Society

Thursday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Time for change

From ‘The Problem of Public Assistance’, The Spectator, 31 July 1915: In one respect big reforms are actually easier in times of national emergency than in times of peace, for the collective purpose of the nation is in the crisis of a great war more firmly set, and therefore better able to overcome sectional and private vested interests. On the other hand, it is somewhat difficult to secure adequate consideration for any important new proposal at a time when public attention is absorbed in the movements of a great war. On the whole, the former consideration is in the present matter perhaps the more important. For although of necessity the

Paul Wood

‘The smugglers don’t care’

 Lesbos A young woman in a headscarf stumbled over some rocks and onto the beach. She stood there, rigid, stunned, then burst into tears. A grandmotherly German tourist hugged her. ‘It’s over now, you’re safe,’ she said. ‘You’re in Europe.’ A Burmese man from the same boat looked around anxiously and asked: ‘Will the police here beat us?’ It was after dawn on the Greek island of Lesbos, the sun glinting off the turquoise sea, an idyllic holiday-brochure landscape of hills with whitewashed houses. But the Turkish coast is so close that you can see it, and so this tiny island has become the front line in Europe’s migration crisis.

Douglas Murray

Despair springs eternal

The literary emissions of the left are hardly ever enjoyable, but they can be instructive. Last year Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century became one of the biggest-selling political books of the year. Like a thousand-page Soviet report on tractor production, it hardly seemed intended to be read. The point of its success was that it could be said to ‘prove’ the left’s argument. They could then hit their opponents over the head with it and move to the next stage. Last year they questioned some premises of capitalism and now Paul Mason, the economics editor of Channel 4 News (and Spectator diarist), is here to say that capitalism

The Spectator

Out of service

From ‘The new standard’, The Spectator, 24 July 1915: If a change must be made at all, it is worthwhile to make a great change, to put right our mistakes, to get any happiness that a rearrangement can give us. We fear that at first a new way of life may come rather hard upon the more prosperous and highly skilled of the servant class, many of whom must be turned out of place. But, on the other hand, we hear constant complaints that servants are scarce because new careers are opening before women, and if the race of indoor manservants died out altogether we do not imagine that anyone would

Bruce Anderson

Young guns

The Honourable Society of Odd Bottles began proceedings with a report on the activities of our junior branch. These youngsters are not yet eligible to become drinking members, but they are chosen because of their unremitting hostility to vermin and their burgeoning enthusiasm for killing game. Young Charlie, the Nimrod of his generation, has been prodigiously active. It is surprising that there is a single grey squirrel still alive in Somerset. Any rat that comes his way goes no further. He is also mightily effective against rabbits and pigeons, which he enjoys scoffing, after he has skinned or plucked them. Charlie has inherited a .410: the fifth generation of his

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Let’s pay for the BBC content we use

What follows is a proposal for reducing the BBC licence fee and improving the corporation’s output while saving the British newspaper industry. All that’s involved is a basic understanding of pricing psychology combined with a digital currency for micropayments. Under my proposals, half the licence fee would fund the BBC’s Reithian purpose; the other £60 could be paid direct to the BBC as now or, if you chose, paid to you as a digital currency (6,000 Beebcoins). People could buy additional Beebcoins, which could be spent on BBC or competitor content — including content from newspapers. Notionally the BBC would lose out; in practice they would gain revenue, as they

Deborah Ross

Dedicated follower of fashion

Iris is a documentary portrait of Iris Apfel, the nonagenarian New York fashion icon. Nope, me neither, but that’s irrelevant, as all you truly need know is she is a joy, a wonder, and terrific, as is this film. It’s the final work of documentary film-maker Albert Maysles, who died last year, at 88, and although Iris obviously loves the camera, and plays to the camera, and it is often Iris doing Iris, as Iris does Iris so brilliantly, who cares? Also, you just can’t take your eyes off her. You can’t. The opening shots show Iris, who is 93, in her Park Avenue apartment, in all her glory. Accessories

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Machetes and the middle classes

Another stabbing in my new neighbourhood, not with an axe or with a samurai sword this time, but a machete. The samurai sword incident was back in the spring. The magnolia was in bloom and the citizens of London N1 were about their innocent business, reading for book club and baking (wheat-free). At 3 p.m., a terrible screaming was heard coming from Englefield Road and when police arrived they found a teenage boy lying bleeding, sword on one side, meat cleaver on the other. The machete killing which followed was worse. Daylight, but this time the crime scene was a playground. Children were goofing about after school, including the soon-to-be victim’s

Melissa Kite

Asking too much

Jack Nicholson’s moving portrayal of a lonely old man in About Schmidt convinced me that I should sponsor a child. You may remember the scene at the end: he gets a letter from a nun in the Tanzanian village where a little boy has been receiving his largesse and realises that his life has not been meaningless. He has made a difference to somebody. I wept buckets as the credits rolled and not long afterwards signed up to a sponsorship programme with a leading charity in the hope that I too could make life better for one person. And maybe I did. I was allocated a child in Armenia. I

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A twinge of fear, and a glimpse of a harsher world

I celebrated Eid in a sandy bay in Sri Lanka, watching from the warm, shallow sea as gaggles of local Muslims in holiday mood sauntered past to congregate at the public end of the beach about half a mile away. Since they looked so much more colourful, picturesque and exotic than the tourists in the security-guarded enclave where I was, I thought I’d wander down to take a few snaps. Having just finished Ramadan, they were all very excited — the young men especially. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a group of dark-skinned boys with wispy beards, bare-chested but in long trousers, had surrounded me. ‘Selfie!’ one of them said —

Claudia Massie

Glasgow

A wet walk in a Glaswegian graveyard might not be your idea of fun, but then you might not have spent the past two hours in the Glasgow Science Centre. Endure that, and see the sodden Necropolis stroll swell in allure. The Science Centre is one of the emblems of the new Glasgow. Rising from the old docklands on the south side of the Clyde, beside the BBC at Pacific Quay, it is one of the shouty new buildings leading the regeneration of the old shipbuilding areas. These buildings and their outlying friends still look like awkward blow-ins here, isolated blobs of glitter studding the wasteland. There’s not yet much

Lucy Vickery

Open and shut case

In Competition No. 2908 you were invited to submit a comically appalling opening to an imaginary novel. Thanks are due to the inventor of the annual Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest from whom I have pinched the idea for this challenge (Edward Bulwer–Lytton is often described as ‘the worst writer in history’). It was a pleasure to wade through your florid, convoluted prose, over-elaborate metaphors and inconsequential tangents. Dishonourable mentions go to Bill Greenwell for an opening composed entirely of hashtags and to C.J. Gleed. The best of the worst earn their authors £25 each. The bonus fiver is Edward Gilbert’s. Inspector Falcon Foot was an experienced murder investigator. He had seen

Tom Miller

The crackdown that backfired

In October 2013, a jeep ploughed through a crowd of pedestrians on the edge of Tiananmen Square, crashed and burst into flames, killing five people. The authorities identified the driver as Uighur, a member of an Islamic ethnic minority hailing from China’s northwest region of Xinjiang. Six months later, eight knife-wielding Uighurs rampaged through a packed railway station in Kunming in southwest China, killing 29 people and wounding more than 140 others — an attack described by the national media as ‘China’s 9/11’. Beijing blamed both attacks on radical Islamist organisations pursuing what it calls the ‘three evils’: terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. It claims terrorists are attempting to create

Wednesday

Ed West Ed West

In our global village, we have recreated the intolerance of village life

Poor Walter Palmer – I bet he wished he’d stayed home in Minneapolis and left Cecil the Lion alone, because now he’s officially the Worst Person on Earth and there are grown humans outside his workplace dressed as animals. As the Guardian reports: Protesters placed animal toys outside Palmer’s River Duff dental practice in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis. The practice was forced to close as protesters staged a recreation of the hunt involving cuddly toys and water pistols. Personally I don’t understand why anyone would want to shoot a lion, but there are lots of things people do which I can’t comprehend, but which I don’t really consider my

Justin Marozzi

Join the revolution to save cricket!

While Aggers, Blowers, Tuffers and the Test Match Special team entertain us from Edgbaston this week, a different sort of cricket commentary is being broadcast live from a sports bar in north London. Guerilla Cricket, son of the alternative Test Match Sofa, is everything TMS is not. Expect music, drinking, occasional swearing, masses of interaction with fans and plenty of jingles. When Ian Bell trots out to bat, you’ll hear Anita Ward’s ‘You can ring my bell,’ for Joe Root it’s Odyssey’s ‘Going back to my roots’. You get the picture. Guests come and go and are an eclectic bunch, from David Papineau, professor of philosophy of science at King’s College London, to the novelist Nick Hogg, member of the Authors’ XI. It’s safe to say that Alastair Cook or any other England player is unlikely to share the microphone anytime soon. ‘Oh God no,’

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

There’s only one person who can save the Queen’s corgis

The Queen, we learnt earlier this month, has decided not to take on any more corgi pups as, at the age of 89, she is worried about leaving any young dogs behind. But it’s not just a great shame for her – it’s a great loss to the breed as well. Corgis aren’t one of those dogs that you see all that often, and the Queen has done an awful lot for their PR. But despite all the positive PR – and their presence in many a royal gift shop – the corgi as a breed is still struggling. Both the Cardigan and the Pembroke corgi are on the vulnerable native breeds list,

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: The new standard

From ‘The New Standard‘, The Spectator, 31 July 1915: Where food and service are concerned we believe there are a fair number of people who will be glad of some necessity which shall compel them to lead a simpler life. It is not that they do not enjoy their fine food and the ease which comes of much waiting-on. They like it far too well voluntarily to relinquish it: On the other hand, the prospect of being obliged to do differently is not without attraction. The burden of “the plant” often wearies them. They feel themselves to be entangled in the paraphernalia of hyper-civilization—almost enslaved by it. It is odd that

Tuesday

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Do Nikkei and the FT really share the same journalistic values? | 28 July 2015

It’s nearly 30 years since I worked in Japan, but I still have a few words of the language and a certain idea of how the place works. The role of the business press, for example, was to trumpet export successes of Japanese corporations, and not to report shenanigans in which securities firms boosted prices of selected shares by pushing them to housewife investors, to generate campaign funds for favoured politicians. So I’m curious how the Financial Times will fare under its new owner Nikkei, the very Japanese media group that has paid £844 million to acquire the world’s most prestigious business title. Has the culture changed since my day?

Tim Stanley

The sooner the Republicans stop Donald Trump, the sooner they can beat Hillary Clinton

Lunatics with money are never ‘mad’, only eccentric. In America, they can also class as Republican presidential candidates. Hence Donald Trump – a barmy billionaire with a mouth bigger than his bank balance – is currently leading the race to be the party’s next nominee. It’s a sad indictment of the American political process. And it disguises how strong American conservatism could be if it only tried harder. So far, more than a dozen major Republicans have declared their candidacy. Jeb Bush stands out for his establishment support, Scott Walker for his credentials as a conservative governor who took on the unions, Marco Rubio for his charisma and ethnicity… and

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: American friendship

From ‘The American Note to Germany‘, The Spectator, 31 July 1915: German submarine methods cannot possibly continue on their past lines without sooner or later sacrificing another American life. The German submarines could no doubt continue, on a small scale, to sink merchantmen bringing supplies to Britain if they made full inquiries as to the nationality of the crews, and provided for their safety by towing them in their boats to somewhere near the land. Such precautions have been taken in two or three cases during the last few days. But they could not continue their warfare on anything but a small scale. The sacrifice of non-combatant lives is inherent