Society

Thursday

Simon Hoggart

October Mini-Bar

This month’s mini-bar is from the estimable Yapp Bros, who specialise in fossicking out first-rate wines, often from small vineyards, in the Loire and the Rhône. These are subtle and sophisticated bottles — serious wines some might say — which you will not find in supermarkets. Nor offered by those allegedly value firms that sell vast quantities of mediocre booze at knockdown prices. If you see a wine advertised at £4.95 a bottle, reduced from £7.50, believe me you’ll be lucky if it’s even worth £4.95. And Yapp’s have kindly knocked £1 a bottle off every selection which, with free delivery, makes for a handsome saving. St Pourçain is in the geographical

Roger Franklin

Note to the opposition: Tony Abbott is not to blame for the bushfires

 Australia One of the odd things about bushfires as we know them in Australia is the unlikely truces declared between species normally very keen to inject toxins or tear out each other’s throats. When the state of Victoria burnt and 173 people died in 2009, one young woman from the picturesque hamlet of Marysville found shelter in a large drainage pipe, where she was soon joined by a dog, a tiger snake and a wombat. The foursome endured each other’s company without protest as all but a handful of homes in a town of 400 souls was turned to ash, along with 32 of its citizens. At one point, the

Christopher Booker

Botswana is persecuting its Kalahari bushmen — and we had a role in it

For 17 years I have been reporting on one of the most haunting tragedies of our modern world — the ruthless persecution of the last survivors of the original inhabitants of southern Africa, the bushmen, by a policy seemingly designed to wipe them from the earth. Those responsible are not wicked white colonialists but the government of Botswana, which, thanks to its vast diamond reserves, is per capita the richest country in Africa. We in Britain, however, should take a special interest in this story because through most of that time our Foreign Office has given full support to the policy which created this tragedy, in breach of a solemn

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: What do you call travellers when they are no longer travelling? 

How should we describe the people who allegedly abducted that little girl in Greece, after a neighbour claimed that they actually paid £850 for her to a passing Bulgarian? It is a minefield we are entering now, having asked this question. Clearly the terms which hitherto some of us may have employed, not always affectionately — pikey, gyppo, tinker — are likely to get you into trouble with the police these days. Probably more trouble than if you, for example, dug up the road to remove a few hundred yards of fibre optic cable, or declined year upon year to pay your taxes. So those three are out. Gypsy, we

Michael Hanlon

There’s a global morality gap — and it’s getting wider

First World, Third World, East, West, North and South; every few years economists come up with yet another supposedly more acceptable way of slicing humanity into manageable chunks. Mostly these great divides are riven by wealth; sometimes (RIP Second World) by ideology. But I think it’s time to name a new divide, a more fundamental, more puzzling one — a split between worlds that will define the 21st century much as the Iron Curtain defined the 20th. I am talking about the morality gap. It is now clear, though not much talked about, that humanity, all 7.1 billion of us, tends to fall into one of two distinct camps. On

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Hugo Rifkind: What is Facebook? 

I’d never noticed that there aren’t any tits on Facebook. The place always seems brimming with right tits to me. But no. According to this week’s mumbling bien-pensant scandal, the world’s largest social network has decided to allow newsy videos of murder and beheading and all the rest, but still not tits, and this is an outrage. Strangely enough, it’s mainly regarded as an outrage by the sort of people who are normally to be found slamming publications such as men’s mags and the Sun because they minimise the proper news and have tits all over the place. Honestly. Anybody would think these people just like to be cross, or

Arthur Laffer

Arthur Laffer: cuts succeeded where stimulus failed

 Nashville, TN All the drama coming out of Washington in the last few weeks has obscured some seriously good news: federal government spending is falling. And not at a trickle: think the White Cliffs of Dover. Not since the economic boom following 1945 have Americans seen such a rapid decline in the government’s claim on the nation’s resources — falling by a welcome $94 billion over two years. You need to go back to the end of the Korean war to find a time when US government spending has actually declined over two years. If Republicans in the House stick to the sequester and future caps already built into current

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer: The BBC should replace Robert Peston with Grayson Perry

Prediction, as Mervyn King once observed, is ‘a stab in the dark’. Who can say with confidence where the wholesale price of electricity will be in ten years’ time, let alone 45 years hence at the end of the contract struck by Energy Secretary Ed Davey with EDF of France for the building of the £16 billion Hinkley Point nuclear station? We can be pretty sure the price will be a lot higher than today’s and it’s not mad to think it might have doubled by 2023, which is the starting assumption of the EDF deal. David Cameron might be right that energy costs will be ‘lower than they might

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

My £30k alternative to HS2

Someone in New York told me this story. I admit that I didn’t believe it when I first heard it. But a little online research seems to confirm that it is true. It concerns a group of people who had bought early versions of the Tesla Model S, a $90,000 high-performance electric car much loved by Silicon Valley’s rich set. The earlier versions of these cars behaved slightly differently from a standard petrol vehicle. In particular there was no ‘creep’. For the benefit of European readers irrationally wedded to the stick shift, I should explain that ‘creep’ is a feature of almost all cars with automatic transmission. It means that

Stephen Walsh

Was Bach as boring as this picture suggests?

What, one wonders, will John Eliot Gardiner be chiefly remembered for? Perhaps, by many who have worked with him, for his notorious rudeness to performers and colleagues. At one point in his marvellous new book on Bach he refers to the master ‘losing his rag with musicians’ (as a corrective to the ‘Godlike image’ of Bach that posterity has tended to prefer), and one senses a not entirely veiled sympathy: one struggling director excusing another, admittedly greater, but in that respect at least no different. For while Gardiner doesn’t, as far as I know, compose, he has been and remains beyond question one of the most influential performing musicians of

Lucy Vickery

Postscript

In Competition 2820 you were invited to supply a postscript to any well-known novel.   This challenge was suggested by a reader who drew my attention to Barbara Hardy’s neo-Victorian gem Dorothea’s Daughter and Other Nineteenth Century Postscripts, which includes afterwords to Little Dorrit and Mansfield Park. I hoped it might appeal to anyone who has ever wondered whether Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy lived happily ever after.   Peter Ridley, Josephine Boyle, Rob Stuart and Adrian Fry were strong runners-up. The winners pocket £25 each and this week’s top dog is D.A. Prince, who takes £30. Ralph winced as the man, porphory-faced and fleshy, seized his hand. ‘Jack,’ he said.

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The Lady lives on

Margaret Thatcher’s memory may be fading a little in England, but at least it still burns bright in Stanley. Here’s a photo taken in a newsagent in the Falklands capital just this afternoon, where, six months after her death, copies of The Spectator’s commemorative issue are still selling well. It does her — and us — proud.

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Will Prince George work his magic on the Church of England?

Well, Prince George has already done his bit for the Church of England. Simply by getting baptised he will bolster a sacrament that pretty well defines Christianity and is, like the state church which he may yet be head of (assuming disestablishment never happens), in sharp decline. In 1950, nearly 70 per cent of the population was baptised into the CofE, with most of the remainder christened into other denominations; in 2010 it was fewer than 20 per cent, and falling. Perhaps Kate Middleton can do for baptism what she does for Reiss dresses – bring it back into fashion. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave a splendid little

Steerpike Steerpike

Sir Peter Hendy’s complaints procedure

All London bus users are equal, but some are more equal than others. Especially if your name is Sir Peter Hendy. On his way to a meeting at the Houses of Parliament today, Mr Steerpike hears that Transport for London’s ‘Commissioner’ was so incensed that a bus had shut its doors and driven off before he could board that he spent the rest of his journey furiously reporting this outrage. From the comfort of a black cab. ‘What a little bastard grass’ my cabbie source said, pointing out Hendy went to great lengths to identify exactly which driver had upset him and demanding consequences. ‘Work at TfL do you?’ the taxi driver

Clarissa Tan

View From 22 podcast special: Is Twitter killing travel writing?

Do you tweet when you travel? We bet you do, that you post your photos and observations as you visit new places — if not on Twitter, then on Facebook, Instagram, tumblr, etc. That’s great, but what’s to become of more conventional forms or writing, especially travel writing? And even if there are some wonderful authors out there, will they find readers with attention spans stretching longer than 140 characters? Our View From 22 special is about how social media is changing the nature of travel and travel writing. We caught up with Gary Arndt, who’s amassed 125,000 Twitter followers on @EverywhereTrip, as he travels around the world. It was

Carola Binney Carola Binney

Give me a tutorial over a lecture any day

I’ve been at university for 17 days, and yesterday had my fifth contact hour: my second tutorial. ‘Tutes’ are what an Oxford education is all about. They’re the reason any self-respecting applicant will give when asked why they’re putting themselves through a three-month ordeal of entrance tests; essay samples; interviews, and an agonising, Christmas-ruining wait. Of course we weren’t swayed by the architecture, the prestige or the challenge: what we really wanted, my sixth-form self often insisted, was the chance to be ‘taught by the people who write the textbooks’. It’s now dawning on me that we’re not really ‘taught’ at all — not in the conventional sense. What we’ve

Ed West Ed West

Blonde children and Roma: when the two great hysterias of our age clash

The media seem to be in a pickle over the removal of a blonde girl from a Roma family in Dublin, which followed the arrest of a couple in Athens who had a suspiciously Nordic-looking child with them. It’s a fascinating story because for the first time I can remember the two great hysterias of our age have finally clashed – racism and child-snatching, the Guardian’s obsession versus the Sun’s. It has also pitted the almost immovable object of media taboo against the unstoppable force of the human-interest story. The highbrow media maintains a sort of code of decency about reporting the Roma, so that you will never read anywhere

Euan McColm

Whose fault is the Grangemouth closure?

Edinburgh The instinct to blame antagonistic – and incompetent – trade union officials for the devastating news that Ineos is to close its petrochemical plant in Grangemouth is understandable. After all, the company has been warning for some time of losses at the complex of £10 million a month. These figures demanded action to stem the financial haemorrhage. And, in those circumstances, Unite’s refusal to accept new conditions for its members was always a risky strategy. It was clear last week – when Ineos temporarily closed down its entire Grangemouth complex, where it employs 1,600 people in the petrochemical plant and adjacent oil refinery – that the company was in

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why Mike Penning can afford to be so aggressive about the benefit cap

What a combative interviewee Mike Penning made on the Today programme. The new work and pensions minister clearly felt that given the benefit cap is the most popular policy pollsters have touched in a long while (73% support the cap in principle), he could take the presenters and the Chartered Institute of Housing, which criticises the policy in a report today, to task in the most direct way possible. ‘I’m really disappointed,’ he said, adding that the work was ‘fundamentally flawed’ and scolding the BBC for even reporting it: ‘I’m really disappointed with the work that’s been done there because it’s fundamentally flawed, and actually disappointed again with the BBC’s

John O'Neill

Grangemouth – six things you need to know

1. Why have I heard of Grangemouth before? Its oil refinery is of huge strategic importance, providing 80pc of Scotland’s fuel and large chunks of England’s too. That’s why a 2008 strike at the site hit the news: it led to panic-buying of petrol in Scotland. The plant’s owners had, then, put forward proposals to phase in a contributory pension scheme for new workers, leading to the workers walking out for two days. Pension liabilities is the big problem (below). 2. What’s closing? At the Grangemouth site there’s an oil refinery – one of seven in the UK – that processes oil from fields in the North Sea. There’s also