Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Causes and effects

When spending money is declared to be a good in itself, it is certain that much of it will be wasted. If that was not obvious already, it was proven by experiment when Gordon Brown announced 13 years ago that he wished to increase healthcare spending in Britain to the European average without much of a plan as to what he wanted to achieve with the money. There followed years of plenty for NHS staff, whose pay packets bulged. Patients found it harder to discern an improvement. Indeed, Brown’s great NHS spending splurge coincided with the Mid Staffs scandal. It should come as little surprise, then, that the same is

Dumpynose

2125: Nil desperandum

‘1/5/28’ (five words in total) is part of a quotation in ODQ and suggests how to find the common element in the remaining unclued lights (41 is in Collins). The author’s surname (6) will appear in the completed grid and must be shaded.   Across   9    Fling blue ring away (3) 11    Vase containing curious coin depicting mythical beast (7) 12    Fruit’s core in wooden dish (6) 13    Thrilling effect of flaky lemon tart (9) 14    Bacon sons eat sparingly (5) 16    Child cheers about seventy rabbits and songbirds (5) 19    I separate and remove lively lion always bounding (7) 21    Blue article with quality rolled gold (4) 24   

Dumpynose

Solution to 2122: Theme and Variations

The theme word is GRAVES: 19, 34 and 40 are famous cemeteries; 17, 28 and 39 are wines from SW France; 6D/12/16 is a work by Robert Graves.   First prize Michael Grocott, Loughborough, Leics Runners-up Alan Hook, York; Dr R.L.H. Barnard, Emsworth, Hants

Steerpike Steerpike

David Cameron and the D Street Band

The Prime Minister’s love in with President Obama is blossoming. Not only has he recruited Barack’s campaign manager, but he’s also become one of those annoying acquaintances who jumps on your music taste and tries to make it their own. Hip Dave has declared that Bruce Springsteen, who was a key Obama fundraiser, is his ‘guilty pleasure’. Apparently, he has to hide his enthusiasm from his wife, who, outrageously, ‘doesn’t like The Boss’. He said, ‘When Samantha is not around there is a little bit of Dancing in the Dark or Born in the USA’. Interestingly, Dave described Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, which was about the economic depression of the

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 – learning to switch off, is London the new Venice and Britain’s shale ambitions vs. the EU

Will holidays ever be truly relaxing again? In this week’s View from 22 podcast, Mary Wakefield and Freddy Gray discuss Clarissa Tan’s magazine cover piece on how technology has ruined our holidays. Has our love of the smartphone and tablet destroyed our ability to ‘switch off’? Do we need to control our impulse to use technology? And is this all a bad thing for our brains? Alec Marsh and our cartoon editor Michael Heath wonder if London is becoming the new Venice — bustling with tourists and barren streets of houses. Michael has been a Londoner since 1935. How has the capital changed since then? Have areas like Primrose Hill

Clarissa Tan

If you’re on your summer holiday, why are you reading this?

I’m in two minds about blogging this post. On the one hand, I’d really rather be on a sunny beach somewhere, reading a good old-fashioned book or staring at the blue horizon. On the other hand, I really, really want to publicise my Spectator cover story about summer and our addiction to technology (it’s fab!). Then I want monitor any comments it gets on this website, and post it on my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Each Like and retweet would give me a shot of satisfaction — ping! That’s where we’re all at, aren’t we? We now lead double lives, one in the real world and the other on the

Clarissa Tan

You’re never really on holiday with a smartphone

I was sitting on some rocks by the Cornish coast when a teenager swanned by on the sun-warmed boardwalk in front of me. The boy stood on the burning deck, preparing to dash across the sand, dive. Then his phone rang. ‘Luce! Yes, I’m at the sea… Was just going to plunge… Ran back to my mobile… Ha ha!… No, didn’t forget, will share that file on Google Docs… How’s France?… Awesome… Ha ha!’ Rage washed over me. I was angry because the boy had broken the sound of the waves with his silly ringtone and sillier chatter. I was angry because he had spoiled my own picturesque vision of

Lucy Vickery

Pretentious, moi?

In Competition 2809 you were invited to submit a letter liberally sprinkled with evidence of an imperfect grasp of foreign languages. In his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ George Orwell took a pop at the self-conscious use of foreign words and expressions: ‘Cul de sac, ancien régime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, Gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance … Bad writers … are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones…’ They may be annoying and pretentious, but the would-be cosmopolitan sophisticates that Orwell rails against provide rich comic potential, which you

Hugo Sabin

Notes on…The Peloponnese

Island-hopping is for backpackers and binge-drinkers; if you want a real Greek holiday, the place to go is Koroni, Messenia, on the southwestern tip of the Peloponnese. It’s an old town — founded by the Greeks before Christ, absorbed into Byzantium, then squabbled over by Ottomans and Venetians. Its geography is ancient history: Olympia to the north, Sparta across the bay, and Nestor’s Palace, Corinth, Mystras and the amphitheatre at Epidaurus all nearby. Yet Koroni feels somehow young and unbothered. Sit in one of the cafés or bars along the harbour, and it seems like a jolly seaside town from the 1970s or 1980s — unpretentious and touristic enough to

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Sorry – the Vikings really were that bad

Sometimes the really obvious take on history turns out to be the right one. For generations, we all assumed that the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans in Belgium at the outset of the first world war and enthusiastically reported in the British press were Allied propaganda. Yet recent research suggests that quite a lot of it was true. Well, the same goes for the Vikings. For almost half a century, the academic line on Vikings has been that our old idea of them as raping, pillaging bastards who’d sack a monastery as soon as look at it was a childishly transparent bit of propaganda, perpetuated by Christian monks who were

Alec Marsh

Welcome to Big Venice: How London became a tourist-trap city

Queuing to gain admittance to the pavement of Westminster Bridge on a ferociously hot Sunday afternoon recently, I found myself trapped. Pinioned by a road to one side, a stall selling models of Big Ben and snow-dome Buckingham Palaces to the other, and bordered by the great bronze statue of Boudicca, I was caught in a corralled mass of tourists and going nowhere fast. It occurred to me that the last time I experienced such a peculiar blend of urban misery was in Venice. This might have been the Rialto in August. But it wasn’t the Grand Canal that we were crossing, it was the Thames, and it started me

Andrew Taylor

Holy Orders, by Benjamin Black – review

It’s always a little disconcerting for the rest of us when literary novelists turn to crime. Have they become different writers? John Banville, winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize with The Sea, has published seven crime thrillers. He writes as Benjamin Black. He certainly looks different — Black has a matching author photo that shows a sinister figure resembling a melancholy Mafia hitman with half his face in shadow. Quirke, Black’s series protagonist, is a Dublin pathologist in the 1950s, not that there’s a great deal of medical detail in the novels. He refers to himself as ‘a consultant to the dead’ and, like Colin Dexter’s Morse, is known

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Cruddas’s revenge

Roll up, roll up, Cameron-bashers everywhere. Peter Cruddas is planning to blow some of the £180,000 he won in libel damages against the Sunday Times with a ‘Victory Party’ at his City offices on 17 September. Cruddas was falsely accused of charging donors for access to Number 10, and he’s somewhat piqued at having got naff-all help from Dave when the story broke. This is a ‘thank you for standing by me party’ and it promises to feature in the book that Cruddas is writing about his bust-up with Downing St. The invitation warns: ‘You might be asked some questions by a ghost writer who will be in the audience.

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Is the RSPCA no longer an animal welfare charity?

In January of this year, Melissa Kite wrote our cover story about how the RSPCA has morphed from being an animal welfare charity into an animal rights group.  She wrote of the ‘culture of fear at their headquarters’, and explained ‘how deeply suspicious some animal experts have become of this once-respected body’. Since then, the problems have only worsened. In July it was revealed that the charity’s Chief Executive, Gavin Grant, was paid ‘between £150,000 and £160,000’ a year – at least £30,000 more than his predecessor.  Last week it was found that the charity has access to the Police National Computer, allowing it to investigate any suspect, witness or defendant’s criminal record. One RSPCA whistleblower –

Jerry Hayes

Can we have an honest debate about sex crimes?

It really is time that we had an honest debate about sex crimes. But in the present climate I wonder if it is possible. Over the next few days there will be howls of rage from women’s groups about comments by a prosecutor that a thirteen year old girl’s behaviour was sexually ‘predatory’. I am not going to make the mistake of commenting on a case when the only information I have are clips from the newspapers. So let me deal with the generality. Is it ever appropriate to use such words in a court case involving rape or sexual assault? The common sense answer must be ‘yes’. I have been

David Blackburn

Interest rates set to stay low for the foreseeable future

Mark Carney made his mark this morning. Moments ago, he opened his inflation report and issued his ‘forward guidance’, which is designed to make the markets aware of his long-term plans for interest rates. This is important because, although there are signs of life in the British economy (and Carney was cautious about them), inflation remains above the Bank of England’s target, the base interest rate remains rooted to the floor and unemployment remains high at around 8 per cent. There is also the question of Britain’s mounting debts, the answer to which will largely depend on how the bond markets react to this and other announcements. And then there is

Tuesday

The Spectator

Spectator event: An evening with Simon Schama on the history of the Jews

There was a row earlier today when a leading figure in the EDL linked (inadvertently, he says) to a website of anti-Semitic sympathies. It is dispiriting that, more often than not, Judaism and Jewish people only receive mainstream media coverage when there is a public spat about anti-Semitism, for there is so much more to their history than persecution. As it happens, Simon Schama will be telling this, for want of a better phrase, “alternative history” in a BBC TV series this autumn. But readers of the Spectator don’t have to wait for the telly or the DVD because Schama will be giving us an exclusive talk at Cadogan Hall