Society

Thursday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

A lightbulb moment at the self-checkout

I spent the last few days in Deal and Folkestone with Professor Richard Thaler at Nudgestock, Ogilvy’s seaside festival of Behavioural Science. On my way home I decided to stop off at M&S to buy some runny scotch eggs and a pie, accompanied by some unwanted green things to make my basket look middle-class. Finding a long queue at the main checkout, I grudgingly took my goods to the self-checkout machines. (For the uninitiated, Richard Thaler is the co-author of Nudge, and more recently the author of Misbehaving. He is perhaps the godfather of behavioural economics, a dissident strand of economics which holds the outlandish view that the discipline might

Toby Young Toby Young

The best way to end the ‘poshness test’

There’s a warning buried in the detail of the new report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission on why top companies employ so few applicants from comprehensive schools: ‘Though this study provides valuable insights into barriers to the elite professions, there are nevertheless some limitations associated with the chosen research methodology. As a small-scale qualitative study, the aim is to explore issues and generalisability is limited.’ But most pundits who’ve commented so far missed this caveat. ‘New research… reveals the privileged choose and look after their own,’ wrote Owen Jones in the Guardian. ‘They don’t like accents that sound a bit, well, “common”.’ Grace Dent made the same

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Are schoolgirls fair game for teachers?

Mr Malcolm Layfield, the former violin teacher at Chetham’s music school, will have been celebrating this week after being found not guilty of raping a former pupil. Malcolm admitted to getting young (though over-age) girls drunk and to having sex with them in the back of his car. But he and his lawyer, Ben Myers QC, were keen to stress that the girls were all up for it. The one who cried rape even wore fishnet tights in his presence, for heaven’s sake. So no harm done, eh, Malcolm? All’s well that ends well. Raise a glass of that cheap Scotch you kept in the glove compartment for the kids.

Lucy Vickery

Howzat!

In Competition No. 2903 you were invited to supply a poem incorporating a dozen cricketing terms. English poets love cricket: Housman, Betjeman, Chesterton and Sassoon all wrote about the game. And then, of course, there is Harold Pinter, who encapsulated it so beautifully in two lines: I saw Len Hutton in his prime, Another time, another time.   I admired P.C. Parrish’s clever poem in the opaque modernist style of Edith Sitwell. Tim Raikes, Peter Goulding, Nick Hodgson and Rosemary Kirk also stood out in a large and impressive field. The winners earn £25 apiece. Brian Allgar takes £30. My wife reminds me of a game of cricket: A splendid

Matt Ridley

‘Quitting is suffering’

Few people have heard of Hon Lik, which is a pity because he’s probably saved more lives already than anybody else I have met. Twelve years ago, he invented vaping — the idea of getting nicotine vapour from an electronic device rather than a miniature bonfire between your lips. Vaping is driving smoking out at an extraordinary rate, promising to achieve what decades of public health measures have largely failed to do. And it is doing so without official encouragement, indeed with some official resistance. Via an interpreter, and sucking on an electronic pipe, Mr Hon told me how it happened. And here is the key point, the one that

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Is suicide bombing now a Yorkshire tradition?

Where would you rather live, Dewsbury or Bradford? I ask because it seems that there are probably some good property deals to be had in this particular corner of West Yorkshire right now, as a consequence of half the population decamping to Syria in order to blow themselves up. I mean, property was pretty cheap already — in Savile Town, Dewsbury, right in the heart of the Muslim ghetto, you can buy a nice grey stone cottage for not much more than fifty grand. Two beds, back yard, only a stone’s throw from the local sharia court and that vast mosque run by those jovial extremists Tablighi Jamaat. But it’ll be

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Oh God, don’t let the Pope be a climate fanatic

In his latest encyclical Pope Francis will apparently describe global warming as a ‘major threat to life on the planet’. If the leaked reports are accurate, his Holiness is absolutely right. Here are some examples of the havoc ‘global warming’ has wrought in the past decade: Honduras:US-backed security forces implicated in the killing of more than 100 peasant farmers involved in disputes with palm-oil magnates. Kenya: Teenage boy shot in February this year while protesting against a ‘wind park’ in Nyandarua. Mt Elgon National Park, Uganda: According to a newspaper report, more than 50 locals killed by park rangers and 6,000 evicted to make space for a ‘carbon offset’ plantation.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Late news: what was really served at the Mansion House banquet

Last week’s deadline did not allow me to report from ringside at the Mansion House dinner, but there was so much to observe that I hope you’ll forgive a late dispatch. What a vivid guide to City psychology and precedence it offered. In the anteroom, Lord (Jim) O’Neill, the Treasury’s new Northern Powerhouse minister, could be seen chatting to ex-BP chief Tony Hayward, now chairman of mining giant Glencore Xstrata. At the top table, HSBC chairman Douglas Flint was carefully separated (by António Horta-Osório of Lloyds) from Governor Carney, so they could avoid discussing HSBC’s plans to move back to Hong Kong. But in prime place next to George Osborne

Tim Ecott

Sharks are awesome!

For 40 years, ever since Jaws set box-office records and struck terror into the hearts of a generation, there’s been a counter-movement to rehabilitate the reputation of sharks. Marine scientists were appalled by the film, and have spent nearly half a century telling us that these sinister creatures are just misunderstood. Very few sharks are dangerous, they say. Do not be afraid! But I’ve dived with hundreds of sharks, and I’m scared of them. Sharks are terrifying — that’s what makes them great. I’ve been fascinated by sharks ever since watching Jaws as a teenager. I have more than 40 books about them on my shelves and I read any

Ian Thomson

Salvation through music

Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears — which dilate on anorexia, alcoholism, cruel bereavement. When is a life worth telling? B.S. Johnson, the London-born novelist (and tireless chronicler of himself), put the most revealing sexual details into his autobiographical novels of the 1960s. They might have amounted to mere solipsistic spouting, were the writing not so good. James Rhodes, a 40-year-old classical musician, was repeatedly raped at his London prep school in the early 1980s. In his memoir, Instrumental, Rhodes tells how he found salvation in music and became one of our leading concert pianists. Written

Emily Hill Emily Hill

The green house effect

I write this half-naked, sucking on ice cubes, breaking off sentences to stick my head in the fridge. In the flat below, one neighbour dangles out of her window, trying to reach fresh air, while another keeps having to go to hospital because the heat exacerbates a life-threatening heart condition. We live in a beautiful new development on the banks of the Thames. Fancy pamphlets in our lobby boast of our building’s energy efficiency. In winter, we bask in a balmy 24ºC, without having used the radiators in two years. The insulation in the walls is super-thick; our energy bills are super-low. But from spring to autumn, whatever the weather,

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Jeremy Clarkson is back on the BBC

Last night Chris Evans was announced as Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear successor, following Clarkson’s fracas with a BBC producer. However, this doesn’t mean Clarkson won’t be appearing on the BBC anytime soon. In fact, despite previously calling those at the corporation ‘f—ing b—–ds’, Clarkson has already made a star appearance on BBC2 this lunchtime as part of their tennis coverage. Clearly not too downhearted by Evans’ appointment, the former Top Gear presenter decided to use his free time to take in some tennis at Queen’s. This led to some scintillating commentary from the BBC tennis pundits as they tried to avoid the topic of Clarkson’s untimely departure: Andrew Cotter: Big names here

Sebastian Payne

The ‘anyone but Tom Watson’ campaign has its first success

Five candidates have made it onto the ballot paper for deputy leader of the Labour party. Tom Watson and Caroline Flint have long had the 35 nominations required to make it into the contest, but until this morning, it was looking to be a two-horse race. But with just under an hour to go until the nominations closed, Rushanara Ali, the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, withdrew her candidacy to help get others on the ballot paper. In the nick of time, her 24 backers flocked elsewhere to ensure Stella Creasy, Ben Bradshaw and Angela Eagle (who were all struggling to find 35 backers) had enough support. With a good

Sebastian Payne

Unemployment down again as the jobs miracle continues

Ahead of his PMQs debut, George Osborne is boosted by the news that unemployment is down again. As the chart above shows, the government’s jobs miracle continues with just over 31 million now in work. Between February and April this year, unemployment fell by 43,000 to 1.81 million. With inflation low and pay packets growing, the declining cost of living, the government is feeling vindicated with its economic plan. Employment minister Priti Patel said this morning: ‘Today’s figures confirm that our long-term economic plan is already starting to deliver a better, more prosperous future for the whole of the country, with wages rising, more people finding jobs and more women in

Toby Young Toby Young

The best way to end the ‘poshness test’

Here is a preview of Toby Young’s column in this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow. Subscribe from just £1. There’s a warning buried in the detail of the new report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission on why top companies employ so few applicants from comprehensive schools: ‘Though this study provides valuable insights into barriers to the elite professions, there are nevertheless some limitations associated with the chosen research methodology. As a small-scale qualitative study, the aim is to explore issues and generalisability is limited.’ But most pundits who’ve commented so far missed this caveat. ‘New research… reveals the privileged choose and look after their own,’ wrote Owen Jones

Douglas Murray

Sayeeda Warsi is part of the jihadist emigration problem

Honestly. No sooner have I filed a piece than along comes Sayeeda Warsi to help prove my point. Yesterday morning she popped up because another three sisters and their nine children appear to have traveled from West Yorkshire to join the thriving Islamic State. Apparently Sayeeda knows one of the families. And of course she is blaming this latest example of jihadist emigration on the British authorities in general and this government in particular. She claims that the current government has ‘disengaged’ from Muslim communities. Now Sayeeda must know that this is nonsense. She must have some inkling of the precise and often thankless efforts to engage such communities. So

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Law of the sea

From ‘The American Note’, The Spectator, 19 June 1915: Mr. Wilson recognizes the existence of a painfully simple issue. The issue is between the German submarines and international law. Consent to the continuance of German submarine warfare as now practised means the abolition of international law at sea. Mr. Wilson understands that he must choose between the two things. He chooses international law ; and consequently he cannot possibly yield to the submarines. He knows well that consent to German submarine methods would mean delivering the world-to an era of violence, of “no-law,” of horrible barbarism, which would be much worse than any hostilities that are now called into immediate

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Goodbye deflation, hello low-flation

Reports of deflation’s death are exaggerated – sure, the CPI index has risen from -0.1pc in April to +0.1pc in May. But many important things are still getting cheaper: food, for example, costs 1.7pc less than this time last year. And the prices of larger-ticket items, the so-called ‘consumer durables,’ fell an average 2.6pc in May – the sharpest year-on-year drop since Labour’s 2009 emergency VAT cut. But as the above graph shows, Citi reckons (pdf) that inflation will not bounce back to where it was before. Sluggish pay and a strong pound mean we’re in for a relatively long period of stable prices. Its chief economist, Michael Saunders, sums it up thusly:- ‘A fairly

Monday

Gloria De Piero

How to get social mobility right

Today’s report from Alan Milburn’s Commission on Social Mobility found young people from working class backgrounds are being ‘systematically locked out’ of top professions because they fail the ‘poshness test’. The figures are stark: 43 per cent of newspaper columnists, over half of senior civil servants and a staggering 71 per cent of senior judges in Britain went to private school which educate just seven per cent of the population. It’s common for organisations and businesses to focus on the gender, race and disability of their recruits but some are leading the way on social background too. Tristram Hunt and I recently visited The Spectator, which has long taken work experience

Steerpike Steerpike

If the Guardian dislikes privately educated Oxbridge types, why does it hire so many?

The Guardian ran an article today about research by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. The commission claims around 70 per cent of jobs at law, accountancy and financial firms go to applicants from private or selective schools. And the Guardian goes into full class war mode. Its article — which has the rather provocative headline ‘poshness tests’ block working-class applicants at top companies’ — reports on the findings of the study, which is in contrast plainly titled ‘Non-educational barriers to the elite professions evaluation’: ‘The research by the social mobility and child poverty commission found that old-fashioned snobbery about accents and mannerisms was being used by top companies to filter out