Society

The British do not do seven day mourning the way many Venezuelans are for Hugo Chavez, neither – as a rule – do we flock to the roads to see the bodies of our politicians being driven through the streets. With the exception of Jeremy Bentham we do not – mercifully – put our departed on display.  We tend to leave that to communists. Just as Chavez’s death reminds us that we like to keep our grief low-key, it is fair to say that we are incredibly bad at most public events, with people grumbling, criticising, and proudly declaring that they are going away on holiday just to avoid the

‘Drones save lives’ is the title of my piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. President Obama is currently receiving criticism from left and right for his policy of targeted assassination by unmanned drones. I think among a range of bad options drones are the least bad option for dealing with the threat, and explain this further in the piece which is available here. Along the same lines readers might be interested in a debate I did last week on the same subject for Google and Intelligence Squared. The motion was ‘America’s drone campaign is both moral and effective’. I was lucky in having David Aaronovitch on my side. The

Members of the World’s Most Rational and Peaceable Religion © have been going berserk in the lovely Bangladeshi town of Cox’s Bazar. Some bloke put a photo of a burned Koran on his Facebook page and the Muslims have been rioting, taking out their infantile fury on the minority Buddhist population. Setting them on fire and stuff. Usually Buddhists don’t need any help setting themselves on fire, but that’s another story. As social networking sites establish themselves in third world countries full of furious mentals, this sort of thing is going to happen more and more often, isn’t it? The end of the world will come not with a bang

White to play. This position is from Nimzowitsch-Alapin, Vilnius 1912. How did White swiftly conclude his sacrificial attack? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 12 March or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I shall be offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 … Rxg2 Last week’s winner Peter J. Skelly, Bedford

Twenty-five years ago, when he had left the Communist party and taken over as chief executive at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, Sir David Nicholson made a point of promising his staff a ‘job for life’. He has certainly stuck to his ideology. This week he admitted his part in the Mid Staffordshire hospitals scandal, in which up to 1,200 patients died from poor care and neglect. He confessed that as chief executive of the Shropshire and Staffordshire Strategic Health Authority — the body which was supposed to oversee Stafford Hospital — he had failed to notice its high death rates. And yet still he appears to believe that he has the

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer failed to dissuade EU finance minsters in Brussels from endorsing a plan to cap bankers’ pay bonuses. City banks contemplated taking the EU to court over it. HSBC’s annual profits fell by 6 per cent to £14 billion, including a loss of £700 million made in Britain. The Royal Bank of Scotland, 81 per cent of which is owned by the government, made its fifth annual loss in a row, of £5.17 billion. Sir Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, suggested it should be split up and sold. Lloyds Banking Group, 40 per cent of which is owned by