Society

Monday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Burning foetuses to heat hospitals: a perfect metaphor for modern Britain

By way of a metaphor for the way the NHS and, come to that, the law regards foetuses, you can’t really better the reality, viz, that foetal remains from abortions and miscarriages are being incinerated in NHS hospitals and possibly used to heat that hospital. If a foetus lives less than 13 weeks, it could, in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, for instance, be used as fuel as part of the hospital’s waste-to-energy schemes. And 13 weeks is just over three months’ gestation – the point at which wanted foetuses register as recognisably human on the scans that prospective parents take home and show their friends. Meanwhile, the unwanted foetuses, or the ones

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The University of Cambridge must choose its donors wisely

Just over three years ago, when I was editor of Varsity, Cambridge’s student newspaper, we ran a story documenting how Dmytro Firtash was using his Cambridge connections to bring libel charges to British courts. Here’s an extract: ‘A billionaire donor to the University of Cambridge has filed a libel lawsuit against a Ukrainian paper, the Kyiv Post, citing his donations to the University as one of the reasons he has chosen to pursue the case through the British courts. Dmytro Firtash, a gas-trading oligarch with strong connections to the President of Ukraine, has donated on a number of occasions to the University to help fund Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, based within

Steerpike Steerpike

Life imitates art as Game of Thrones returns to our screens

The last season of Game of Thrones ended while a rough and ready rabble from north of ‘the wall’ were preparing to make life difficult for the establishment down south in King’s Landing. Ahead of the fourth season premier, one of these northern wildlings, Ygritte (AKA Scottish actress Rose Leslie), has told the forthcoming issue of Spectator Life: ‘If we are going to be dictated to by anyone, I would prefer it to be Westminster rather than Brussels.’ Quite right,  and what a refreshing measure of Euroscepticism and pro-Unionism. Fans of HBO’s epic adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s novels have pointed out that Leslie needs to take this debate onto Channel Four News so that

Carola Binney Carola Binney

Being a student has made me see Oxford in a new light

I have a confession to make: I go to my hometown university. The decision to stay in Oxford is one I often feel I have to justify. When people learn that my parents live a 30 minute walk from my college, I get an ‘Oh, cool’. It’s in that tone that I imagine might also be prompted by someone telling you, while wearing flares and flashing trainers, that they maintain a shrine to Peter Andre. I am, evidently, thoroughly lacking in a sense of adventure. Unimaginative and insufficiently independent, I am bound to be missing out on the full ‘university experience’. And I am missing out on some things. There are no surprises

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Budget 2014: what Osborne didn’t tell us about the crunch to come

Getting to the truth of a Budget is far easier under George Osborne’s new system. His creation, the Office for Budget Responsibility, now writes its own report  (pdf here) and it’s like having your own mole in the Treasury flag up what the Chancellor would rather gloss over*. I read its report over the weekend – it’s too rich a document to skim on Budget day. I found a few charts that CoffeeHousers may be interested in. The graphs are all about Osborne’s decision to defer tough decisions – what James Forsyth brilliantly called his Saint Augustine tendency: give me fiscal discipline, Oh Lord – but not yet. Osborne’s glacial progress on

Charles Moore Charles Moore

How I became editor of The Spectator (aged 27)

Thirty years ago this weekend, I became editor of The Spectator. In the same month, the miners’ strike began, Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as the right-wing press still insisted on calling him) won the Chesterfield by-election, the FT index rose above 900 for the first time and the mortgage rate fell to 10.5 per cent. Mark Thatcher was reported to be leaving the country to sell Lotus cars in America for £45,000 a year. Although she now tells me she has no memory of it, Wendy Cope wrote a poem entitled ‘The Editor of The Spectator is 27 Years Old’. Because I was young, the events are vivid in my mind, but in

Sebastian Payne

Pension reforms are vital to encourage saving. But what about everyone else?

‘This reform is about treating people as adults’ — according to the Pensions Minister Steve Webb. The announcement of a pensions revolution in this week’s budget took everyone by surprise, leading to the question of whether there has been enough consultation on the changes. Webb said on the Sunday Politics today that evidence elsewhere shows the coalition is doing the right thing: ‘We know from around the world – places like America and Australia – where people already have this kind of freedoms. So we already have some things to judge by. We’re going to spend the next year talking to people working it through, including a three-month consultation. There

Saturday

David Blackburn

#ToryBingo could still benefit the Conservatives

Isabel and Sebastian are right: #ToryBingo is embarrassing. The advert was crass to the point of being idiotic. The use of the word ‘they’ rather than ‘you’ to describe ‘hardworking people’ was sloppy. The episode has taken some of the gloss off an otherwise shiny Budget. It is, emphatically, bad PR. That said; I don’t imagine that the Tories will be too displeased by the furore. #ToryBingo has given a huge amount of exposure to two Budget measures that would otherwise have been buried beneath the pension announcement: the Tories have cut tax on bingo and duty on beer. Neither of those measures is going to turn the next election

John Rutter

John Rutter – M.E. is real. I know, I had it for seven years

Rod Liddle may or may not be right that certain illnesses become fashionable once given a name and are illusory, as he wrote last week. But ME — myalgic encephalomyelitis, alias post-viral fatigue syndrome or yuppie flu, is not one of them. It’s an unpleasant physical illness: it ruined seven years of my life. It probably takes a number of forms, but in my case it started with chicken pox, caught off my infant son. I seemed to make a complete recovery until a year later, when I began to experience unpleasant symptoms. These included abnormal sensitivity to sound and light, violently inflamed eyes and blisters around the head and upper

Henry De Zoete

How to disempower the Big Six energy companies

I believe in free markets, but there are some markets that don’t work properly.  Where competition has not prevailed in favour of the consumer. Where customers are too weak, companies too strong and choice too constrained. One such market is energy.  Just six companies control 98% of household gas and electricity supply.  British Gas accounts for over 70% of all gas customers. In energy the regional monopolies that existed before privatisation largely continue to this day.  If you’re reading this and live in London I’d be willing to bet that for three out of four of you EDF is your electricity provider.  If you’re in Cardiff I bet it’s SSE. And

Friday

Olivia Cole

Introducing Spectator Life Spring 2014

From Homeland to Game of Thrones and House of Cards, it’s an observation often made that we’re in a golden age of television. If there’s a TV renaissance afoot, and a renewed appreciation of what good writing, subtle character development and long form drama can achieve on a small screen, David Hare’s Johnny Worricker trilogy, which started in 2011 with Page Eight, is without doubt one of the best things to have been made for British TV in recent years. Our cover star Bill Nighy plays a modern day MI5 agent, and the production has a cast list from Rachel Weisz to Michael Gambon, Christopher Walken, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham-Carter

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How food banks were shunted around government departments

It is well worth reading Paul Waugh’s interview with Iain Duncan Smith in the House Magazine for a number of reasons – not least his hint about docking child benefit in the future. But the Work and Pensions Secretary also makes an interesting comment about food banks: ‘We are not responsible for food banks, that policy area generally is Cabinet Office and so it should remain. I’m happy for people to visit food banks, I don’t have a particular problem with them.’ I’ve written before about why people visit food banks, and why even if we had a very good benefits system that paid people the right amount of money

Steerpike Steerpike

Newsnight of the long knives

The controversy over the appointment of TUC economist Duncan Weldon as Newsnight’s economics correspondent has taken a surreal twist. The former Labour Party adviser appears to have used his blog to deaden the impact of a Sunday paper exposé about his connections with the extreme right. Weldon admits to a ‘brief and misguided flirtation with the ideas of the far right,’ yet denied that he had joined any organisation. However, when he was a student he wrote an anonymous piece about this ‘flirtation’ for a student newspaper, under the headline ‘I was a fascist’. All water under the bridge, he now says: ‘None of this should be read as a plea for sympathy. This chapter of my teenage life was witless and intensely embarrassing and

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Stella Creasy, social media, and politicians with ‘hinterlands’

Politicians like to insinuate that they have a ‘cultural hinterland’ — a range of interesting interests beyond Westminster. Take Stella Creasy, the MP for Walthamstow, who describes herself as an ‘Indie Kid’. This morning she read a Telegraph post by Peter Oborne about modern politicians being too inexperienced and dull. ‘Think of Healey; Crossman; Crosland; Jenkins; Callaghan; Castle and others,’ wrote Oborne. ‘They had knocked around life far more than the modern generation. They were much broader in their interests: at home in arts, academic or military life almost as much as Westminster.’ ‘Whatevs,’ answered Stella on Twitter. She was already, it so happened, having a Twitter conversation on one

Sebastian Payne

Technology is reshaping childhood — should we be worried?

Are children utterly obsessed with technology? Yes, is the obvious answer to that question, but debate about whether is it a good or bad thing rages around forums such as Mumsnet. Many believe the innocence of childhood has been ruined by unfettered access to the Internet, videos, games and goodness knows what else. Others instead think that every generation of children is different and parents have to move with the times instead of yearning for their own past. I have to admit I’m a little biased. I built my first computer when I was six and spent most of my teenage years faffing around with websites and attempting to code.

Ed West Ed West

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is jingoistic, angry and oppressive. But it’s nothing like Nazi Germany

I’m conservative, so it’s hard for me not to love Vladimir Putin. His ripped torso, the way the sweat glistens on his pecs, the steely gaze, the cheeky smile. How much does he bench press, I wonder? And of course the main reason why conservatives like me aren’t desperately keen to get stuck into the Ruskis over their occupation of Crimea is because, deep down, we really love Putin’s authoritarian style of nationalist chauvinism. Especially the beating up the gays part, because deep down we’re all secretly gay; or have micropenises. Whichever one would be more embarrassing. ——————————————- A lot of people actually believe this, and that those of us

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Vladimir Putin’s right about one thing: the West doesn’t observe its own rules

Congratulations to Stephen Glover for writing perhaps the only sensible piece about the Crimean crisis. There is a certain force, too, to Putin’s charge that the West believes itself a chosen people to whom the normal moral rules do not apply. We have meddled, frequently with the help of military might, to spread our own creed of liberal evangelism across the world, regardless or not as to whether the people to whose aid we have come actually share our aspirations. It has been a staggeringly unsuccessful policy. Look at Iraq. Look at Syria. Look at Afghanistan. I wonder too about the way the media reports these crusades. A while back

Molly Guinness

Remembering the decimation of Crimea’s Tatars

Crimea’s Tatars are nervous after Russia’s annexation of the territory. The Tatars, Sunni Muslims who account for 12 per cent of Crimea’s population, boycotted Sunday’s referendum worried that the Russians would impose repressive and discriminatory laws on them. Reading Bohdan Nahaylo’s 1980 article, Murder of a Nation*, you can see why. First, Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar nation. ‘In the early hours of 19 May 1944, some 238,000 people were abruptly awoken by units of the Soviet security forces and within minutes herded into cattle trucks. Sealed in without food or water, they were transported several thousand miles eastwards and eventually dispersed in Soviet Central Asia. Denounced before the

Thursday

Peter Jones

On teaching, St Jerome is with Daisy Christodoulou

Last week in The Spectator, Daisy Christodoulou argued that, contrary to current educational theory, children learned best via direct instruction and drills under the guidance of a good teacher, which might be hard work but was satisfying and good for pupil self-esteem. Romans would have seconded that. In ad 403 St Jerome wrote a letter to Laeta, telling her how to teach her daughter Paula to read and write: make ivory or wooden letters; teach Paula a song to learn them and their sounds and their correct order, but also mix them up and encourage Paula to recognise them without such artificial aid; guide her first writing by hand, or

The Spectator

Spectator letters: John Rutter and Coeliac UK answer Rod Liddle

ME is real Sir: Rod Liddle may or may not be right that certain illnesses become fashionable once given a name and are illusory (‘Children with a severe case of the excuses’, 15 March). But ME — myalgic encephalomyelitis, alias post-viral fatigue syndrome or yuppie flu, is not one of them. It’s an unpleasant physical illness: it ruined seven years of my life. It probably takes a number of forms, but in my case it started with chicken pox, caught off my infant son. I seemed to make a complete recovery until a year later, when I began to experience unpleasant symptoms. These included abnormal sensitivity to sound and light, violently