Society Archives

Thursday

25 Apr 2013

The tyranny of the cycle track

If Joni Mitchell were writing her song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ today, about the ruination of the natural world by the march of modernity, the lyrics might run something like this: ‘They paved paradise, put up a cycling route.’ Not content with demanding cycling lanes through our towns and cities, the cycling lobby — by which I don’t mean old maids bicycling to communion, I mean the Lycra brigade — are starting to turn the countryside into a surface on which they can pedal themselves into an endorphin-rich sweat as well, it seems. The tarmacking of a six-mile track through unspoilt Warwickshire countryside near my parents’ home is the latest evidence

Alison Wolf

The unfair sex – how feminism created a new class divide

James is 15 years old, coming up to his GCSEs; and the researcher he is talking to is clueless about girls. Yes, he tells her, girls at his school, underage girls, do indeed have sex. With guys in their class, like him. The researcher is surprised. Haven’t girls gone studious; aren’t they collecting the top grades, leaving the boys behind? James states the obvious. ‘It’s not girls with As or A*s,’ he explains. ‘Girls with As are virgins.’ Today, almost a quarter of girls report having underage sex. But there are almost as many girls waiting till they’re 20 or more. This isn’t random, a question of whether and when

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: So it might really be true – nicotine is good for your brain

It was a few months ago, and I had just arrived in Philadelphia. My friend picked me up at the airport — one of those charming, civilised things people do when they live in a city that’s a sensible size. As I climbed into the car I furtively pulled an e-cigarette out of my pocket. Furtively, because my friend has never smoked, and is better qualified than most to criticise my nicotine use — what with his having been awarded the highest first in biochemistry in his year at Cambridge and being a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and all. I muttered some apologetic comment: ‘E-cigarettes… nicotine but without

Bruce Anderson

Sex and Margaret Thatcher

My last column discussed Lady Thatcher and drink. It is now time to move on to sex. But there is little to say. Hard as it may be for moderns to contemplate, she was uxorious. A million years ago, in her days in opposition, I was in the House having a drink with an elderly Tory MP when she swept past. His already rheumy voice thickened with sentiment. ‘Ishn’t she a lovely little thing,’ he mused (not quite how I would have described the leader of our party). ‘But you should have sheen her when she first arrived. Oh, she was sho beautiful. We all tried to [have our wicked

Simon Hoggart

April Wine Club | 25 April 2013

I have been enjoying Growing Up in Restaurants by James Pembroke (Quartet), which is largely autobiographical, but also covers the history of eating out in this country, including the darkest days of the last century. But even in the 1950s and 1960s there were people trying to produce edible food, some successfully, and looking at past menus has made me nostalgic. I’d love to have eaten at 235 Kings Road in 1968 — avocado vinaigrette 4/6, prawn cocktail 4/6, followed by coq au vin or sole meunière, 12/6 each, rounded off with a syllabub also at 4/6. Yum! And what would we have drunk? Possibly some of the nostalgic wines provided

James Delingpole

Since I moved to the country, I’m on the side of the squirrel-killers

What is the correct expression to wear, I wonder, when you’ve just caught a squirrel in your squirrel trap? Guilt? Pain? Sorrow? Fear at the possibility of a 3 a.m. knock at the door from the boot boys of the RSPCA? The expression you definitely shouldn’t wear, apparently, is one suggestive that you might have taken any pleasure in poor, sweet, bushy-tailed Mr Nutkin’s death. This was the mistake made by Defra secretary of state Owen ‘Butcher’ Paterson, who was revealed over the weekend to have upset visiting Tory colleagues by showing pictures of himself cheerfully posing with the decapitated victims of his Kania 2000 squirrel traps. ‘I’m not sure what

Leah McLaren

My battle with Britain’s mean, ineffective immigration system

When I first came to this country nearly a decade ago, Britain wanted immigrants like me. Back then you could get a visa just for being creative. It was called the ‘Artist, Writer, Composer Visa’ — a Blairite flight of fancy if there ever was one — and all you had to do was fill out a form proving that you’d made a name for yourself in your country of origin in one of those three disciplines. The application, as I recall, made a point of including conceptual artists and sculptors. I’d published a novel in Canada, so I was in. It was that easy. Thinking about it now makes

Theo Hobson

The Church of England needs a compromise on gay marriage. Here it is

It is a wearyingly obvious observation, but the Church of England remains crippled by the gay crisis. It is locked in disastrous self-opposition, alienated from its largely liberal nature. Maybe the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has a secret plan that will break the deadlock: there is no sign of it yet. The advent of gay marriage has made the situation look even more hopeless. It entrenches the church in its official conservatism, and it further radicalises the liberals. A few weeks ago the church issued a report clarifying its opposition to gay marriage, in which it ruled out the blessing of gay partnerships. This was not a hopeful

Rod Liddle

Zero tolerance for people who watch fairy-folk sex cartoons

A man in New Zealand has just been sent to prison for three months for watching cartoons of pixies, elves and trolls enjoying sexual intercourse. I don’t know, from the court report, if this was inter-species fairy-folk sex, i.e. if it was a nasty scene of one of those enormous, wart-festooned Norse Huldrefolk applying himself with great vigour to the epicene and vulnerable form of a mere elf. This information is not recorded. We know simply that Ronald Clark was dispatched to chokey and a local campaigner against child abuse said outside the court that while the convicted man had watched only cartoons of these creatures having sex, it was

Hugo Rifkind

Why should our children be more like the French?

I’ve no particular beef with the French, gruesomely tortured beef as it would no doubt be, but I’m a little tired of being told we ought to follow their example with our children. Elizabeth Truss, the normally quite sensible education minister, is the latest culprit. She believes that Britain’s nurseries are chaotic, noisy places. Children would be better prepared for school, she feels, if British nurseries were more like French nurseries, in which toddlers wear couture, click their heels whenever an adult enters the room, and never laugh. I daresay she’s right, just as I’m sure people are often right when they marvel at the flawless behaviour of little French

Lucy Vickery

On second thoughts

In Competition No. 2794 you were invited to give a helping hand to Sebastian Faulks, who will write the first-ever authorised Wodehouse sequel, and submit a scene from an imaginary sequel in which Wodeshousian characters of your choice debate the wisdom of such an enterprise. This was a mean assignment, given that Wodehouse imitators are doomed to failure. Faulks himself acknowledges that he has his work cut out — and by and large you agreed. Honourable mentions go to Francis Macleod, Mike Morrison and Pauline Love. The winners take £30 each. D.A. Prince bags £35. The Wooster brow crumpled like a punctured balloon. ‘I don’t like it, Jeeves. This fellow

Martin Vander Weyer

Reinhart and Rogoff’s faulty spreadsheet doesn’t destroy the case for austerity

Economists should always leave themselves a margin for error. When challenged that free-market policies on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s led straight from boom to bust, Milton Friedman argued that problems arose not when politicians applied his prescriptions too dogmatically, but because they only ever did so half-heartedly. John Maynard Keynes, the high priest of big government, changed his mind ‘when the facts change’ and was so magisterially flexible that he was able to express ‘deeply moved agreement’ with the moral stance of The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek’s sermon against the tyranny of the over-powerful state. The Harvard professors Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, by contrast,

John Preston

‘Kurt Vonnegut Letters’, by Dan Wakefield – review

In the early 1950s Kurt Vonnegut became the manager of a Saab dealership in Cape Cod, a job which often involved him taking prospective clients out on test drives. Keen to demonstrate the Saab’s front-wheel drive, Vonnegut would take corners at a tremendous lick, leaving his often elderly passengers ‘sickly and green’ afterwards. Vonnegut’s early writings left a number of editors feeling pretty sickly and green too. As the rejection slips piled up, he cast around desperately for some alternative source of income. He tried to flog a board-game he’d invented, as well as a bowtie made from ribbon the Atomic Energy Commission used to cordon off highly radioactive areas

Benjamin Yardebuller

‘Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov’, edited by Robert Chandler – review

For the English-speaking world, the book that more than any other defines the magic — or fairy — tale is Children’s and Household Tales by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, first published in Germany in 1812, and translated (or adapted: it was seriously toned down) into English by Edgar Taylor in 1823. For the Grimms, as for other Romantic writers, these traditional tales were the repository of an authentic, national culture, under dual threat from industrialisation and invasion by Napoleon’s France. Educated Russian interest in folk traditions followed a similar trajectory: the first great Russian folklorist, Aleksandr Afanasyev, assembled his vast collection in the middle years of the 19th century. But

Wednesday

24 Apr 2013

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Miliband’s NHS torment

Back to business at PMQs. Our ailing NHS, and its many-headed crises, were today’s key battle-ground. We hear of sick people being parked in ever tinier and more humiliating confinements: corridors, trolleys, airing cupboards, pill depositories, laundry baskets, spare gaps between drinks’ machines. All these locations, and worse, are currently sheltering patients awaiting the healing touch of some NHS miracle-worker. Today Miliband told us of a pop-up ward which has been raised, like a Punch and Judy tent, in the grounds of some calamity-hit hospital. Plenty of ammo there to chuck at the PM. But Miliband couldn’t bring any colour or vitality to his arguments. He used percentages and numbers

Shiraz Maher

The glaring failure of the Arab Spring

Two Bishops carrying out relief work in northern Syria appear to have been kidnapped by rebels, underscoring the increasingly sectarian dimension of the conflict. Syria’s minorities have long worried about their future if Assad falls, fearing a similar fate to that of their counterparts elsewhere in the Middle East. Indeed, of all the Arab Spring’s various let-downs the failure to protect minorities is perhaps the most glaring. The attacks on Christians in Egypt earlier this month which resulted in two deaths and left close to 100 people hospitalised epitomises the decay of any pluralistic promise the Arab revolutions may have once offered. Those attacks followed the effective eradication of Jewish

Tuesday

23 Apr 2013

Isabel Hardman

Anna Soubry: PM thought only a woman could do ‘soft bloody girly’ public health job

Was Anna Soubry grateful to be promoted to the health department in last September’s reshuffle? She doesn’t exactly give that impression in her interview with Total Politics magazine this month. ‘To be quite frank, when the PM said to me, ‘I want you to do public health’, I thought, ‘Oh boss, I respect you so much, but I’m the only woman here and I get public health – I hope there’s no connection there. ‘Maybe I can make people realise that this is not a soft bloody girly option, it is a big serious job. I’m a huge fan of our prime minister… but I did sit there in the cabinet

Jonathan Jones

Deficit falls by 0.3%… maybe

George Osborne will be breathing a sigh of relief this morning. The boast he made in his Autumn Statement in December — ‘the deficit is coming down this year, and every year of this Parliament’ — appears to have held up. But only just. The figures from the ONS today show that the government borrowed £120.9 billion in 2011-12 and £86.2 billion in 2012-13. But that 2012-13 figure is artificially lowered by £28 billion by the Royal Mail pension transfer, and by a further £6.4 billion by the cash transferred to the Treasury from the Bank of England’s Asset Purchase Facility. Strip out those two effects and borrowing in 2012-13

Monday

22 Apr 2013

Fraser Nelson

Britain and America face a new enemy: the lone wolf terrorist

Yesterday, thousands of runners in the London Marathon converged on the greatest target in the world. Winston Churchill was the first to see the problem. ‘With our enormous metropolis here… [we are] a kind of tremendous fat cow, a valuable cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey,’ he told the Commons in 1934. But ‘we cannot possibly retreat, we cannot move London.’ New enemies, from the IRA to al-Qa’eda, have come to do their worst — but since the London Underground bombing of 7 July 2005 none has succeeded. The average British urbanite would be forgiven for thinking the threat has subsided. It has not. The atrocity at

Isabel Hardman

The question Labour won’t even consider on the NHS

Labour’s new independent commission on health and social care aims to draw up plans on bringing together health services and social care so that the NHS can be financially sustainable. Launching the plans today, Ed Miliband said that ‘we must make every pound we spend go further at a time when our NHS faces the risk of being overwhelmed by a crisis in funding because of care needs by the end of this decade’. But there is one big question that Sir John Oldham, who will chair the year-long review, won’t be asking about the long-term financial viability of the health service. It’s a question that some Labourites are well-attuned