Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 12 September 2013

Trust us The National Trust opened the Big Brother House at Elstree Studios at the weekend. Some other less grand National Trust properties: — 575 Wandsworth Road, Lambeth. 19th-century terraced house that was home to Kenyan-born civil servant Khadambi Asalache who, to keep out the damp, decorated the walls with elaborate panels made from pine salvaged from skips. — Birmingham Back-to-Backs. A 19th-century courtyard of artisans’ dwellings which survived slum-clearance. — Mr Straw’s House. 1920s semi in Worksop kept just as the day it was built. — 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool. 1950s council house that was the childhood home of Paul McCartney. Trust me George Osborne said he had been

Columba

2130: Elusive

Each of 23 clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer including one extra letter. Each of 13 clues is of the same type, but includes two extra letters, next to each other within the jumble. The extras spell a 13-word assertion (in ODQ) by an unclued light. Concealed in a straight line in the grid is a definition (an eight-letter word) which, according to the quotation, would elude any of the other unclued lights; this word must be highlighted. Two unclued lights consist of two words each.   Across   6    Lydia is young descendant of Fatima (6) 12    Indigenous plant bin

Columba

Solution to 2127: Dire straits

Twelve unclued lights are names of ARTISTS which are ANAGRAMS (9) of superfluous words in clues.   First prize E. Hogg, London SW13 Runners-up A. Mulholland, Nottingham; Sue Topham, Elston, Newark

Frank Field

Time’s up for today’s welfare state

Welfare as we know it is doomed to defeat. It looks like going down to defeat from three major challenges, and each challenge comes from the sea change that is now so marked in public opinion. First, welfare has moved from one based on the duty to contribute before the right to help was conceded. Increasingly benefits are provided only after a test of income. Voters do not approve of this significant change. The next challenge comes from an increasing reluctance by voters to pay an ever growing share of their income in taxes, of which the largest part goes to a form of welfare with which they strongly disagree

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Yes, Royal Mail should be privatised.

In this morning’s post: enticing offers from McDonald’s, Domino’s pizza, Sainsbury’s a local clothes shop and a children’s charity. Arriving later today: a couriered parcel from Amazon.  That’s often the reality of the modern British postal service. The Royal Mail delivers things you don’t want; private companies deliver the things you do. Which is one reason why all the arguments citing the fact that Margaret Thatcher – sorry, even Margaret Thatcher – thought privatising the Royal Mail a step too far are cute but utterly irrelevant. It’s a different world now. One in which if things are to stay the same they must change. And so, on balance, the partial privatisation of

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22: the end of political parties, RBS and Lib Dem conference preview

Have political parties had their day? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Ross Clark and Fraser Nelson debate whether party conferences are now pointless, filled with lobbyists not members, and whether parties no longer have a purpose. Are we entering a post-party politics? What, if anything, can be done to fix the relationship between Britain’s interest in politics and our parties? The Telegraph’s Iain Martin also discusses the breakup of RBS with the publication of his new book Making It Happen this week. What did RBS fail in such a spectacular fashion? How strong was the Scottish connection to the financial crash? Was Fred the Shred entirely responsible? What

Iain Martin

Braveheart banking: the fall of RBS

When Fred Goodwin was looking for a marketing slogan in the boom years, he alighted on a simple phrase which encapsulated the ‘can-do’ philosophy of the bank he ran. RBS would, promised the adverts, ‘Make It Happen’. Goodwin and his colleagues made it happen, though not quite in the way they intended. They turned RBS into a financial monster, the world’s biggest bank, with assets of £1.9 trillion. By 2008 it had become so large and so exposed that if boom ever turned to bust the bank (and the rest of us) would be buggered. And so it proved. Five years ago this week, Lehman Brothers went out of business.

Simon Hoggart

September Wine Club | 12 September 2013

The magazine The Drinks Business recently published a list of the ten most annoying descriptions of wine. I agree with most of their judgments: for instance, ‘icon’ is just a lazy word for a wine that has an inflated reputation. ‘Reserve’ merely means ‘better than our usual stuff’. Which is the same as ‘premium’. ‘Passion’ is a stupid term, at a time when sandwich bars claim to be ‘passionate about food’. And ‘terroir’ is often a smart-alec excuse for thin, weedy wines which taste of the stones on which they were grown and little else. Anyhow, none of these words are applied to our selection of six terrific wines from

Bruce Anderson

What it’s like to drink a 118-year-old wine

Marcher country, the Jura lies to the east of Burgundy and the contrast is marked. Burgundy: the very name is redolent of opulence. The architecture, the courtliness, the great wines: the aristocratic civilisation of Burgundy is a dance to the cornucopia of nature. Among the rocks and hills and gorges of the Jura, nature is less generous: livelihoods harder wrought. But as so often in European history, adversity has been the nursery of triumph. The Jura produces a famous wine, vin jaune. Until this week, I had hardly tasted it. That has now been rectified, in a spectacular manner. Those who try to write about wine often talk of terroir,

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

My mansion tax solution: hit rich foreigners. But no one else

I am surprised no more attention has been given to Martin Vander Weyer’s suggestion in The Spectator two weeks ago that a mansion tax should be levied on those buyers who pay no other UK tax. Why has it taken so long for anyone to raise this idea? Where tax paid against income should be set against tax paid on property? Let’s consider this question in psychological terms. Assume that you are eager to buy a particular house but someone else decides he wants to live there too. He is twice as rich as you are and so comfortably outbids you. Whatever the other person’s moral worth, you know two

Peter Jones

Notes on…Classic cruising

We arrive at the tiny Greek island of Sikinos on a blustery day, making landing rather difficult. Is there transport to take us to the extraordinary, now deconsecrated, perhaps 6th-century church of Episkopi inside a 3rd century AD Roman mausoleum/temple? The mayor appears: yes, we can use the island’s one bus, and off we go to the magnificent site miles from nowhere. A bonus too: the tiny 14th-century monastery next door is being restored, wall paintings and all. Back to the harbour via a vineyard to taste the local wine — the mayor has his chums — and by now a storm has set in. At the third attempt the

Douglas Murray

Richard Dawkins interview: ‘I have a certain love for the Anglican tradition’

‘You owe me an apology,’ Richard Dawkins informs me. It is a bright Oxford morning and we are sitting in his home. His wife has just made me coffee and I have met their new puppies. I am here to discuss a new book of his, but he is smarting from a disobliging reference to him in a recent one of mine. That, and an earlier encounter I wrote about here, have clearly rankled. I try a very limited apology. But it does strike me that Dawkins is more easily bruised than one might have imagined. I wonder if it has anything to do with the deluge of criticism he

Anne Applebaum

Time for our leaders to stop talking about ‘justice’ in Syria if we can’t or won’t enforce it

‘It’s about chemical weapons. Their use is wrong and the world shouldn’t stand idly by.’ — David Cameron, 27 August ‘The chemical massacre in Damascus cannot and must not go unpunished.’ — François Hollande, 30 August ‘We lead with the belief that right makes might, not the other way around.’ — Barack Obama, 31 August In their speech, in their manner and in their choice of language, the American President, the French President and the British Prime Minister have been impeccably clear about their motivations for military intervention in Syria. They don’t want to use force for economic gain. They aren’t in this for national interest. Strictly speaking, they aren’t moved

Clarissa Tan

The ideal death show

I am in a yurt, talking about death. Everyone is seated in a circle, and I am the next-to-last person to share. The last of the summer sun is shining through the entrance. At one end is a display coffin of biodegradable willow — there’s also tea and coffee, and coffin-shaped biscuits with skeleton-shaped icing. ‘I am a reporter,’ I say. ‘I’ve come to cover this event. But don’t worry, I won’t report what you share in this yurt. Also, I have cancer. I have been in treatment for one year, but now the treatment is over. I take one day at a time.’ There is silence, then hugs. I

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The RSPB is fighting for wind turbines. The birds can fend for themselves

The RSPB has come out against fracking and urged the government to ‘rethink its shale gas policies’. And of course the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds would know. After all when your skill set ranges from identifying Little Brown Jobs through your binoculars at 10,000 yards all the way to differentiating a Greater Spotted Woodpecker from a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker merely by the sound of its drumming beak, clearly it goes without saying that your insights into the merits of hydraulic fracturing and the minutiae of Britain’s energy economy deserve to be taken very seriously indeed. No, no I jest. About the first bit, anyway. It would, of

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The reassuring stupidity of John Kerry

The Syrian rebels who liberated the mountain village of Maaloula apparently immediately set about converting the predominantly Christian population to Islam, using the gently persuasive techniques we have come to associate with this dynamic and expanding religion. ‘Allahu Akbar! Either you will convert to Islam or you will be beheaded,’ rebels allegedly told some villagers. Other residents were simply shot dead without all the onerous conversion palaver. It is said that the accents of the rebel soldiers were many things — Chechen, Tunisian, Moroccan, etc — but certainly not Syrian. It was further reported that, once again, the rebels were drawn from one or another al-Qa’eda franchise; as John O’Sullivan

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Welcome back, TSB: your founder’s spirit is alive and well and living in Airdrie

A big hello to the revived Trustee Savings Bank — the spin-off of 631 Lloyds branches that were going to be sold to the Co-operative Bank to fulfil EU conditions for the bailout of Lloyds after its catastrophic takeover of HBOS. The new entity starts life with 4.6 million personal and small-business customers, a clean balance sheet, no investment banking arm and no foreign skeletons in its cupboard. That all sounds promising, but those of us who have long argued for a break-up of mega-banks and a return to relationship-driven high-street finance will watch closely to see whether the new TSB’s slogan, ‘Welcome back to local banking’, turns out to

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Boring politicians are a threat to democracy. That means you, Rachel Reeves

I’ve never met the woman that the Newsnight editor Ian Katz this week accidentally described as ‘boring, snoring Rachel Reeves’, so for all I know, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury might be an absolute riot. Although actually, writing that, it occurs to me that maybe I have and she was just too boring for me to remember. Perhaps we sat next to each other at some sort of function, and had a fun chat about, ooh, fiscal prudence in a post-OBR paradigm, which involved her talking and me going ‘Mmmm’, and left her thinking, ‘He seems nice, I wonder if we’ll be friends?’ as she walked dreamily to