Society

Thursday

Stuart Etherington

The lobbying bill’s sloppy wording risks silencing charities and community groups

The government’s lobbying bill is intended to promote transparency and enhance the UK’s political integrity. It is meant to bring an end to underhand tactics by clearly setting out what organisations can and cannot do to support political parties, including how much they can spend. These are laudable aims which we understand and support. But the government has been forced to defend a piece of hurried legislation so broad that the likelihood is it will restrict the ability of charities and community groups to speak up on matters of public interest. Under the sloppy wording of the proposed legislation, charities are at risk of being silenced. On Tuesday evening, the law inched closer to

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22: Obama’s zigzagging path to war and Cameron’s tiff with his MPs

What is behind Barack Obama’s wobbly approach to Syria? In the latest View from 22 podcast, former US State department official Colleen Graffy and the Spectator’s Douglas Murray discuss Obama’s latest manoeuvres in Washington and whether the American people still have an appetite for going to war with Syria.  What will happen when the issue hits Congress next week? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also discuss how the developing Syria situation has affected the political landscape in Westminster. Are Conservatives feeling disgruntled with their party leadership over the disastrous vote? What can we expect to see from the main parties in the next few weeks before party conference season? Have Labour regained

Jane Kelly

Hospital food isn’t a joke. It’s a scandal

One of the patients I see regularly as a voluntary hospital visitor, who has been in hospital for weeks, seems to be getting better. Still skeletally thin, he is now sitting up and complaining. His problem is that he longs for a jacket potato with just butter. He hates beans. But he might as well ask for gravadlax and dill. On the hospital menu, baked potatoes only come with baked beans. I asked one of the Thai ladies who deliver the food if he could possibly have a plain spud. ‘Not possible,’ she said, ‘all with beans.’ She said she would go and ask someone, but who that might be

Nicholas Farrell

Italians for Maggie

Now that the forces of evil have transformed Silvio Berlusconi into a condemned man, there remains just one person on the planet who can save Italy: Roger Scruton. If the famous philosopher were just to come to Italy to deliver a single speech, his very words would be enough to set in motion la rivoluzione. That at least is the view of the Circolo Culturale Margaret Thatcher, a group whose mission it is to establish at long last, after all those centuries lived without one, a proper Anglo-Saxon Tory party in Italy. So far it has failed, but its members, like all true believers, have not lost their faith. A

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Seamus Heaney’s poems are for Protestants too

The one and only time I met Seamus Heaney, in 2007, he was making tea in the kitchen of his Dublin home when he asked — more modestly regretful than coy — ‘Did you have to do the poems at school?’ I grew up in Belfast, and certainly we had to do the poems at school. Even in the early 1980s, in a disputatious city that was frequently contemptuous of life but rarely of poetry, it was Heaney whose reputation already seemed cast in bronze. His lines on Northern Ireland defined us internationally, like it or not: it was clear that we had somehow grown someone big, a poetic prize

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What are we supposed to say when a grooming ring comes to light?

It is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times. According to that increasingly gobby conduit of right-on morality, the NSPCC, girls these days feel compelled to act like porn stars in order to ingratiate themselves with boys. I am not sure quite what, in day to day life, this involves. I only know that they made no similar attempts during my adolescence, or if they did I didn’t notice. I vaguely recall one young lady in my school class telling me, when I was 14, that she had engaged in sexual intercourse the previous night with a boy from a neighbouring town. ‘What was it

Christopher Caldwell

Obama knows that America has lost its appetite for war

It was to Fort Belvoir that President Barack Obama repaired on Saturday, minutes after he announced that attacks by the Syrian government on a rebel stronghold in Damascus constituted ‘an assault on human dignity’ and a ‘serious threat to our national security.’ By using what the US government says was sarin gas, Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad crossed a ‘red line’ that Mr Obama had laid down a year before. The President has asked Congress to authorise an attack on Syria as soon as legislators return on 9 September. Fort Belvoir is home to the US army’s 29th Light Infantry Division. More to the point, it is the site of a terrific 18-hole

Nigel Lawson

Sport: Nigel Lawson on the Ashes

Those of us who watched the last day of the final Ashes Test of the present series enjoyed a rare and unexpected treat — and I write as one who has been a devoted cricket follower for more than 70 years: the first first-class match I ever saw was the Royal Navy playing the Army at Lords in 1942. There has, however, been much controversy over the anti-climactic ending, when the umpires decided to call it a day, on grounds of bad light, with England on the brink of victory. Much has been said about how this sort of disappointment must be avoided in future. In fact, the remedy is

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Notes on…Sicily

It could be, in Sicily, there comes a time when you’ve had your fill of seaside calamari and cheap white wine. The sheer thrill of lying on a beach without goose-bumps never really fades, but by day four you may need a break from all the nakedness: Italians blackening in rows like sausages, or Brits, more lumpen, clumped in ones and twos, turning pink. If you can bring yourself to turn your back on the Med, it’s well worth it. From Palermo, take the coastal road, then turn right, inland on the A19 towards Catania. Or drive south on the world’s most surprising motorway, which leaps right over Monreale and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Blue Stockings defames women in order to defame men; Thark succeeds thanks to a trio of great perfomances

More un-Shakespearean drama at London’s leading Shakespeare venue. The Globe has pushed the Bard off stage to make way for Blue Stockings, by Jessica Swale, which portrays the lives of female students at Girton College, Cambridge, in the 1890s. The script, which veers between weepy romcom and manipulative satire, sets out to elicit a collective gasp of outrage at the sexist piggery of the last century but one. To achieve this Swale has to rely on several fabrications. First, that intelligent women are rare. (Really?) Second, that men seldom meet intelligent women. (Surely they mingle all the time.) Third, that men find intelligent women threatening, tricky and outlandish. (In fact,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

What Vodafone should do with its huge windfall: invest it in the next Vodafone

Vodafone, which has just collected an £84 billion windfall from the sale of its 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless of the US, is either a hero or an anti-hero of British capitalism, according to taste. To me, the world’s second-largest mobile phone business is heroic because it achieved that position from a standing start just 30 years ago, when poker-playing Ernie Harrison, chief executive of a military radio manufacturer called Racal, bet everything he had on the future of mobile telephony. At a time when other electronics companies thought it too uncertain a prospect to bother trying to compete against the monopolistic British Telecom, Harrison and his colleague

Lucy Vickery

Poetic pitch

In Competition 2813 you were invited to submit an application in verse, from the poet of your choice, for the position of poet laureate. There were robust bids from poets who were passed over for the laureateship on account of their questionable politics — Pope, for example, and Milton — as well as from those that made the grade: Betjeman, Hughes, Wordsworth and Nahum Tate all threw their hat in the ring. Other eloquent pleas came from McGonagall, who would surely have challenged Alfred Austin for the crown of worst rhymester, Ogden Nash and Dylan Thomas. Mae Scanlan, Gerard Benson, Mike Morrison, Sylvia Fairley and Paul Evans were unlucky losers.

George Van Den Bergh

Another case for course correction

Ever since it became a required topic in 2002, citizenship has crept into lessons where it doesn’t belong. Languages are one of the casualties. ‘What do you think about the dangers of smoking?’ ‘Do you have problems with pollution in your local area?’ And my favourite — a suggested question for French GCSE: ‘What is the best thing that has happened to you as a homeless person?’ All significant problems, ça va sans dire. But is a French lesson really the best forum for discussing them? I now run a website (www.thisislanguage.com) that hosts authentic language videos for GCSE students. Our mission is to teach young people to speak foreign

Sarah Reynolds

170 open days in one hall

‘Finding the right school for my child is the most important decision I will make as a parent, a major emotional investment as well as a financial one,’ says David Wellesley Wesley, director of the Independent Schools Show. ‘School selection is no longer a question of which old school tie your father wore but rather which school best suits the child’s disposition, needs and skills.’ Independent schools have faced many difficulties in recent decades — the Lloyd’s crash, recessions, political opposition, rising costs and fees and so on. Some schools survived, others didn’t. But the sector as a whole has emerged stronger than ever. Today, with ever more international interest

The Spectator

Barometer | 5 September 2013

Market price Independent schooling versus private tutoring: which is the biggest market? Some 579,700 pupils are educated at independent schools, for an average annual fee of £13,788, making for a total market of £7.99 billion. Based on a 35-hour week and a 40-week academic year, parents are paying an average of £9.80 per hour. A survey by tutor firm EdPlace found that 28 per cent of parents employ private tutors for at least one child. They pay an average of £2,758 per year, making for a total market worth £6 billion. The average charge is £22 per hour. Independents abroad What percentage of children attend independent schools in the following

James Delingpole James Delingpole

James Delingpole discovers he’s an old-fashioned disciplinarian

Diving with great white sharks, speeding round the track at Brands Hatch with the world sidecar racing champion, being eaten alive in an interview with Lou Reed… though I’ve done lots of exciting things in the course of my life as a journalist, none has come even close to matching the visceral thrill of the four days I spent earlier this year as a teacher at my old school, Malvern College. I don’t mean that the pupils (or whatever grisly term you’re supposed to call them these days: students? clients? learning co-travellers?) were in any way frightening or unnecessarily difficult. Nor that I found the experience remotely traumatic. I’m merely

Sebastian Payne

The role of technology is changing in classrooms – and independent schools are leading the way

Ah, happy memories of the 1990s classroom. The flicker of the CRT screen; the interactive whiteboard; the screeching from the dial-up internet modem; the frantic searching for the Encyclopedia Britannica CD-Rom. These images are now as archaic as the blackboard and the slide rule. Gone are the boxy computers under a dust sheet in the corner. They’ve been replaced by hordes of gadgets, now mostly in the hands of the pupils. Walking into a classroom today is like visiting an Apple Store. The role of technology in schools has evolved in three phases. It all began in the 1980s with the arrival of the BBC Micro and the affordable personal

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

There is nothing quite like the prep-school play

Letter home from prep-school boy, c. 1949: ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy, last night was the school play. It was Hamlet. A lot of the parents had seen it before, but they laughed all the same.’ Guffaws from the audience at lines that are not supposed to be funny; total absence of laughter at lines that are: these are what actors and directors dread. The world of prep-school drama has come a long way since 1949. The three-hour Shakespeare tragedy marathon has generally been ditched in favour of swiftness and inclusivity. Under an hour is the preferred length, and it is not done to have lengthy black-outs while scenery is changed.

Mark Palmer

Friends made at prep school – and kept for life – are worth paying for

Some years ago (well, nearly ten if you must know), I gave a dinner to mark my undistinguished half-century. Nothing grand — but a convivial gathering of ten men and ten women in the basement of a restaurant where several of us used to hang out in loon pants in the early 1970s. Looking down the table, I realised that five out of the ten men had been at preparatory school with me. This was a good feeling but not one that struck me as unusual. I loved Sunningdale — although when I think about those freezing lavatories, those sagging beds, those terrifyingly stern rebukes from Pauline the matron, those

Molly Guinness

The best teachers make you fall in love with a subject

My brother’s Classics teacher Mr Maynard had a pet rock called Lithos (Greek for stone); his teaching methods included ‘subliminal learning’ sessions, during which he’d walk around the room conjugating verbs in a soft voice while everyone else suppressed giggles. He was also fond of a physical demonstration, hurling himself across the room with no warning when describing how Aegeus had thrown himself into the sea. As a result, most of his class at school chose Latin or Greek for A-level. Another of my brothers is surprisingly knowledgeable about plant virology because he was taught by a man who threw pot plants at people when they weren’t listening and who