Society

Thursday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

How consumer habits are subject to the law of unintended consequences

Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan) found themselves debating the direction of causation in the purchase of electric drills. Their dispute revolved around one question: do men a) conceive a need for making a hole and therefore go and buy a drill or b) buy an electric drill in a shop because it looks cool and then wander around the house desperately looking for any excuse to make holes in things. (One joy of working in advertising is that you get paid to have the kind of conversations when sober which other people are only allowed

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

As a republican, I used to look forward to Charles III. Now I’m scared

When republicans meet, we console ourselves with the thought that our apparently doomed cause will revive. The hereditary principle guarantees that eventually a dangerous fool will accede to a position he could never have attained by merit, we chortle. With Charles III, we have just the fool we need. I don’t laugh any more. Britain faces massive difficulties. It can do without an unnecessary crisis brought by a superstitious and vindictive princeling who is too vain to accept the limits of constitutional monarchy. If you want a true measure of the man, buy Edzard Ernst’s memoir A Scientist in Wonderland, which the Imprint Academic press have just released. It would

Bruce Anderson

The spirit of Prohibition lives (if you’re a haggis)

It is an old adage, but still pertinent. ‘Every generalisation about India is true, and so is the opposite.’ The other night, some of us were discussing the US and wondering if the same applied. Certainly, there are lots of paradoxes. Although Americans passionately believe that they live in the land of the free, there is plenty of enthusiasm for chains. A few years ago, the state of Vermont simultaneously legalised homosexual marriage and prohibited the serving of fried eggs unless they were ‘over easy’ — i.e. bent over. There is a terrible amount of food faddism. Outside the big cities, it is hard to find cheese made with raw

Carola Binney Carola Binney

History is the art of making things up. Why pretend otherwise?

In a recent interview, the celebrity historian and Tudor expert David Starkey described Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as a ‘deliberate perversion of fact’. The novel, he said, is ‘a magnificent, wonderful fiction’. listen to ‘David Starkey on Wolf Hall’ on audioBoom But if Oxford has taught me one thing, it’s that all the best history is. Starkey is a Cambridge man, and maybe they do things differently there. But any perceptive Oxford undergraduate will soon realise that a little bit of fiction is the surest way to a First. What the admissions material opaquely describes as ‘historical imagination’ turns out to be an irregular verb: I imagine, you pervert the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

‘Black,’ ‘coloured’, ‘BME’ – any kind of label is essentially racist. It’s time to move on

How should we refer to non-white people, and foreigners in general, given that of course we do sometimes need to mention them, perhaps over dinner in White’s or when mulling over where to go on our holidays? This is an important question, because the approved terminologies seem to shift by the day, if not the minute, and we could find ourselves in a lot of trouble. I remember the late US politician George Wallace, when he was governor of Alabama, being ticked off for having used the word ‘negroes’. Quite unacceptable, he was admonished — the correct term is ‘blacks’, and there’s an end to it. ‘Sheesh,’ Wallace replied, ‘we

Nicholas Farrell

The benefits of breeding like a rabbit

Let’s face it. Whatever Pope Francis actually means when his head is in the clouds during those in-flight press conferences of his, we Europeans need to breed like rabbits if we want to preserve Europe. That is not why I have bred like a rabbit, but it is the brutal truth. I have five children aged 11 down to three — because until the age of 40 I thought I was infertile and did not think I could breed at all, let alone like a rabbit; and because though I am a devout agnostic, I am married to Carla, a devout Catholic, who is much younger than me and refuses

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The hottest year on which record?

Did you know that 2014 was the hottest year ever recorded in the entire history of the world? Probably you did because it’s been all over the papers. Not only that but President Obama slipped it into his State of the Union address and the president of the World Bank quoted it at Davos and the singer and rap producer Pharrell Williams is so concerned that he plans to stage a series of Live Earth concerts with Al Gore to emphasise the seriousness of the problem. And these luminaries must know what they’re talking about, right? After all, it’s not just one distinguished scientific institution which has endorsed the ‘2014:

The Spectator

From the archives | 29 January 2015

From ‘Reprisals’, The Spectator, 30 January 1915: There has been a tendency among some newspapers, and perhaps still more among private persons, to demand that the murder of non-combatants on the East Coast by German ships of war and Zeppelins should be visited with reprisals. ‘Murder is murder,’ they say in so many words, and should be treated as such. If we do not punish the Germans, no one else will or can, and the murderers will go free… The argument bears a strong likeness to arguments used over and over again in history. At the beginning of the Indian Mutiny it was firmly believed by most people — some

Tim Stanley

Only capitalism can save Nigeria

Abuja was eerily quiet when I arrived. The capital of Nigeria is normally bustling, but that morning the wide boulevards were empty. The red dust was undisturbed; the call to prayer echoed through the city like the sad lament of the lonely. There is an election approaching, and a lot of people take that as their cue to leave the country. You’ll find much of Nigeria’s ruling class in the Harrods food hall at this time. Although Abuja is far wealthier and more stable than most of Nigeria, its problems are representative of a country on the brink of disaster. Construction of the capital began in the 1970s, its layout

Wednesday

Iain Martin

Free markets need defending. Meet CapX

With The Spectator and Coffee House you are already used to getting the very best gossip and news. Can I interest you in the perfect accompaniment?It is a new service called CapX. I’m its editor and we have been trialling the site since last summer. The new version, looking rather nice we hope, launched today. Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, kindly thought that readers of Coffee House might like to be introduced to what we’re doing. Our editors based in London scour tens of thousands of sources such as blogs, academic research and newspapers around the world to locate smart stories on markets, politics, economics and ideas. We also

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Cameron demonstrates true gamesmanship

Last week it was seven. This morning it stood at nine. By the end of PMQs it had climbed to 12. The statistic everyone is yawning about is the number of shimmies Ed Miliband has performed while failing to admit that he once vowed to ‘weaponise’ the NHS. The only source for Ed’s gangster talk, Nick Robinson, is regarded as infallible. This is helpful to Cameron who has turned a complete non-issue into an astonishingly useful defence. Miliband was cruising for victory today. An easy win and a lap of honour. He came to the chamber with an archive of 29 NHS facilities which David Cameron had vowed to protect

Hope Whitmore

Guardian journalists might not like the Work Programme but jobseekers (like me) do

The government’s Work Programme, launched in 2011 to help long-term unemployed people into work, has been widely condemned in the media. It has been portrayed alternately as greedy, cruel or incompetent, and sometimes all three. Yet one of these providers, Ingeus, helped me. Many journalists, who have no experience of such places, have maligned this scheme as well as others. This infuriates me. How dare they dismiss as a failure the scheme which saved me and many others (Ingeus has helped 215,000 into work) from long-term unemployment, benefits and the dismalness that entails? Following a nine-month period on Jobseeker’s Allowance I was referred to Ingeus in 2011. As well as

Sebastian Payne

Andy Burnham’s car crash interview shows why Labour can’t be trusted with the NHS

If Labour is weaponising the NHS, maybe it needs to sharpen its tools. Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham had a difficult and ill-tempered interview on Newsnight yesterday about what he actually thinks about private sector involvement in the NHS. When asked about the role he sees for the private sector under his reshaped health service, Burnham said private companies would not be entirely excluded: ‘There is still a role for private and voluntary providers but I also did say very clearly that the market is not the answer.’ Presented with a graph (below) showing how private sector outsourcing grew to four per cent under Labour — but rose two per cent

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Crime and punishment

From ‘Reprisals’, The Spectator, 30 January 1915 THERE has been a tendency among some newspapers, and perhaps still more among private persons, to demand that the murder of non-combatants on the East Coast by German ships of war and Zeppelins should be visited with reprisals. “Murder is murder,” they say in so many words, and should be treated as such. If we do not punish the Germans, no one else will or can, and the murderers will go free. Besides, quite apart from just punishment, how can we prevent the Germane from continuing in their criminal courses except by doing to them as they do to us? Therefore, if they

Steerpike Steerpike

Have you heard the one about David Attenborough, a case of diarrhoea and a rat?

To London Zoo, where Mr S caught up with Sir David Attenborough at the launch of his new UKTV series Natural Curiosities. The 88-year-old broadcaster gave party goers pause for thought when he revealed what his least favourite animal was. ‘Rats. I don’t want to put you off your meal but when I was in India, I was by and large not afflicted by tropical diseases, but I did get a bit of the you-know-what and I had to run to a loo. I sat on the loo and I did what I had to do and a rat came out from between my thighs. That is not endearing.’ Happily, Attenborough said such vermin does

Tuesday

Barnaby Rogerson

Why is the V&A hiding a picture of Mohammed from its website?

The V&A has recently decided to remove an historic image of the Prophet Mohammed from its website. The image remains in the collection and will be made available to scholars and researchers by appointment. I am not sure it is a very uplifting example, this censorship of the past, but they are certainly not alone in doing this.  Indeed over the last generation, a slow but efficient iconoclasm has been at work in Britain pruning images of the Prophet from published books, not just about the life of the Prophet but also illustrated surveys of Islamic Art.  It is extraordinary how successful this campaign has been, based not on any physical threat but on a deluge

Steerpike Steerpike

Mike Tindall: Why in any way am I lucky with my in-laws?

The Duke of York attended the World Economic Forum last week in what was his first public appearance since he was accused of abusing an under-age ‘sex slave’. While Prince Andrew chose to speak out in Davos to deny the allegations, members of his family appear to be lost for words. Mike Tindall, who is married to Prince Andrew’s niece Zara Phillips, agreed to an interview with the Radio Times on the condition that ‘any questions about the royal family, including Prince Andrew, will lead to it being called to an abrupt halt’. When the writer did venture a question as to how his wife is holding up, he was met with a terse reply. ‘Let’s

Alex Krasodomski

Are the members of hacker group Lizard Squad cyberterrorists or cybervandals?

Another day, another hack. This morning, Facebook and Instagram went dark. Facebook has blamed a technical glitch; ‘Lizard Squad’ celebrated another successful attack: Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, AIM, Hipchat #offline #LizardSquad — Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) January 27, 2015 Yesterday, the group claimed responsibility for defacing the website of Malaysia Airlines. One of the more active of many mysterious groups, they have claimed responsibility for a range of online mischief in the last year, from hacking into online games networks to the temporary internet blackout in North Korea in December 2014 (although the latter isn’t easy to prove). This kind of seemingly random hacking has been happening more often, and has been termed ‘cybervandalism’. A

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

How will the Guardian and the BBC cover the Trinity Mirror phone hacking?

Trinity Mirror have admitted that they published 71 stories which were enabled by phone-hacking. Now eight cases are due to come before Mr Justice Mann at the beginning of March, with a two-week trial scheduled. Those they concern include Alan Yentob, Sadie Frost and Paul Gascoigne. Steerpike is curious to see what coverage the trial will get in the papers and from the BBC. Both the corporation and the Guardian have taken glee in the past at resting the phone hacking crimes firmly in Rupert Murdoch’s court. Giving the impression, of course, that the sin of hacking came straight from the blackness of Murdoch’s heart – rather than a sin that was spread right across an

Steerpike Steerpike

Should the Guardian apologise to David Cameron over orgasm blunder?

Readers of the Guardian had cause to splutter into their tea this morning after one bright spark seemingly put the wrong photo on an article advising a reader who has difficulty reaching climax during sexual intercourse. Some mistake surely by the @guardian website’s picture editor pic.twitter.com/HLufxoiuoW — Paul Callaghan (@PMCallaghan) January 26, 2015 Although the reader’s name was not listed, it is thought that it was not David Cameron writing in with his problem. Mr S imagines he would go straight to The Spectator‘s own Dear Mary should any issues arise. The photo on the article has now been changed to a more generic snap. It would certainly make an interesting read in their corrections column.