Society

I’m looking forward to tonight’s Spectator debate in which Fraser Nelson, William Cash and I will be taking on Owen Jones, Jack Monroe and Molly Scott Cato MEP over the issue of whether the rich should pay more in tax. One thing I’m sure Owen and his colleagues will do is point to figures released today from Trussell Trust food banks that seem to show that over a million people are now using their facilities. In fact, this figure is misleading, as Full Fact has pointed out: ‘The claim that over a million people are using Trussell Trust food banks is inaccurate. It comes from confusing the number of different people using Trussell Trust food

British chess Grandmaster Nigel Short has form when it comes to explosive statements. Competing in a tournament in France some years ago as a junior player, he was asked during an interview ‘what do you hate most in life?’ His answer – ‘the French’ – failed to win over his audience. Short’s latest foray into contentious self-expression came with his intervention into the age-old debate about the differences between the male and female brain. According to Short’s comments, the female brain fails in the logic department, hence girls will never be able to match boys over the chessboard. He is reported to have said that we should ‘gratefully accept’ that men are ‘hardwired’

From ‘The Menace of Drink’, The Spectator, 24 April 1915: Some depressing influence is at work among the very poor which is not poverty, something which makes the full effort after the highest civilization attainable to them seem not worth while. That depressing influence is, as we believe, drink. “Oh, hold your tongue!” we hear some one say. “Every fanatic, and tract-writer, and cheap moralist, and goody-goody parson, and old-maidish district visitor has been shouting that word for years. We are sick of hearing it. It may be very true that drink is responsible for a small output of munitions, but to make it responsible for the condition of the

Twitter is abuzz today following the election site May 2015‘s claim that Ed Miliband will most likely win the election. The article in question argues that it would be very difficult – and surprising – for Cameron to win a majority or gather enough seats to form a coalition. The site, which describes itself as ‘an unaligned election site‘ came to this conclusion after sampling several polls and looking into marginal seats along with possible coalition deals. The article won wide praise on social media, with one pundit describing the ‘non-partisan analysis’ as a ‘must-read’: Whatever your party, this is must-read, non-partisan analysis of the likely #GE15 outcome, which is Ed Miliband as PM http://t.co/NZwJB2BVbU —

The latest issue of The Spectator carries an interesting piece by James Bartholomew on ‘virtue signalling’, the bane of social media and political debate; that is, people expressing how ruddy good they are by telling the world how much they hate bad things like Ukip and the Daily Mail. He writes: ‘It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are. If you were frank and said, ‘I care about the environment more than most people do’ or ‘I care about the poor more than others’, your vanity and self-aggrandisement

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 24 April 1915: THERE are two very important military events to record during the week. The first is the capture by the British of Hill 60, a part of a ridge which runs close to the south of Ypres. Ypres is on what we may call the dead Flanders plain, and the bill is on the low elope which overlooks it. We captured the bill by a very successful piece of sapping and mining. We tunnelled under the German trenches which held the hill, blew them into the air, and before the enemy could recover from their surprise occupied the trenches with our