Society

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

When 50,000 Irishmen gathered to commemorate the First World War

As I wrote last week, I had not thought commemorating the centenary of the First World War need be a matter of controversy. But one of the reasons why it is worth doing – and worth doing properly and on a large scale – is that the First World War is complicated. Consider the photograph at the top of this post. It was taken on Armistice Day in 1924. In Dublin. Yes, Dublin. The Union Flag is flown. The National Anthem – ie, God Save the King – is sung. A Celtic Cross is erected on College Green prior to its transportation to France where it would serve as a

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Sir John Major is right about education and privilege in modern Britain

Sir John Major is, of course, correct. It is depressing, though perhaps not surprising, that the British upper-middle-classes – that is, those educated privately – still dominate what he termed the “upper echelons” of “every sphere of British influence”. Depressing because no serious person can sensibly believe that talent is restricted to the minority of people educated in Britain’s excellent private schools. But unsurprising because elites – I use the word dispassionately – have a natural tendency to do whatever it takes to maintain their elite status. Ed West is right about this. Still, Major’s remarks were hardly, as has been claimed in some right-of-centre quarters, “an attack” on private education.

David Blackburn

What can the international community do to restore law and order in the Philippines?

Britain is to deploy one warship, the Type 45 destroyer HMS Daring, which is currently on station near Singapore, and RAF support aircraft, including one Boeing C17 transporter, to the Philippines. The US has deployed a carrier group. It will take HMS Daring 5 days or so to reach its destination. It will provide engineering equipment, first aid, water sanitising kits and the means to turn sea water into drinking water. Most reports from the disaster area warn of the threat of waterborne disaster, so HMS Daring’s supplies will be very welcome. The destroyer is also equipped with one Lynx helicopter, which will extend its operational reach inland. The RAF

Monday

Ed West Ed West

Should state education be abolished?

These days I find myself so drifting away from the bounds of acceptable opinion that I don’t even shout at Radio 4 for being biased, because I don’t even understand the basis of what the arguments are about. Take this morning’s schools feature (occasioned by Sir John Major’s comments about the ‘truly shocking’ dominance of a privately educated elite in public life), in which Harry Mount argued in favour and Owen Jones against the motion that grammar schools lead to more social mobility than comprehensives. listen to ‘Owen Jones and Harry Mount on social mobility’ on Audioboo

Rupert Myers

David Cameron should confront Australia over Nauru asylum detention centre

Walking a lap of the North Pacific island of Nauru would take you three and a half hours. One kilometre inland, you would glimpse the republic’s phosphate mines. Living hundreds of kilometres from anywhere must sometimes feel like incarceration for the 10,000 or so Nauruans. What makes the republic seem even more prison-like is the way it is used by Australia as a detention and processing facility holding over 800 mostly Iranian asylum seekers. As fellow Commonwealth members, we should be concerned about this dot in the Pacific, and the way that Australia is off-shoring facilities there. Nauru is used by Australia to distance itself from the human face of

The Spectator

Lest We Forget

One remarkable fact of recent years is that even as the veterans of the first world war have died and as those who served in the second world war have headed through their eighties and beyond, the memory of the 20th century’s two most devastating wars has continued to be honoured with thoughtfulness and devotion. The idea of commemorating those who defended and saved this country has lost none of its potency. This year, as we head towards the 100th anniversary of the start of what was meant to be the war to end all wars, there are more British poppies in evidence than ever. Our part in the Allied

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

At last! The ‘splashback problem’ has been solved

After months of study, scientists have at last discovered the most amenable way to urinate without suffering what they call ‘splashback’. In a study entitled ‘Splash dynamics of a male urine stream’, the researchers suggest that a ‘narrow angle of attack’ and close proximity to the receptacle are both crucial factors. There was no word, however, on the vexed dilemma of whether or not you should remove the washing up from the sink before weeing or just leave it in and hope nobody notices. Incidentally, the scientists concerned are Mormons at the Brigham Young University in Utah, where every academic endeavour must be, er, guided by the Lord’s spirituality. Next

David Blackburn

Can we expect more social conservatism from the Tories?

The Telegraph reports that the Relationships Alliance, which is to launch in the House of Commons, warns that the ‘disintegration of romantic, social and family relationships costs the average taxpayer around £1,500 a year’. Apparently this amounts to £50 billion a year. The story is of course familiar, even if the figures involved are new. Broken relationships can cause immense social and economic damage to the wider community. The Relationships Alliance, which is a union of charities, actions groups, politicians and individuals, has come into being to convince the government to adopt a national strategy to counter these costly ills. Relationships do break down, and some relationships should be dissolved. The question is how to limit the

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How ‘Help to Buy’ helps the Tories

Few images are more seared in the Tory consciousness than that of Margaret Thatcher handing over the keys to people who had brought their council house under ‘right to buy’. The image seemed to sum up the aspirational appeal of Thatcherism. I suspect that there’ll be a slight homage to these images when Cameron meets some of those that the government’s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme is helping onto the housing ladder tomorrow. Number 10 wants to show that the full scheme, which has only been running for a month, is already being used by a large number of people. The economics behind ‘Help to Buy’ might make many on the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Is Islam so weak that Malala’s book has to be banned in Pakistan’s schools?

The autobiography of the Pakistani schoolgirl shot by the Taliban, Malala Yousafzai, has been banned by Pakistan’s private school association. No small matter given that Pakistan’s hugely popular independent schools teach half of its pupils.Today’s Independent on Sunday reports it saying that I am Malala would have a “negative” effect on its pupils due to the way it talks about Islam – so it’s being banned from the libraries of 40,000 affiliated schools. I’ve read it – a great book, but scathing about jihadis. Specifically, jihadis who ban books. Here’s Malala:- “My father’s college held a heated debate in a packed room. Many students argued that the book  [The Satanic Verses]

Saturday

Carola Binney Carola Binney

I’m ashamed of myself

On waking up (at noon) on Thursday morning, I found I had a text from one of my fellow History freshers. Sent at 6am and accompanied by a screenshot of a half-finished essay: ‘WHY am I still up?!’ The all-nighter is a notorious Oxford experience, and not one I thought I would ever have to sample. ‘I’ll be fine getting the work done at university,’ I blithely assured those warning me of how unstructured a History student’s life is, ‘I like to keep busy.’ What I failed to appreciate is that it’s impossible not to be busy at university. School without lessons was dire — by Tuesday afternoon of the

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How the foreign aid industry demeans Africa

The Norwegian students’ group which  last year came out with the brilliant ‘Africa for Norway’ spoof video has again released a hilarious film lampooning the aid industry for the stereotypes they perpetuate. The video makes a serious point. That the aid industry uses pictures of starving babies to trigger donations, even if it means spinning a misleading and patronising view of Africa. All this is Western self-indulgence if the aid doesn’t actually help Africa (as African authors like Dambisa Moyo have demonstrated). There are many African countries with a wide array of problems – chiefly, bad governance. These videos raise a potent question: what’s the point of all these charity appeals?

Ed West Ed West

Drivers are a menace to society

I hate drivers. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate all of them, just a considerably larger proportion than I hate of the population as a whole. And, like most cyclists, I drive myself, having been bullied into it by my then girlfriend who bought me lessons for my 27th birthday. But generally speaking I feel the same way about them as Rod Liddle feels about cyclists. Although I agree with Rod on almost all things, it would be weird and awkward if I agreed with him on everything, and this is the slither outside the bubble on the Venn diagram. I don’t object to his characterisation of cyclists as

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The CSJ awards show what’s going right in Britain

The (other) big awards ceremony yesterday was that held by the Centre for Social Justice. CoffeeHousers will be familiar with the problem: if you want to donate to a charity, which ones are actually helping society rather and which wasting their money on tedious political campaigns? Name recognition tends to drive donations, and the CSJ awards (which I had the honour of being involved in) are aimed at giving more profile to small charities. And cash awards for each. It was a brilliant evening. God knows there’s plenty going wrong with this country, but this was an evening dedicated to what’s going right. Here were a few of the winners.

Thursday

Peter Jones

What are you doing for ‘Live like a Stoic’ week?

On 21 November The Spectator is hosting a discussion about addiction — disease or choice? — and how we should best treat it. This neatly coincides with ‘Live like a Stoic’ week (25 November–1 December), which culminates in academics and doctors discussing how far problems of everyday life can be solved by the Stoic practice of thinking rationally about them — in modern parlance ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’ — rather than by expensive medical intervention. Stoicism was invented by Zeno, a Greek from Citium in Cyprus. In about 301 bc, he began teaching in one of Athens’ covered walkways (a stoa, whence ‘stoicism’). His work was to influence two thinkers in

Taki

Taki: RIP John Jay, my brave friend who refused to take part in vulture capitalism

I suppose the secret of death is to choose not to expire the same day as famous people. I read in Lapham’s Quarterly that JFK, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley all met with the man in the white suit on 22 November 1963. John Jay Mortimer, a friend of very long standing, died last week and I attended his funeral in Tuxedo Park, the seat of his very old and fine family. After his daughter Minnie gave the reading, Lewis Lapham, the renowned editor of Harper’s and now Lapham’s Quarterly, spoke in a quiet, unemotional tone about his old friend. It seems that at the height of the Cold War,

The Spectator

Letters | 7 November 2013

Counting on the country Sir: I spent many hours helping to canvas for local Conservative candidates before the last two elections (‘The countryside revolts’, 2 November). I was motivated to do so because of the Labour government’s prejudice against the rural community. The Conservative party offered a chance to redress this prejudice through repealing or amending legislation on small employers, hunting, communication, transport, fuel, immigration and the EU. But progress on these issues has been negligible. We see no action on the Hunting Act, and no action to stop the harassment of country people by vigilante pressure groups, despite managing a more robust reaction to anti-fracking campaigners. Huge effort has

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke: Can’t we even manage a proper hurricane?

In the Spar shop I overheard someone talking anxiously to the woman on the till about an approaching ‘hurricane’. I had thought the fast forwarding sky was looking a bit apocalyptic, so we hurried back to the caravan and put the radio on and waited for the news. The most important thing to have happened in the world in the past 24 hours, apparently, was the death of the ‘influential’ former Velvet Underground member Lou Reed, the man who characterised his style of musicianship as: ‘One chord is fine, two chords is pushing it, three chords and you’re into jazz.’ The gathering storm was the second item. Hurricane-force winds were

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite: aliens have landed in Warwickshire — I’ve seen their spaceship

Like the heroine in Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers, I stood in front of it with my mouth open in awe. It was a ship in the earth. I was looking at the tip of a flying saucer protruding from a field where it had become wedged thousands of years before after crash-landing. I had been walking across the farmland at the back of my parents’ house with the builder boyfriend and Cydney the spaniel when we came across it. Let me paint the picture: mile upon mile of rugged countryside stretched in every direction. Stubble fields were lit by a magical golden light. Cows ambled around grassy meadows. Perhaps it

Alexander Chancellor

Alexander Chancellor: Do you think you should read this piece for free?

I was in Nottingham last Sunday to address university students about journalism. The occasion was a one-day ‘media conference’ organised by the Nottingham University students’ magazine, Impact, for the purpose of encouraging students to embark on journalistic careers. The conference, it promised, would give them a ‘kick start’ in this direction. I hadn’t realised until I got there that this was the intention, for I had planned to say how it was now almost as bad an idea for a young person to try to go into journalism as it had been, in Noël Coward’s song, for Mrs Worthington to put her daughter on the stage. I decided to tone