Society Archives

Thursday

27 Feb 2014

Portrait of the week | 27 February 2014

Home Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo detainee who won substantial compensation after suing the British government, was arrested in Birmingham on suspicion of terrorism offences relating to Syria. John Downey, accused of killing four soldiers in the IRA Hyde Park bombing in 1982, will not be prosecuted, because he was given, in error, a guarantee he would not face trial; an Old Bailey judge ruled it was in the public interest to make state officials keep their promises. Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of the opposition, said she had ‘regrets’ that the Paedophile Information Exchange continued to be affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties during her time as

Lavatch

2151: Sources

Three theme words which must be deduced each suggest three unclued lights (including one of two words and ignoring one definite article). The word which connects the three theme words must be highlighted in the completed grid. Unchecked and cross-checking letters in all unclued lights could spell: KOREANS CAN SOON LEARN. Across 1 Sadly embracing such silly sweethearts (8) 8 Bit of door said to stick (4) 11 Refined orgy’s rendered with Homeric adjective (12, hyphened) 14 Cut segment of mollusc is sore (7) 17 Bone a northern Parisian’s read about (4) 18 Speed ingested by extremely naughty old slapper (6) 22 Publish English Scriptures (8) 23 They

The Spectator

Books and Arts – 27 February 2014

Dumpynose

to 2148: Eighth of February

Unclued lights can each be abbreviated so that together they give the letters of FEBRUARY: FAHRENHEIT (19), EARTH (32), BASS (35), RÖNTGEN UNIT (41), UNIVERSITY (1D), ATOMIC WEIGHT (4), RECTOR (12) and YEN (7A). First prize Hilda Ball, Belfast Runners-up Roderick Rhodes, Goldsborough, N. Yorks;B. Taylor, Little Lever, Bolton

Alex Massie

Standard Life becomes the latest firm to bully Scotland. But is it bluffing?

No-one should be surprised that Standard Life has warned it might leave Scotland should the country vote for independence later this year. It is not exactly a secret that Edinburgh’s financial services industry is concerned by the possible – indeed plausible – implications of independence. The suggestion – sorry, the threat – that it might leave Scotland is already being characterised by nationalists as yet more bullying, this time of the corporate rather than political kind. No doubt this is a blustering bluff too. But what if it isn’t? The sorry truth is that Edinburgh’s financial sector is not quite what once it was. The Bank of Scotland is a small part of the

Mary Wakefield

Would you screen for the ‘gay’ gene?

How would you feel about a couple doing IVF just in order to find the embryos most likely to to be gay… and chuck them out? Does that sound like eugenics to you? What about the other way round: what if a gay couple wanted to maximise their chance of a having gay baby — would you let them screen for and select embryos with the genes that made it more likely they were gay? Then bin the rest? It’s time to make your mind up because after decades of panic about ‘designer babies’ (remember Gattaca?) the future is finally here. On the one hand, as I write in the

Michael Gove

Nature belongs at the heart of school life

History, Edmund Burke wrote, is ‘a pact between the dead, the living and the yet unborn.’ Nowhere is this pact more important than in our relationship with nature. Conservative governments have always sought to protect and enhance the natural environment – whether through Disraeli’s Public Health Act, which sought to limit the environmental impact of the industrial revolution; or Eden’s Clean Air Act, which helped lift the London smog. We shouldn’t forget it was Margaret Thatcher’s drive to cut sulphur emissions that stopped the acid rain which was damaging our woodlands and killing the fish in our lakes and rivers. It’s not just a safe and secure environment we are

Camilla Swift

Podcast: Cameron’s Northern Alliance, Christianity and the left, and the end of two-party politics

Is David Cameron’s new gameplan to look to the northern states for allies? Fraser Nelson is joined on the podcast by Stephen Booth of Open Europe, to discuss the influence that people such as the Dutch PM Mark Rutte – who has a clear and impressive reform plan – and Angela Merkel are having on our PM. Could Cameron really be serious about making Britain an honorary member of Scandinavia? And could this strategy really be enough to pull him through the next election? Ed West and Andrew Brown of The Guardian also discuss the church’s left-wing bias. Ed has written frequently about this issue in the Catholic church. But is this, in fact, an

Julie Burchill

The joy of online hatred

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Julie Burchill debates Paris Lees on intersectionality”] Listen [/audioplayer]On Saturday morning, when the body of the beautiful Antipodean model and television personality Charlotte Dawson was being taken from her home in Sydney, I was back in Blighty rolling up my sleeves and getting stuck in for yet another happy hour in the gladiatorial arena that is the Spectator online comments section. Wherein, amongst other things, an angry trans-person had threatened me with the Police, for committing Hate Crimes (note the use of Krazy Kapitals) and a Beating from her Hells Angel Husband. These two things might seem completely random were it not for the fact that in 2012

Lucy Vickery

All together now | 27 February 2014

In Competition 2836 you were invited to coin collective nouns for the following: tweeters, hackers, hoodies, WAGS, environmentalists, bankers, MPs and contrarians. This was by far the most popular competition we’ve run for a long time and it was cheering to see so many new names in the postbag. Inevitably, there was a fair amount of repetition: nest/cacophony/outrage/triviality of tweeters came up more than once, as did skulk/huggle/scowl of hoodies; bonus/wad/wunch/trough of bankers; knot/-perversity/Hitch of contrarians; vacuum/bling/surgery of WAGs; flood of environmentalists; expense of MPs; to list just a few. I especially liked Graham Peters’s and John Doran’s ‘thong of WAGs’, Sarah Drury’s ‘concatenation of tweeters’, Poppy McLean’s ‘excess of

Wednesday

26 Feb 2014

Isabel Hardman

Low Pay Commission backs 3% rise in minimum wage

So after all the to-ing and fro-ing over whether the minimum wage will get a big fat rise, the Low Pay Commission has recommended that the rate rise by 3 per cent to £6.50 an hour from October 2014. George Osborne had said that he wanted to ‘see an above-inflation increase in the minimum wage’, pointing out at the same time that ‘if, for example, the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, it would be £7 by 2015/16’ (full quotes and audio here, if you need a reminder). If he did want it to rise to £7 by 2015/16, that would mean a much bigger rise from the LPC

Ed West

Paedophiles are just one of the Left’s unacceptable bedfellows

It’s curious that the story about the National Council for Civil Liberties and its links with the Paedophile Information Exchange is big news now, since it’s been common knowledge for many years, and written about in the Catholic press on a number of occasions. I researched the story back in 2006 or 2007, along with another journalist, and this was already then well-trampled territory, but the papers weren’t interested, despite my friend’s huge amount of work. He even went to Hull, I seem to remember. And back. I only got as far as Cockfosters, which was then the improbable home of the Gay and Lesbian Newspaper Archives, which was where

Isabel Hardman

What’s happened to the Balance of Competences report?

What’s the problem with that Balance of Competences report on Freedom of Movement that still hasn’t been published? Nick Clegg gave his monthly press conference today, and was asked whether he had a problem with the report, which is believed to have been delayed because it painted too positive a picture of immigration. Clegg said: ‘They by and large depict a situation where we get a lot more from this pooling of decision-making in the EU than we somehow lose. My simple rule of thumb is that the exercise has got to be depoliticised, it’s got to be objective, it’s got to be based on facts, and not just on

Isabel Hardman

Welfare cap will change the way cuts are made

The Sun’s report that pensioner benefits will be included in the overall cap on welfare spending highlights an interesting shift that this policy will cause. George Osborne will set out the detail of the cap on Annually Managed Expenditure in the budget in a few weeks’ time. It will put pressure on all Work and Pensions Secretaries to keep future welfare spending under the limit, meaning there will be internal pressure within the department for cuts, rather than the battle for savings between the DWP and the Treasury that we’ve grown used to. Instead of the Chancellor bearing down on DWP with a package of cuts, the DWP will be

Tuesday

25 Feb 2014

Camilla Swift

Gavin Grant steps down. What now for the RSPCA?

Gavin Grant, the CEO of the RSPCA, is stepping down from his role after just over two years in the job because there are ‘concerns about his health’, the charity announced today. The announcement will be met with a mixture of delight and dismay; delight from those who believed that his influence was shifting the RSPCA’s purpose from animal welfare to animal rights and, of course, dismay from his loyal supporters in the animal rights brigade. It’s hard to reject the view that he was a driving force behind the many incendiary headlines written about the RSPCA since he started his job. While Grant was in charge, the increase in

Melanie McDonagh

A prenup undermines a marriage before it has even begun

A friend of mine, quite a distinguished lawyer, takes the view that marriage ceased to make sense after no-fault divorces came in. What, he says sternly, is the point of a contract when there’s no sanction if you break it? Well, quite. But if no-fault divorce pretty well invalidates marriage after the event, prenups do quite a good job of undermining it beforehand. The point of marriage is that it’s meant to be a lifetime affair – the hint being in the ‘til death do us part’ bit – and the point of prenups is that they make provision for the thing ending before it even gets underway. You’re putting

Alex Massie

Whatever happened to Scotland’s timid posh folk?

Whatever happened to Scotland’s upper-middle class? That’s one of the questions asked by Hugo Rifkind in his characteristically interesting column this week. Why, more to the point, are they so reluctant to play a part in the independence stushie? When did they become so bashful? It is time, Hugo says, for the timid posh folk to speak out. Perhaps. But the alumni of Scotland’s private schools are hugely unrepresentative of Scottish life and, in many cases, far removed from the Scottish mainstream. Privately-educated Scotland is a tiny place. Everyone knows everyone (though the saddest people in Scotland are those who know only privately-schooled people). Even in Edinburgh. True, 25% or

Monday

24 Feb 2014

Steerpike

Sir David Frost: Hoover’s ‘hippie’

News of J. Edgar Hoover’s interest in Sir David Frost resurfaced in yesterday’s Sunday Times. In an FBI memo, which Mr S has seen, Hoover wrote, ‘Check with our legal attaché in London. Frost shows every indication of being a hippie’. A cable instructing the London office to conduct an ‘extremely discreet check re-Frost’ is below. Needless to say, the Feds never found anything on Frost. Mr S wonders why Hoover suspected Frost of being a ‘hippie’. At the time in question, Frost was doing 8 TV shows a week on both sides of the Atlantic: leaving little time for daisy chains and hemp knitting. Maybe his sideburns were seditious?

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Opera takes on Islam

You know how it is. You’re finishing off Friday prayers, wondering what to do with your evening. You notice some women in a cattle truck and decide to engage in a spot of ritual humiliation, bunging the women into burkas and forcing them to distribute petals in front of your feet. Critiques of Islam don’t get much more savage than the one delivered by a new French production of Rameau’s 18th century opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes. The third act assault on Iran’s patriarchy drew gasps from the audience – and even a protest at the Toulouse premiere. The idea of casting Islam as an oppressor is a concept almost completely unknown to the art

Nick Cohen

When is a scandal not a scandal?

When it involves metropolitan left-wingers, says the Daily Mail. For a week, it has been exposing how Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt – or “Hat and Pat” as the London left of the early 1980s knew them – committed the National Council for Civil Liberties to the cause of helping the Paedophile Information Exchange. The Mail showed that while at the NCCL (now Liberty) * Hewitt described PIE in glowing terms as ‘a campaigning/counselling group for adults attracted to children’; * The NCCL lobbied Parliament for the age of sexual consent to be cut to ten – if the child consented and ‘understood the nature of the act’. * It