Society

Thursday

Doc

2141: Megacant

The unclued lights (all but two of two words) are of a kind, listed in Chambers 2011. Elsewhere, ignore one accent.   Across   1    Race to leave car in protected area (12, two words) 10    Regular car rides to Irish peninsula (4) 12    Able to include one opposing support (10) 14    Everything’s satisfactory returning the acacia (3) 17    Pillar of Hercules unknown in Gaelic Scotland, on reflection (5) 18    Reversion to type in songbird, head to tail (7) 22    Phoenician goddess is with husband, 28 (6) 24    Bird in river and lough (5) 29    Diminutive confection without number, it may

Doc

to 2138: Hundred centimes

The unclued Across lights are words abbreviated by C (= 100) and the unclued Down lights are abbreviated by c (= centimes).   First prize Mrs P. Bealby, Stockton-on-Tees Runners-up Jacqui Sohn, Great Yarmouth, J. Murray, Exmouth

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Net migration is bogus. Gross migration is what affects communities

Just over half a million people migrated to the UK in the year to June. And half a million the year before – actually, it was 517,000, but let’s not quibble. A million, then, in two years…that’s quite something. But you wouldn’t have known from the news about the new immigration stats from the Home Office, which focussed instead on a rise in net migration to 182,000 (ie the number of people arriving, less the number of Brits leaving). Now, for all the noise about Bulgarians and Romanians coming to Britain, about half the new immigrants were from outside the EU – 242,000, down from 282,000 the previous year. You’d never think

Ben Lazarus Ben Lazarus

Plain packaging of cigarettes is based on pseudoscience and speculation

It has been a bad week for smokers. In yet another skirmish in the war against the vice, it was announced late last night that the British government is pressing ahead with Soviet-style plain packaging of cigarettes, despite Cameron’s decision to shelve the policy in July. Australia is the only country currently with plain packaging, after enacting it in December 2012. The results have been less than impressive. Indeed, as I wrote about earlier this month for the Telegraph , the accountancy firm KPMG released a report on 4 November, which highlighted how the Australian government has lost $1 billion Australian dollars in the 12 months ended in June, as a

Ed West Ed West

Ex-Muslims are living the British dream – Britain should support them

There was an excellent Radio 4 documentary on yesterday in which Sarfraz Manzoor interviewed a group of people you don’t hear much about – ex-Muslims. Like all good radio documentaries, it left me wanting to know more about the individuals involved, feeling more confused about the world, and with mixed feelings too. On the one hand I can understand that Dover Beach sadness of people falling away from religion, and why the parents of those interviewed would feel devastated by that loss. On the other hand, the ex-Muslims are right. They’re right to question the beliefs they were brought up with, and they’re right to see the inconsistencies and those

Sebastian Payne

The Spectator podcast: ‘You can’t say that’, Osborne’s challenge and Obama’s struggle

Are there truths in modern Britain we can’t speak about? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Spectator columnist Rod Liddle discusses his cover feature on why we  are so reluctant to talk about certain topics. Was Dominic Grieve right to apologise for his comments last week? Is this a case of political correctness getting worse? And is it too late to do anything about it? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also look at George Osborne’s preparations for the 2013 Autumn Statement. According to James’ column, he was recently caught filming Bono and Bob Gedolf at a party  — what does this say about the man? What can we expect to see from the Autumn

Theodore Dalrymple

Should we be threatening cocaine addicts with execution?

Mao Tse-tung was by far the greatest therapist of drug addiction in world history. He threatened to execute opium addicts if they didn’t give up. Threats to murder were about the only utterances of Mao’s that could be believed, and 20 million addicts duly gave up. I hope you don’t think that I am advocating Mao’s methods, but it does seem to me that his success tells us something very important about addiction. Mao didn’t say, nor would it have made sense for him to say, I will execute anyone who suffers from hypothyroidism, say, or rheumatoid arthritis; and therefore there must be a category difference between illness and addiction.

Tri Woodall

Trinny Woodall: how I became a cocaine addict — and how I beat it

I’m Trinny, I’m an alcoholic and I’m an addict. When asked whether addiction is a disease, I didn’t have to think twice. Knowing that I have a disease is how I manage to have a healthy life today. All I can tell you about addiction is my experience. I grew up in a very normal home. Both my grandfather who was an alcoholic and an uncle who was alcoholic died of this illness. When I went to my first rehab I kept wondering: why I am an addict? They told me: ‘Don’t be concerned with why you have developed this disease. It’s in you, you have it, and you need

The Spectator

Cure addiction the Mao Tse-tung way

Yes Trinny Woodall I’m Trinny, I’m an alcoholic and I’m an addict. When asked whether addiction is a disease, I didn’t have to think twice. Knowing that I have a disease is how I manage to have a healthy life today. All I can tell you about addiction is my experience. I grew up in a very normal home. Both my grandfather who was an alcoholic and an uncle who was alcoholic died of this illness. When I went to my first rehab I kept wondering: why I am an addict? They told me: ‘Don’t be concerned with why you have developed this disease. It’s in you, you have it,

Gerald Warner

David Cameron is betraying Scotland’s Unionists

With trademark grandiosity, Alex Salmond unveiled his white paper on independence this week as if he had retrieved it from the top of Mount Sinai. ‘This is the most comprehensive blueprint for an independent country ever published,’ proclaimed the First Minister. It was yet another reminder of an inexorable law of politics: the larger the document, the weaker the content. The American declaration of independence managed to fit on a page. The SNP’s plan for a separate Scotland is so bald that it needs to conceal its nothingness with 650 pages of flannel. You can look in vain in its pages for any sign of any policy that will make

Roger Alton Roger Alton

As England’s cricketers wobble, the rugby team are finally getting it together

My friend Miles was bowling in a festival of wandering cricket clubs in Oxford the other day. First wicket down and in walked an immaculately turned out Japanese gentleman. As he took guard, he turned to the slips and said, ‘I’m the best batsman in Japan.’ Miles’s first ball he edged to the keeper, and tucking his bat under his arm he said to the slips again, ‘But I’m also the only batsman in Japan.’ Ah, cricket, lovely cricket. It’s a long way from the Ashes and Jonathan Trott collapsing from unspecified stress issues or Michael Clarke snarling at England’s No. 11 batsman, Jimmy Anderson for heaven’s sake, to ‘get

The Spectator

The 2013 Michael Heath Award for cartooning — shortlist (part 2)

Nine cartoonists are shortlisted for the first ever Michael Heath Award for cartooning. The theme of the contest, sponsored by John Lobb, is ‘Man in Motion’. Work by four of the artists was printed in last week’s issue; four more are below. The winner will be published next week. Thanks to all who entered — and congratulations to those shortlisted. Sponsored by      

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: The truths you can’t tell in today’s Britain

My memory gets addled sometimes, so maybe I’m wrong about this. But didn’t it used to be the case that when politicians were caught out lying, they made some sort of shame-faced apology to the nation and begged for our forgiveness? I’m sure that was it, you know. So if I’m right, to judge by the case of our Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, things have turned precisely 180 degrees. Mr Grieve has just offered a full and unqualified apology for having told the truth. I thought that politicians were meant to do that — tell the truth? And what an apology. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Mr Grieve

Lucy Vickery

Picture this | 28 November 2013

In Competition 2825 you were invited to supply a poem for a well-known painting of your choice. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the inspiration behind this challenge. His sonnet ‘Found’ was written in 1881 as a companion to an unfinished oil painting of the same title on the theme of prostitution, which is now in the Delaware Museum. Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite brethren featured strongly in the entry. Melanie Branton’s companion piece to ‘Ophelia’, a lament from a long-suffering Lizzie Siddal, made me smile. Rob Stuart, Sylvia Fairley, Adrian Fry, Philip Wilson and Chris O’Carroll were also strong contenders but narrowly missed joining the prizewinners below, who take £25

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris: The secret Australia – and why I love it

Nations seek their souls in the strangest places. We English, for instance, have illustrated ourselves to the world and to ourselves with a stark choice between Cool Britannia and Ye Olde Tea Shoppe. When not hawking to tourists in London those T-shirts scrawled with obscenities, we picture ourselves in country lanes and rose-covered thatched cottages. A few of us actually seek out the vestiges of that countryside world and live a pretend-rural life there; but most Spectator readers would be bored to tears after ten minutes of Morris dancing; and a fortnight of hobnobbing over a honeysuckled garden fence with a rosy-cheeked jam-maker who had never heard of the Today

Digby Warde-Aldam

Stuck for Christmas presents? Hit the museums

The plan to do last year’s Christmas shop at Peter Jones on 23 December was doomed from its sorry inception. I was soaked by the time I got there, my plimsolls waterlogged, kept going only by my expectation of a quiet and civilised department store, rammed to the skylights with perfect presents. Instead, I found myself spearing a path through the seething, teeming, hostile masses with my sodden umbrella, and, worse — finding its  stock all but decimated. The claustrophobia that ripped through me was so violent that I was forced to run to the toilets to hide — and even then I had to queue. I shivered in the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Lord Bamford on why JCB is staying independent

‘If I can’t see a factory from up here,’ I mutter to myself, throwing the car round an uphill bend of the B5032 south of Ashbourne, ‘I must be in the wrong county.’ But no, I’m not lost; there below me is a long pale slab of a building that announces itself as JCB World Headquarters — adding, on a giant polythene wrap, ‘Celebrating 1,000,000 Machines May 2013’. Equidistant between the Rolls-Royce aero-engine works at Derby and the potteries of Stoke-on-Trent, what I’m looking at is the beating heart of what’s left of industrial England. I’m here for lunch with the man whose fiefdom it is, the recently ennobled Lord

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Cui Bono? George Osborne’s video shame

Poor, dear, awkward George Osborne. Just when he seems to be doing things right — the economy, for instance — he gets something wrong. Very wrong. In The Spectator this week, James Forsyth reveals that, at Matthew Freud’s now notorious 50th birthday bash, when Bono and Bob Geldof sang a duet, Osborne insisted on whipping out his mobile telephone and filming the performance. Just what the Chancellor was doing there is one question. But if this were a 15- year-old and not, er, the Chancellor, his Bono-worship might be endearing. Perhaps the proper response is one of pity. But politicos are not a forgiving bunch. As James puts it, Osborne’s “act of