Society

Thursday

Harry Mount

The case against London cabbies

I lost my misguided faith in black cabs last week, on the corner of Royal College Street in north London. It was the tiniest trip — 2.4 miles from Bloomsbury to my Camden flat at 11.30 in the evening. Hard to mess up, too: empty roads, good weather and the easiest of routes — practically a straight line to my flat. To my horror, the cabbie dodged the obvious, straight route and embarked on an extended loop through the traffic-choked hub of Camden Town tube station and Camden Market. I pointed him in the right direction and he reluctantly did a U-turn and headed up Royal College Street. Not a

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Aid, Arabs and how to spot a gentleman

The battle over aid Sir: Why Nations Fail, the book rightly lauded in The Spectator (‘Why aid fails’, 25 January), is one of the inspirations for many of the changes this government has made in international development policy. Those changes can best be described as driving value for money through the system, tackling conflict and instability, and building prosperity. Bringing together defence, diplomacy and development — not least through the mechanism of the National Security Council — has made a significant difference to the success of British development policy. Buried in the article is the sentence: ‘We do not argue for its [the aid budget’s] reduction.’ Our development policy is

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 30 January 2014

I always find it impossible to sleep when I’ve played poorly, and last night just one sleeping pill was never going to be enough. Alas, I needed two to stop me agonising over my many mistakes during the weekend’s Lady Milne trials (for the women’s home internationals). Sally Brock and I didn’t manage to qualify, which,  given Sally’s brilliance, tells you just how badly I played. However, let me describe one interesting hand for which Sally insists on taking half the blame, even though I propelled us to the wrong contract: (3♣ = 5 card stayman; 3♠ = agrees hearts; 4NT = RKCB). Sally had limited her hand by opening

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How to stop cinema iPhone pests

Q. At a private screening of a documentary about the artist David Bomberg, a woman sitting near me in the hand-picked audience carried on using her iPhone to send and receive messages. She had the phone on silent but was generating a rival source of light to the screen we were all supposed to be watching. Thus we could not fully concentrate. Was there an elegant way I might have put a stop to this insensitive behaviour? What would you have said, Mary? — S.H-H., London SW3 A. There is no need to say anything. Cinema usherettes of yore would curb rowdy or undesirable behaviour in the stalls by shining

Peter Jones

Democritus on the 50p rate

What a song and dance about a tax rise affecting a minuscule proportion of the richest in society! Greeks would have been baffled. Classical Greeks did not have the automatic admiration for self-made millionaires that we do. They felt that only the very lucky or the very wicked could aspire to wealth. ‘No one gets rich quickly by being honest,’ says one character in a play, articulating that sense of the injustice of the good poor man and the evil plutocrat. Riches could also produce bad citizens because it was easy for a man to become ‘enslaved’ by his money (a common image). By contrast, Socrates, rejecting payment for his

Raymond Keene

Gates’ exit

In Virgil’s Aeneid the hero Aeneas escapes from Hades via one of two gates, one made of ivory and the other of horn. It is widely believed that he selected the wrong gate. As Homer had already established, the gate of ivory, which Aeneas chose, portends false visions, while the gate of horn heralds true prognostications. Last week Bill Gates flew into London to contest a game against the new world champion Magnus Carlsen. Although the game only lasted nine moves, Bill certainly chose the wrong gate to exit the game.   Gates-Carlsen: London 2014; Nimzowitsch Defence   1 e4 Nc6 2 Nf3 Nf6 3 Bd3 d5 4 exd5 Qxd5

Raymond Keene

no. 299

Black to play. This position is from Aronian-Van Wely, Wijk aan Zee 2014. Having already clinched first prize, Aronian’s only loss came in the last round when he fell into a diabolical trap. What has he missed? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 4 February 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 shall be offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.   Last week’s solution 1 … Rxg3 Last week’s winner Robert Tove, Cambridge MA

Charles Moore Charles Moore

What medieval farmers knew – and the Environment Agency doesn’t

Our neighbour Philip Merricks is a farmer on Romney Marsh, 90 per cent of whose land is below sea level. The marsh would not exist without the medieval ingenuity which ‘inned’ it from the sea. Phil is therefore well placed to understand the interests of farmers on the Somerset Levels who have now been inundated for a month. But he is also a conservationist, owning and running two bird reserves, so is pro-farming and pro-wildlife, which too few are. Last week, he went to the Somerset Levels as chairman of the Hawk and Owl Trust, which has a reserve down there. He tells me that while the usual winter waterlogging

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 January 2014

Home Britain’s gross domestic product grew by 1.9 per cent last year, the most since 2007, according to the Office for National Statistics. The last quarter’s growth was 0.7 per cent, a little less than the 0.8 per cent of the previous quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2013, construction actually declined by 0.3 per cent, and economic output was still 1.3 per cent less than in the first quarter of 2008. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, promised in a speech that Labour would restore the 50 per cent rate of tax on higher earnings. Daniel Evans, a former Sunday Mirror journalist, told the Old Bailey that he had intercepted voicemails

Mr Magoo

2147: Amazing performance

Each of the 22 across solutions, in clue order, contributes one unchecked letter to a two-word phrase (13,9) in Chambers 2011. This dictionary entry will enable solvers to highlight a potential victim (9,7) by (again) choosing some of the unchecked letters from fifteen across entries in the order they appear in the grid. The nine unclued lights are selected so their initial letters confirm this potential victim.   Across   6 Intoxication, at heart, admitted by ‘People like tequila’ (7) 11 Mathematician’s unit for the smallest degree (6) 14 Arkansas consumed by hobby favoured in St Andrews (5, apostrophised) 15 Thirty seconds presumably, or one below eighteen (5) 17 A

Mr Magoo

to 2144: Leonids

The work was ‘THE TAMING OF THE (1D) Shrew’. ‘Shrew’ is suggested by 15, 27 and 33. The ‘Shrew’ of the title is KATHARINA (38), addressed as ‘KATE OF KATE-HALL’ (9) (in ODQ) by Petruchio (disguised as EUTROPHIC (20)), whose servant is Curtis (CITRUS (3)). Title: ‘tamed’ SONDELI (the Indian musk shrew).   First prize John Gaymer, Effingham, Surrey Runners-up P. Taylor-Mansfield, Worcester; Margaret Shiels, Edinburgh

Chris Mould

Edwina Currie is wrong about food banks

The Trussell Trust would like to correct the following inaccuracies and misleading statements made in Edwina Currie’s recent blog, and wishes to make readers aware that Edwina Currie has never spoken to The Trussell Trust, and has not sought to verify any of her assertions with us. A response to ‘Food banks aren’t solving problems — they can make things worse too’ The Trussell Trust started Salisbury foodbank in 2000 and has been running it ever since. The Trussell Trust started the UK foodbank network, a social franchise, in 2004. All foodbanks in The Trussell Trust’s network operate to a common system, adhering to agreed policies. All Trussell Trust foodbanks share

Molly Guinness

The Spectator on Britain’s treatment of refugees

The British government has said it will allow in some of Syria’s most vulnerable refugees. The Home Office hasn’t specified how many will be admitted but says it will probably be in the hundreds. The Syrian civil war has created 2.4 million refugees and 6.5 million internally displaced people, and looking through the archive, you get the sense that some of The Spectator’s former writers might have thought Britain could have offered more this time. The government’s attitude towards Jewish refugees in 1944 was ‘niggardly, bureaucratic, evasive and insincere’, according to the diplomat Harold Nicolson. We’ve historically been ‘proud to succour the oppressed and to defend the weak. We were

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Battle for Threadneedle Street

I thought it obvious that Mark Carney’s trip to Scotland yesterday was a bad day for Alex Salmond and the Scottish nationalists. Sure, the governor of the Bank of England said, a currency union between Scotland the the rump UK could happen and be made to work but it would be fraught with difficulty and sacrifice too. Do you really want to do that? How lucky do you feel? Carney, being a Canadian and therefore a man crippled by politeness, did not add “punk”. In response the SNP were reduced to pushing a meaningless poll which found 70% of Britons favouring a currency union after independence. That is, 70% of

Anthony Seldon

Liberal arts education has been under attack – we need to rediscover its profound wisdom

England did so deplorably in the Ashes in part because of an obsession with data, including minutely detailed plans on diet and exercise. Excessive bureaucracy can squeeze the lifeblood out of sport, the arts, and indeed education. Bureaucracy gone mad. Michael Gove, aided by Michael Wilshaw, has massively improved the standards of schooling in Britain. Their insistence on top quality teaching for all, and a will to smash the mediocre, lies at the heart of all they have achieved. They will go down in history as great education secretaries and chief inspectors respectively. But for all that, they do not sit comfortably in the same railway carriage as the principle

Ed West Ed West

Meritocracy doesn’t work. It’s in the Left’s interest to recognise this

At the end of Coming Apart Charles Murray mentions, rather enigmatically, that our assumptions about society will soon be blown out of the water by new discoveries about human nature. I imagine he’s talking about genetic discoveries, in particular about the human brain. One of our current assumptions is meritocracy, and the idea that we can produce a fair society in which the most talented and energetic rise to the top. This is sometimes what people mean when they talk of the ‘American Dream’, a term that seems to be used more now that social mobility in that great country is fading and inequality rising. That is why The Son

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Let them eat whale

If the Faroe Islanders want to eat whale, let them. So says Tim Ecott in today’s Spectator. He argues that the Faroese – who live on dramatic and remote islands in the North Atlantic – shouldn’t be victimised for killing less than 0.1% of the pilot whale population annually for food. There are far more pressing marine issues that we should be concerned about – for example the 100 million sharks slaughtered for shark fin soup, or how the EU has allowed tuna stocks to be decimated. The problem is, many people don’t agree with him. We’ve all heard that whales are highly intelligent, social and family orientated creatures, and that

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Take note, Fiona Millar – you can’t close the class divide by closing private schools

If there was a coalition to keep the poor down in Britain, Fiona Millar would be its chairman. If a wicked emperor were to seize Britain and want to make sure the rich held all the best jobs, he’d set up a system where there was a direct link between wealth and quality of education. He’d smile with evil content at what Chris Cook has revealed as the ‘graph of doom’ which shows such a relationship in British state schools. So we have designed a system of near-perfect unfairness. And yet, the people who are supposedly against inequality ignore this problem completely – and instead focus their ire on those reforming