Society

Sunday

Thomas Byrne

How taxing their benefits could help people with disabilities

Close your eyes for a moment and place an image in your mind of the sort of person who needs to claim state benefit for their disability. The most common picture is someone almost destitute, reliant on the benefit just to function in their day to day life, likely to be claiming a multitude of other entitlements; the sort of person who won’t ever be able to derive a normal income. Whisper it: the majority of people claiming Disability Living Allowance are the sharp elbowed middle classes, with incomes placing them in the top half of those in the UK. Amongst pensioners, arguably those who need the most help with their

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tories try to use their lead on the economy to bolster their position on the NHS

The Tories believe that their record in government and their lead on economic competence means that they can set out spending commitments without having to set out precisely how they would pay for them. George Osborne’s interview on Marr this morning was a demonstration of this strategy. Challenged repeatedly over where the £8 billion for the NHS that he and Cameron pledged yesterday would come from, Osborne simply pointed out that they have managed to increase the amount of money going into the health service every year over the last five years despite having to make significant spending cuts. However much it infuriates their opponents, I suspect that this Tory

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: When Ogden Nash met Johnny Cash (plus: brunch with Byron?)

The latest brief was to submit irregular quatrains that bring together two people from the world of the arts and finish on a couplet describing the consequences. Popular couplings included Wendy Cope and Alexander Pope; Salvador Dalì and Bob Marley; Horace and William Morris; and Mel Gibson and Henrik Ibsen. 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. This one drew the crowds and

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Friendship and the war

From ‘Friendship and the War’, The Spectator, 10 April 1915: WE are all losing our friends. This is true in a tragic sense, because our friends are dying in battle. But there is a lighter sense in which it is true also, and which is also connected with the war. There is so much work to be done that there seems to be no time for keeping up with old friends, let alone for making new ones. Besides being busy, everybody is obsessed by new emotions, and cannot pay attention; and besides that, the mental strain of eight months’ war is beginning to tell, and we are all rather on edge. Anyhow,

Friday

Rj Stove

An anti-cricketer’s tribute to Richie Benaud, a cricketing great who radiated televisual decency

Cricket-captain-turned-cricket-commentator Richie Benaud died in Sydney this morning. He would have been 85 next October.  That last pair of sentences contains, believe it or not, two of the most crucial facts in modern Australian history. As of the last (2011) census, approximately 24 million people lived in Australia. It is a fair bet that (whatever the Fourth Estate supposes) fully two-thirds of them would struggle to remember – on the optimistic assumption of their ever having known – who Malcolm Fraser was, or who Gough Whitlam was. (From the mere fact that voting at Australian elections is compulsory, it need not follow that voting at Australian elections is literate.) But

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: The possibilities of thrift

From ‘The Possibilities of Thrift’, The Spectator, 10 April 1915: IT has, perhaps, not yet been sufficiently realized that the country is passing through what may almost be called an economic revolution. Large numbers of the working classes who, let it be frankly admitted, were often underpaid are now in receipt of incomes which, in comparison with their previous earnings, must almost be described as princely. The husband, who by the nature of the case in a working-class family is the greatest consumer, has gone to the front, and the wife finds herself in possession of a larger income than before, while she is relieved of the principal burden upon

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Polymath

I learn from The Problemist, the organ of the British Chess Problem Society, that the polymath Dr Jacob Bronowski also composed chess problems. According to the article I read, Bronowski was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1908, grew up in Germany and then became an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge. He was a mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatrical author, poet and inventor, and of course is most celebrated as the author and presenter of the 1973 BBC TV series The Ascent of Man. The puzzle in Diagram 1 composed by Bronowski. This puzzle is a reflex mate which is a variant of the self-mate theme. In a self-mate White must

Raymond Keene

No. 357

Black to play. This is from Cochrane-Staunton, London 1842. How did Staunton exploit his menacing build up of pieces on the kingside? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 14 April or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I am offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 h7+ Last week’s winner Dennis Brierly, Falmouth, Cornwall

The Spectator

Letters | 9 April 2015

In defence of Catholicism Sir: Michael Gove gives an excellent defence of Christianity (4 April), but his embarrassment about the Roman Catholic part of the story is unnecessary. He writes of his discomfort as, declaring oneself to be a Christian, ‘You stand in the tradition of the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits who made South America safe for colonisation … the Christian Brothers who presided over forced adoptions’. The Inquisitions (Papal, Spanish and Portuguese) were indeed shameful, but were often as ineffective as the governments that supported them. The Counter-Reformation was a great movement of spiritual and cultural renewal that altered and improved western civilisation. Jesuits, and other religious orders,

Peter Jones

Voting for heroes

To judge from elections, the purpose of politics is to win power by promising to make people better off. Plato, feeling this made the politician the equivalent of a procurer or pimp, argued that the purpose of politics was to make people not better off, but simply better — better humans, and therefore better able to run their own lives, as well as better citizens, able to make sound judgements about the qualities required to run a better state. In other words, politics had a high purpose — the moral good of the whole community, guaranteed by both citizens and their leaders driven by the same purpose. In a famous

The Spectator

Barometer | 9 April 2015

The Scottish way of death Nicola Sturgeon said the SNP would block a rise in the state pension age on the grounds that it would be unfair to Scots, who don’t live as long as the English. — The idea that the Scots die early was fuelled by a study by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health in 2006, which found male life expectancy in the Calton area of Glasgow to be 54: less than in many developing countries. — The figure, derived from statistics collected between 1998 and 2002, was exaggerated by the presence of a large number of hostels in the Calton taking in drug addicts from other

Taki

High life | 9 April 2015

Ah, spring! The spring of our frostbitten age. At the Polish Club in London, a wonderful place studded with portraits of Polish patriots who have fought and sacrificed for the West’s freedom. In this beautiful and heroic setting, your High life correspondent gave a speech about what it’s like writing for The Spectator, with some odds and ends about my life in general of 50 years ago. The big surprise turned out to be the turnout. It was packed to the rafters, with 50 or so turned away at the door. This was the work of Lady Belhaven and Stenton, and Basia Hamilton, both Poles, the former’s family massacred by

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 9 April 2015

Q. For ten years, I have made a reasonable freelance income working from home. During this time my husband has gone out to an office to work, leaving home in the early morning. Now my husband has announced that he is going to retire and will be at home with me all day. I feel guilty and disloyal saying this, but the truth is it means the end of my reasonable freelance income. Our marriage has been great for many years but I know it won’t survive this kind of annoyance. My husband just chuckles and says I am being neurotic and must learn to be more tolerant. I can’t

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 9 April 2015

Spectator Life’s third birthday party was a glamorous affair. It had paps, pop stars and Pippa. One went in and waiting at the top of the stairs were Spectator Life’s editor and deputy editor, super-dazzlers both, offering their cheeks to be kissed. We drank Bellinis. There is a new economic theory which claims that people often act more irrationally than economists in particular imagine. One of its key terms is ‘discounting the future’, which is another way of saying that in certain circumstances people often behave as if there were no tomorrow. The Spectator Life birthday party was a bit like that. Speaking for myself, I discounted the future so

Toby Young Toby Young

Miliband vs Millwall

I’ve been trying to think of a good football analogy to describe the battle between the two main parties as the general election approaches. One suggestion is the second leg of a Champions League game, with the Conservatives having won the first leg by one goal to nil. If we assume that the Tories are playing at home, that means Labour have to score two goals to win, whereas all the Tories have to do is not concede. Last week’s debate certainly felt like that, with Cameron playing a tight, defensive game and Miliband trying to score at every opportunity. The Conservative leader ended up winning on aggregate because the

Melissa Kite

Real life | 9 April 2015

After I phoned the Aviva call centre for the ten thousandth time, a girl called Adele had to sort it in the end. If she hadn’t, I would have climbed on to the roof of the House of Commons in an outfit made of Lycra, waving a banner bearing the legend ‘Drivers For Justice!’ The poor thing wasn’t too impressed with my hysteria at first. ‘Help me, please!’ I squawked into the phone. ‘I’ve been fighting these people who claimed I injured them when I hadn’t for three and a half years and this week the statute ran out on their claim — not just ran out, really ran out.

Dot Wordsworth

Pious

Married to a public-school man (I almost said boy) for many a long year, I can’t bring myself to disqualify politicians for that crime alone. But during last week’s party leaders’ debates I did detect the tang of the Shell, as I think they call upper forms at Westminster, when I heard Nick Clegg say to Ed Miliband: ‘I will leave that pious stuff.’ It echoed from Tom Brown’s Schooldays (at Rugby) long ago or that weird novel The Hill (Harrow). Mr Clegg’s cosmopolitan background looks resistant to establishment conventions, yet, for that very reason, he takes some on board without noticing. It is no coincidence that the Westminster term

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 9 April 2015

It’s April. It’s spring. The daffodils and the cowslips are in flower. The birds are chirping merrily. But where are the tortoises? There were two of them, a big one called Alice and a small one called Gertrude. They have been in my care since last summer when a friend, their owner, moved from her London house, which had a garden, into a flat nearby, which hadn’t. So the tortoises came up here to my house in Northamptonshire to be looked after by me. I put them in a patch of garden, about 20 yards by 15, surrounded by walls and yew hedges. Within these was erected a chicken-wire fence,

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 9 April 2015

Bridge has always been a game of highs and lows, but what happened to Janet de Botton and her partner Artur Malinowski at the Easter Championship Pairs was more like being strapped to a rollercoaster. It started when everyone was staring at the computer screen waiting for the final results. The top three pairs — Janet included — were within a hair’s breath of each other, and with each new score their positions kept switching. Then the last score came in — Janet and Artur had won! Off they went for a celebratory bottle of champagne. Later came a message: sorry, a score was wrongly entered, they were second. Utter

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 9 April 2015

Home Tony Blair, the former prime minister, opposed a referendum on membership of the EU. In a speech at Sedgefield he said that, following the Scottish referendum, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, knew ‘the perilous fragility of public support for the sensible choice’. Opinion polls following a television debate by seven party leaders, which drew an audience of 7.7 million, were inconsistent. Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, was held to have made a mark, while Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru, and Natalie Bennett polled at between 2 and 5 per cent. Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, was seen to sweat profusely. He had