Society

Thursday

Lisa Kelly

A&E

If this waiting is hellish, then the sick are limbo dancing; only those who are bent double, or on the floor, puddles of their former selves, have a hope of getting under the bar, progressively lowered as more contorted squeeze through. If the woman in a white coat is god, then the boy with bleeding hands has stigmata, the man with closed eyes on the stretcher is Lazarus, and the toddler pushing donkey-on-wheels up and down, up and down, is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. If this is a place of worship, then the grey kidney-shaped receptacles are donation plates passed around for contributions from the faithful,

Wednesday

Robin Harris

Cameron betrayed public trust – and sounded like Arthur Scargill – when he said ‘money is no object’

There are some things that as a politician you really mustn’t say – things that suggest your priorities are so wrong, and your understanding of public duty so defective, that you can never be entrusted with anything serious. When David Cameron announced yesterday that, in coping with floods, ‘money is no object’, he said one of those things. For any responsible politician, money – tax payers’ money – is always an ‘object’. As Mrs Thatcher endlessly reminded her colleagues, the government, itself, has no money, only the money it takes from the people. She was right. To declare that there is no limit to what the government is prepared to

Sebastian Payne

Betting on the future of Scotland — Parris vs. Massie

How would you bet on the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum? With Ladbrokes offering odds of 1/5 on a ‘No’ vote, its a much better return than any savings account. But should writers put a wager on something they can possibly influence? Matthew Parris discussed how he might bet with Alex Massie on our podcast last week — a conversation that has stuck in his mind. This was what Parris says on the matter in his Times column today (£): ‘Something came over me. Last Wednesday, in the middle of a debate about Scottish independence with Alex Massie, a Scottish columnist who writes for The Spectator and The Times,

Tuesday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Let’s ignore George Clooney’s vapid comments about the Elgin Marbles

George Clooney may be many things, but an art historian he is not. Speaking at a press conference promoting his new film The Monuments Men, both he and co-star Bill Murray waded into the long-running row about the Elgin Marbles. The British Museum should hand them back, they both said. Murray began with a twee plea: ‘They’ve had a very nice stay here, certainly. London’s gotten crowded. There’s plenty of room back there in Greece. England can take the lead on this kind of thing – letting art go back where it came from. The Greeks are nothing but generous. They would loan it back once in a while.’ Clooney

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Could beavers really solve our flooding crisis?

All this talk about dredging is well and good; but could the humble beaver in fact be the solution to the nation’s floods? Well, as far as the Mammal Society are concerned, yes. The animal has been extinct in the UK since the sixteenth century, but in recent years people have been pushing for its reintroduction. There are already two separate wild beaver colonies in Scotland, which have elicited a mixture of good and bad reactions from locals. But could they really help with the flooding? The Mammal Society’s argument is that beavers – ‘the master river engineer’ – create ‘impoundments’ with their damming, which help to keep water upland

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Smoking in cars is banned. The state’s next stop is your living room

How the hell do we keep the kids quiet in the car now that we can’t subdue them with tobacco smoke? I suppose we’ll have to resort to slipping a tranquiliser into their in-car snacks, somehow. Parliament has now voted to make it illegal to smoke in a car when there are children in the back. Or the front, I suppose. I don’t know anyone who does this anyway, frankly. The British Lung Foundation, a pressure group which campaigns for equal rights for all lungs, regardless of colour, creed or gender, has stated that 430,000 children aged between 11-15 are subjected to cigarette smoke in cars every week. Where did

Sebastian Payne

Tube strike called off, but is either side victorious?

Londoners rejoice — the Tube strike has been called off. Following discussions through the ACAS arbitration service, the RMT and TSSA unions have called off the second 48 hour strike due to begin tomorrow. It seems to be a draw, with neither Transport for London nor the unions being crowned the winner. In return for calling off all industrial action, TfL has agreed to two months of intensive talks ‘to examine LU’s proposals in detail’, combined with a review of every station which significantly ‘could result in some ticket offices remaining open.’ Boris Johnson said: ‘TfL’s negotiators have been ready since November to discuss the detail around ticket office closures

Steerpike Steerpike

Baby takes her final bow

Thousands of social media users have taken to their keyboards to express shock and surprise at the death of Shirley Temple. Almost everyone, it seems, thought that the film star and diplomat had passed away many years ago: Shirley Temple – dead at 85. I had no idea she was still alive. — Gvac (@WMGvac) February 11, 2014 So shocked to read that Shirley Temple, the Academy award winning actress and former child star, was still alive. — John Johnsonson (@JohnJohnsonson) February 11, 2014   Shirley Temple was alive? — Mr Eugenides (@Mr_Eugenides) February 11, 2014 BREAKING NEWS: Shirley Temple was still alive until this week. — Hugh Armitage (@hugharmitage)

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron has set a precedent on smoking in cars with children

What next after Luciana Berger’s victory from the opposition benches on smoking in cars with children? Yesterday MPs were making all sorts of dire warnings in the House of Commons about what might happen next and supporters of the ban are dismissing them as trying to find a slippery slope when this is just a sensible public health issue. But a precedent has been set here of the Prime Minister initially saying he’s ‘nervous’ about what passing laws on what people do in a private space, then being forced to fold when legislation is thrust upon him by a member of the opposition. He made last night’s vote a free

Molly Guinness

Shirley Temple, 1928 – 2014, remembered in The Spectator

Shirley Temple has died in California at the age of 85. She was known as America’s little darling after she appeared in her first film at the age of three. Later in life she moved into politics, running for Congress and joining the diplomatic corps. Henry Kissinger, she said, was surprised she knew where Ghana was, but she became ambassador to Ghana and later to Czechoslovakia. As for her films, Graham Greene, reviewing Shirley Temple’s latest performance in August 1936, was rather shocked: Captain January, the latest Shirley Temple picture, is sentimental, a little depraved, with an appeal interestingly decadent… Shirley Temple acts and dances with immense vigour and assurance,

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Could smoking around children be made illegal in the near future?

The most remarkable thing about the ban on smoking in cars when children are present, which will pass the Commons later today, is how quickly minds have changed. There’ll be ministers and MPs voting for it today who were dismissing it as absurd nanny-statism just a week ago. What has happened is that MPs, particularly Tory and Lib Dem ones who have a genuinely free vote on the matter, have reflected on how far the state already restricts liberty when it comes to smoking. Once you have decided to ban smoking in pubs, where adults go voluntarily, and even private members clubs, then it is very hard to defend allowing

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband and the state

Ed Miliband is delivering the Hugo Young lecture tonight, and will focus on ‘people-powered public services’. All the briefing so far sets it out to be one of those ‘intellectual underpinnings’ speeches, rather than something that sets the world on fire (although Miliband does, to his credit, have a habit of pulling impressive speeches out of the bag when we’re not expecting it, or boring us all to tears when we’ve been told to expect something major). The central premise of it is set out in his Guardian article (and for more background, do read Rafael Behr’s piece on this): it’s about people having more power over their lives. He

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Memo to the Environment Agency: humans have needs too

It is not surprising that the Environment Agency (EA) have come under attack for the flooding in South West England. What is surprising is how long it took people to catch on to the fact that if anyone was to blame, it was the EA, not Owen Paterson.  As this week’s  leading article in The Spectator says,  ‘the unprecedented scale of this mess is not just due to nature. It is a disaster that has resulted from a deliberate policy followed by the Environment Agency since, 18 years ago, it was given overall responsibility for river management and flood defences throughout England.’ The agency decided – perhaps mistakenly – that wildlife

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The inherent strength of religion cannot mask the fragility of Christian belief in Britain

Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, has been something of a hero of mine since the publication of his Reason, Faith and Revolution, a thoroughgoing demolition of the Richard Dawkins critique of religion – on the sound basis that Prof Dawkins didn’t know what he was talking about – and his latest, Culture and the Death of God, promises to be pretty good too. listen to ‘Terry Eagleton on the Today programme’ on Audioboo

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why politicians secretly love the Environment Agency

‘I’ve kept my counsel up to now,’ said Chris Smith, loftily, when he appeared on the Today programme. Perhaps by the end of the interview, in which he managed to distance himself from previous policy pronouncements while defending his staff to the hilt, he wished he’d kept his counsel too. Those opening words suggested that the Environment Agency chief was about to unleash some terrible truth against the politicians taking aim at him, when in fact all he could tell listeners was that it was the Treasury’s fault… sort of. ‘I have to say I’ve kept my counsel up to now about issues like government rules about what the Environment

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Britain can’t use foreign aid money to help Somerset

Should Britain’s foreign aid budget be raided to help homes hit by the flood? There are plenty calls for this today, making the splash of the Daily Mail (below). A local MP, Ian Liddell-Grainger, says:- “We send money all over the world now we need to give people down here the hope that they will get what they need. We should divert some of it down here. We don’t have to divert it forever, but we need it now.” But this demand is based on a misunderstanding of how aid money is allocated. David Cameron’s commitment to double the aid budget until it is equivalent to 0.7 per cent of

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Tell us what you’d call a group of bankers

Spectator literary competition No. 2836 This week you are invited to come up with suitable collective nouns for the following: tweeters; hackers; hoodies; WAGs; environmentalists; bankers; MPs; contrarians. Entries to be emailed, please, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 19 February. The recent call for extracts from the adolescent diary of a well-known public figure, living or dead, pulled in the punters. The overall standard was impressive and it tough boiling the entry down to just six. Those who were narrowly squeezed out include Pervez Rizvi, P.C. Parrish, Mark Shelton and John Whitworth — and I liked Ralph Rochester’s Baden-Powell doing battle with his raging libido. The winners below take £25

Friday

Ed West Ed West

Why are feminists intolerant? It’s age, not sex

There has been a lot of comment about a recent Michelle Goldberg piece in the Nation on feminism in social media and how incredibly unpleasant feminists are to each other. That is not entirely surprising, in one sense. All political ideologies are wracked by internal struggle, especially those that reach an impasse in their goals. And Twitter is full of angry, self-righteous eejits. But there is also something uniquely intolerant about feminism in the online age. Partly it seems to be because it is much more dominated by one-upmanship over victimhood; the ground war of the sexes was won a long time ago, but what has followed is a deluge

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

The mutant meat industry

When it emerged that there was horsemeat in cheap burgers, some people thought it might spark a revolution in the British meat industry. Now that the public are more aware of the ins and outs of it all – the complicated and murky supply chains, the potential drug contamination, the images of badly-wrapped frozen meat – perhaps cheap meat would lose its attraction. But it doesn’t seem to have done so. Despite the stories about sales of game meat soaring and of people going back to basics and cooking from scratch, sales of processed meats such as sausages and burgers are still booming – both in the UK and abroad.