Society Archives

Thursday

9 Apr 2015

I know I shouldn’t ask this, but is cocaine really that addictive?

Cocaine addiction is a dreadful thing. I’ve seen it so many times: bright, once-pretty people with washed-out grey faces who can’t think about anything else. Children, partners, careers – they can all go hang so long as the restaurant has a loo where you can do a quick line between courses, or you can nip outside to suck on a crack pipe. This how frantic it can get: If anyone has stopped to watch me go to the cash machine and withdraw stacks of bills, several times because of the $200 transaction limit, then head out to an idling van with tinted windows, and return minutes later with bulging pockets, it wouldn’t take much

Bruce Anderson

A rum encounter

For many years, the Central American republic of Guatemala had a grievance against the United Kingdom. It claimed sovereignty over British Honduras, then a colony of ours. Eventually, all that died down. Calling itself Belize, British Honduras became independent and showed no desire to join Guatemala. Opposing colonialism could earn a plaudit from the sillier sort of states at the UN. It was harder to gainsay democracy. Back in the old days, there was an amusing exchange. In pursuit of his country’s ambitions, the then Guatemalan ambassador pressed for a meeting with the then Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. Bevin is said to have left school at eight. His spoken English

Rory Sutherland

Why plane crashes are getting weirder

In the late 1980s, the parks service in the United States were concerned about the deterioration of the stonework on the Lincoln Memorial. So they asked the maintenance staff why the stone was decaying. The crew explained that they used high-power sprays every fortnight to clean the masonry. The water penetrated cracks and joins, weakening the stone. But they needed to spray to get rid of the large volume of bird droppings. So they erected bird nets. These scarcely worked, and were unpopular with tourists, so the parks service called in the maintenance workers again and asked, ‘Why are there so many birds?’ ‘The birds come to feed on the

Tim Stanley

Fringe benefits | 9 April 2015

No election night is complete without a man dressed as King Arthur waving a plastic sword as the result is read out. Eccentricity is the bedrock of British democracy. The freedom of a madman to waste £500 to get on the ballot is precious. On these islands, we have a right to rave. And sometimes what we rant about is quite revealing. I’ve been fascinated by eccentric independent candidates ever since as a teenager I met Mr Mark Ellis, a perennial independent running against EU domination and casual littering. He used to patrol Sevenoaks high street with a shopping trolley, collecting rubbish. A profile in the local newspaper revealed that

Laura Freeman

The age of the Skype Dad

Could you be a useful and loving father to your children if you only ever saw them on a computer screen? Most of us would say no. So much of being a parent is about being physically there. It’s curious then that our courts seem to think the opposite — that a chat via Skype or on an iPad is all a father needs to bond with and care for his child. British judges, like American ones, have to deal with increasingly complicated custody cases every year. We travel more these days, and so we meet our partners abroad. When these marriages break up (as four in ten marriages do),

Mark Mason

Hell on wheels

How many of the people driving mobility scooters these days actually need a mobility scooter? The invention of the vehicle was a great move forward (literally) for those who genuinely needed it: the disabled and the infirm. But then another group of users appeared. Rather slowly, admittedly, and wheezing as they did so, before settling their vast backsides into the soothing embrace of the scooter’s seat. Once there they sighed happily, popped another Kit Kat into their gob and contemplated a life where movement from A to B required a mere flick of the wrist, rather than all that tedious leg business. This supersized scooter squadron has conquered Britain with

Rod Liddle

The jihadi bride and her astonishing dad

Like you, I suspect, I have been terribly worried these last few weeks over the plight of 15-year-old Amira Abase. Amira fled the country on 17 February in order to take up an exciting and challenging position as an in-house whore for the vibrant and decapitating warriors of the Islamic State somewhere in Syria, probably Raqqa. She travelled with two like-minded school friends from the local caliphate of Bethnal Green and not much has been heard of her since. We wring our hands in anguish at the fate which might have befallen this girl. It is of course commendable that she, along with so many other fervent young British Muslim

Martin Vander Weyer

Switch over to the Greek debt drama: the final episode must be coming shortly

Bored with the election? Switch over to the Greek debt drama. In this week’s cliffhanger, silver-tongued finance minister Yanis Varoufakis visited IMF chief Christine Lagarde on Sunday, promised to meet his country’s obligations ‘ad infinitum’, and was expected to meet a €450 million repayment to the IMF on Thursday. But more troublesome members of the ruling Syriza party denounced the IMF and Brussels for treating Greece as ‘a colony’, threatening a snap election ‘if creditors insist on an inflexible line’, and warning that public-sector salaries and social security payments must rank ahead of debt as cash runs out. Which it will before August. Greece’s tax collections are so feeble, its

James Delingpole

I went looking for a used car – and found my inner boy racer

A bit late, I know, to put in a bid for Jeremy Clarkson’s old job. But I think I might just accidentally have rediscovered my inner petrolhead. What happened was this. We’d just replaced our old sensible family car (a Ford Mondeo) with another sensible family car (a Skoda Yeti), only to realise that it just wasn’t enough. If you live in the country you really need at least two cars. The question was: what type should it be? Well, there are all sorts of cars I would like to own — the one I covet most of all being one of those evil-bastard Range Rovers, preferably the sport model with Kenneth

Mary Wakefield

Original sin makes us better people. I wish Muslims believed in it

These days, on the subject of Islam, non-Muslims have mostly divided into two camps — though there’s a little wandering about between the tents. Camp one says Islam is a religion of peace, and points for proof to the millions of non-violent Muslims around the world. Warlike Muslims are an anomaly, they say, and fight not because they are religious but because they are politicised. Bad guys like Isis aren’t Muslims so much as Islamists, which is different. Most politicians and public figures belong to this camp, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. Camp two is more furtive. Members look around before they speak. In this gang, sotto voce, everyone agrees

Lucy Vickery

Consequences

In Competition No. 2892 you were invited to submit an irregular quatrain in which you bring together two people from the world of the arts and then add a couplet describing the consequences. Two competitors paired Tolkien and Graham Greene, with not dissimilar results. Here’s D.A. Prince: If J.R.R. Tolkien Met Graham Greene Would a hobbit’s story Become The Power and The Glory? And take two from Virginia Price-Evans: Had J.R.R. Tolkien Met Graham Greene, The Hobbit’s lair Might have been the end of the affair. Other popular couplings included Wendy Cope and Alexander Pope; Salvador Dalì and Bob Marley; Horace and William Morris; and Mel Gibson and Henrik Ibsen.

Wednesday

8 Apr 2015

Brendan O’Neill

Trans activists are effectively experimenting on children. Could there be anything more cruel?

Can you think of anything more cruel than telling a five-year-old boy who likes Lady Gaga that he might have gender dysphoria? Or telling a nine-year-old tomboy who hates Barbie and loves Beckham that she might really be male – in spirit – and therefore she should think about putting off puberty and possibly transitioning to her ‘correct gender’? Saying such things to kids who are only doing what kids have done for generations – messing about, discovering their identity – turns playfulness into a pathology. It convinces boys who aren’t boyish and girls who aren’t girly that they must have some great gender problem, a profound inner turmoil that

Andrew J. Bacevich

The Iran deal heralds a new era for US policy across the Middle East

What is it about a nuclear deal with Iran that induces hysteria in certain quarters of the West? In recent weeks, editors at both the New York Times and the Washington Post have seen fit to run op-eds calling for preemptively bombing Iran, apparently under the impression that preventive war has not yet received a fair shake. Sure, Iraq didn’t work out, but why quit now? By ensuring that the American people and their leaders do not overlook the possibility of giving war one more chance in Iran, these newspapers are presumably performing a public service. In the Times, John Bolton, Dr. Strangelove with an unkempt moustache, describes a situation on ‘the brink of

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Righting wrong

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 10 April 1915: With much satisfaction we record that Mrs. Johnson, formerly of Redhill and now of Old Town, Croydon, has been awarded by the Home Office £500 compensation for eighteen months’ wrongful imprisonment. This unhappy woman was wrongly convicted in October, 1912, and July, 1913, of writing threatening letters. The letters have since been clearly traced to another person. Her husband and family were compelled to leave their former home, and were reduced almost to destitution. The compensation is none too large after two and a half years of agony, but we congratulate the Home Office warmly upon having done the just

Tuesday

7 Apr 2015

Ed West

Kids love fairy tales. This doesn’t mean they must be taught about transgender politics

If the NUT didn’t exist it would be necessary for a latter-day Michael Wharton to invent it. This week the teaching union is having its congress where, among other things, it’s pushing for the government to install an anti-Section 28; a rule stating that schools are required to teach positive examples of same-sex relationships as part of sex education. I always thought Section 28 was a bad idea because it was not Westminster’s job to tell individual schools and teachers what to think. I imagined that schools would know how best to guide their pupils through these difficult years of confusion. But for some people the principle behind Section 28 was wonderful; they’re

Sebastian Payne

Listen: The Spectator’s take on the Scottish leaders’ debates

The Scottish leaders’ debate was, so far, the most informative TV debate of the campaign. In a View from 22 podcast special, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and I analyse which party leaders gained the most from this evening’s STV programme. Was the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon successful in defending her party’s record? Did Labour’s Jim Murphy say anything to tempt back the thousands of disaffected Scottish Labour voters? And did the Conservatives’ Ruth Davidson or Liberal Democrats’ Willie Rennie manage to score any points? You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

Douglas Murray

Snowden now faces the traitor’s fate – worship from hipsters and Hollywood

New York Brooklyn is the hipster heaven of New York, which is perhaps why it was there that a bust of Edward Snowden was unveiled yesterday. Not that it stayed long. The bust of the former National Security Agency contractor was put on a pedestal sometime on Monday with the word ‘Snowden’ glued on the base at the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument at Fort Greene Park. It was taken down a few hours later by parks and recreation employees. I don’t want to read too much into this, but the brief deification and bringing down of Snowden’s image does seem apposite. When the Snowden leaks were first publicised the left-wing

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Three month suspension

From ‘A Possible Compromise’, The Spectator, 10 April 1915: If the Government have not the courage to adopt total prohibition, then we reluctantly suggest the following plan. Let the Cabinet adopt the policy of the suspension of the sale of all intoxicants for three months—say from April 20th till July 20th. Such suspension would cover what, as far as we can see, must be the crisis of the war. It would cover also the period when climatic conditions give less excuse for the use of stimulants, though at the same time they increase the temptation to drink on the purely physical ground of thirst. Speaking generally, people drink more in

John Raffles

Being a bit fat can be healthy. But the medical profession doesn’t want us to know

A GP called Malcolm Kendrick has written a book about politically correct manipulation of medical data – and has cropped up in the Independent highlighting the medical profession’s unwillingness to share research suggesting that being a bit fat makes you live longer. Here are two key paragraphs: Despite the fact that study after study has demonstrated quite clearly that ‘overweight’ people live the longest, no one can bring themselves to say: ‘Sorry, we were wrong. A BMI between 25 and 29 is the healthiest weight of all. For those of you between 20 and 25, I say, eat more, become healthier.’ Who would dare say such a thing? Not anyone with tenure

Molly Guinness

Bored teenagers are the last people we should be forcing to vote

One of the trendy things to worry about these days is political disengagement among young people. A think tank called the Institute for Public Policy Research is so worried it’s suggested people be forced to vote in the first election after their 18th birthday. They say political apathy among the young is undermining democracy, but their solution is rather perverse. People who are so bored by thinking about the future of the country that they can’t be bothered to vote are the last people we should be consulting on the next government; frankly it’s a relief that so many of the least competent voters keep themselves away from the polling