences against Muslims have risen by 70%. And guess which story the BBC, Guardian and Independent, those voices of the British liberal conscience, have chosen to flag up? Yep, the 70% hike in Islamophobic attacks, not the nearly 100% hike in anti-Semitic offences. The BBC’s headline is ‘Islamophobic crime in London “up by 70%”‘. The Guardian‘s is ‘Hate crimes against Muslims soar in London’. The

The Spectator

Our longest-reigning monarch has presided over a second Elizabethan age

That the Queen has lived to become our longest-reigning monarch is in itself a sign of the golden age of prosperity which has been the second Elizabethan age. Over the 63 years of her reign, life expectancy for women has increased by a dozen years, to 83. The Queen may be remarkable for her age, but she is far from alone in modern Britain for having lived to a great age in good health. A team of 12 is now needed to send out royal telegrams congratulating those of her subjects to celebrate their 100th birthday. To the increase in longevity over the past six decades can be added huge

The Spectator

The Queen will do her duty. It is the duty of her peoples to match her example

This leader was originally published in The Spectator on 5 June 1953, following the coronation of Elizabeth II on 2 June.  The splendour of the Coronation of Elizabeth II is over. It was a bright symbol, and its light will not fade quickly. Yet if the Queen lives as long as her loyal subjects have hoped, prayed, sung and, in the past few glorious days, shouted at the tops of their voices, most of us will never see another Coronation. On normal expectations some three out of every five people now living in the United Kingdom will have to make the best of the memory of this one. In any case full