Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 13 September 2012

The start of the tape Business secretary Vince Cable announced another crackdown on red tape. But where did red tape come from? It seems to have been a product of the Holy Roman Empire. — Spanish officials in the reign of Charles V (1516-56) would tie up documents relating to issues which had to be discussed on the Council of State with red tape; other, lesser documents were bound with rope. — The tape was called Boldoque, after the Dutch city in which it was manufactured (S’Hertgenbosch in Dutch). The Spanish have retained the word for red tape. — As for the Dutch, they have made amends by inventing the

Peter Jones

The Athenians’ mansion tax

Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, has said he may support Nick Clegg’s suggestion of a mansion tax. All houses worth more than £2 million will annually pour a certain percentage of that down the Treasury black hole. But how appealing is that going to be? And what if X, whose house comes into the category, believes that his shouldn’t, but Y’s up the road should? Let the ancient Athenians ride to the unhappy Clegg’s rescue. In Athens, the property tax levied every year on the richest 300 was called the leitourgia (‘public service’, origin of our ‘liturgy’). Those liable were worth about four talents or more (that meant 24,000 drachmas — a skilled workman was paid

Raymond Keene

No. 235

White to play. This position is from Akshaya Kalaiyalahan-Callum Brewer, UK Schools Challenge 2012. White concluded this game with an extraordinary tactic. What did she play? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 18 September 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 … Nxf3+ Last week’s winner Terence Marlow, Northants

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 13 September 2012

Q. I was fishing in the Highlands and had to take a two-hour taxi from Inverness to the cottage where I was staying. In such a situation, how does one silence a well-meaning but overly chatty driver? — Marcus W., London A. Ideally, you should take more of an interest in people. However, if you really dread such conversations on long taxi journeys, then make a point of entering the car wearing a windproof jacket (such as a Barbour) and a hat, regardless of forecast and condition. In this way, if it should turn out that the driver is a bit garrulous, you can chat animatedly for a short while

Dot Wordsworth

Fudge-a-rama

‘It’s just a fudge-a-rama,’ exclaimed Boris Johnson of the government stance on Heathrow. ‘And it’s just an excuse for a delay,’ he added by way of gloss. I was surprised to find that a fudge-a-rama, or Fudgeorama, already existed: Salerno Fudgeorama Fudge Covered Graham Cookies. They are American, or were till production stopped in 2008 on the death of some members of the Salerno family. A Graham cookie is a biscuit invented in 1829 by a New Jersey clergyman, Sylvester Graham, who thought their consumption helped ward off carnal urges. I don’t suppose adding fudge helps. The -rama suffix has been around for longer than you might think. ‘Visited the

Columba

2080: Players

Each of twenty-one definitions contains one misprinted letter. Corrections of misprints spell two items of the same kind as the unclued lights. Two unclued lights consist of two words each. Across 1      Visits made by guys (5) 9      Bearers of nominal offices in knots about strange ritual (10) 11     Scrape preceded by college rags (5) 12     Marks by English tutor mostly giving reminder (7) 15     Stains around suits (5) 16     Slanting section, see, in copy (6) 22     Constant line endlessly producing sausage (7) 24     Son variable with attention (4) 25     Lost gold returned with thanks (4) 27     Move

Columba

2077: below par

Extra letters in jumbles, plus INITIALS (37) of clues, give the saying ‘Where the carcase is, there shall the eagles be gathered together’.  The carcase in the grid is a MORKIN, accounting for the presence of six eagles. First prize Mark Rowntree, London SE10 Runners-up C.V. Clark, London WC1; M.F. O’Brien, London N12

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What will happen to the NHS budget?

George Osborne has long regarded support for the NHS as the most important aspect of Tory modernisation. For this reason, I think it is highly unlikely that the ring-fence will be removed from around the NHS budget. But I suspect that the practical, as opposed to symbolic, importance of the ring-fence will be diluted by more and more things being classified as health spending. At a Quad meeting on the Dilnot proposals on social care, George Osborne told Andrew Lansley that the £1.7bn cost of them, which rises to £5bn within 3 years, should be met out of the NHS budget. Lansley resisted this idea. But I understand from senior

Sunder Katwala

Richard III should be buried in the north

History is written by the victors. So Richard III might have anticipated that his death at Bosworth Field in 1485, the last English monarch to be killed on the battlefield, would only be the start of a downward reputational spiral. The last five hundred years have not been good for the man whose remains may just have been found under a Leicester car-park yesterday. Shakespeare did much of the damage, forever fixing our image of this hunched Machiavellian schemer and his ignominious downfall – ‘my Kingdom for a horse’ – though the Bard was popularising an existing Tudor narrative. Sir Thomas More, seven when Richard died, deserves at least equal

John Simpson

Rebel island

Hong Kong isn’t what it was. Under British rule it was meek and mild, careful not to rock the boat, forever nervous about its future under China. The rich bought property in Chelsea and Vancouver, put their children into good schools and universities in Britain and America, and did whatever it took to get another passport. Nowadays Hong Kong fizzes with political radicalism. Last week mass student protests obliged the Chief Executive, C.Y. Leung, to cancel the introduction of mandatory ‘patriotism’ classes in schools — that is, lessons for children about the superior nature of Chinese Communism. And the following day, at the Legislative Council elections, the democratic groups won

Bruce Anderson

Some eggs and a glass of wine

Caviar feasts stay in the memory. I remember one occasion when I scoffed a satisfactory quantity of the stuff with that old monster Bob Maxwell. As he wanted a favour, he was the acme of charm and encouraged me to dig in to a tin of beluga ‘given to me by President Gorbachev himself’. At that, I thought I saw the butler twitch. I gathered from others that the Gorbachev tin was in constant use for favoured guests, so there were only three conclusions. First, that Mr Gorbachev was using a sizeable proportion of Russia’s GDP to fund Bob’s entertaining. Second, that Bob had discovered the philosopher’s stone, or at

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Nowhere to hide | 13 September 2012

Ever since the millennium, I have wondered how long the utopian faith in the emancipatory potential of the web will last. Of course, we know the new technologies give the citizen new powers to communicate and connect. We hear this praised so loudly and so often, how could we not know? But what benefits the individual also benefits the powerful, and gives states and corporations surveillance powers the secret police forces of the 20th century could only dream of. If you doubt me, consider how today’s scandals are technologically enabled. The Telegraph’s publication of MPs’ expenses would have been impossible 30 years ago. The source would have had to photocopy

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

New kinds of housing

If the all-party Parliamentary Housing Sub-Committee were to embark on a week-long fact-finding tour of Barbados, it would create a tabloid scandal. Yet it might be a good idea all the same. For among the palm trees they will find remnants of a fascinating housing experiment which began almost 200 years ago, yet which affords a useful lesson for housing policy today. In 1838, when slavery was abolished on the island, plantation owners suddenly found themselves obliged to pay wages to their workers. In an effort to recoup this cost, they churlishly began charging those workers rent for houses they had previously occupied for free. Rents in some cases were

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Mexico notebook

Four a.m. Something was triggering the motion-sensor on the outside light. One minute, darkness, the next, a window-full of flailing palm leaves, bright with rain. I blinked for a bit, then remembered: hurricane! There was one on its way, we’d been told by Rudy, the beach barman the day before, a bruiser called Ernesto. But Rudy had been phlegmatic: Ernesto is category 1, no problem. iPhone said different. By the light of that terrible little rectangle I fed my fear with headlines from round the world: ‘Ernesto gathers strength and takes aim at Tulum.’ ‘Ernesto careens across the Caribbean towards Mexico.’ ‘Ernesto could devastate Yucatan.’ By morning, I was pale

Lucy Vickery

Patchwork poetry

In Competition No. 2763 you were invited to submit a poem that is composed of lines taken from well-known poems, with no more than one line taken from any single poem. This was a brute of a challenge, but it did pull in the crowds. Semi-nonsense was fine as long as it was amusing but I was especially impressed by those who managed to knit together something that made sense. Commendations to Geoffrey Tapper, Gerard Benson, Margaret Howell and Gordon MacIntyre. There is no overall winner this week but those printed below earn a well-deserved £25 each. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, With dream and thought

Wynn Wheldon

Pitch perfect

It is fashionable, in the wake of all those rowers and cyclists and runners, abled and otherwise, who do what they do for something — glory, pride, joy of physical exertion?  — other than for money, to disparage football, and to regard it as somehow vulgar and its practitioners over-indulged. Despite the fairytale exploits of Chelsea and Manchester City at the end of last season, football is seen as having a lot of catching up to do. It is, after all, almost impossible not to be cynical about a sport that rewards its players so extravagantly. This book reminds us that football too has its virtues. Duncan Hamilton’s father, James,

The Spectator

The Universal Credit crunch

Exactly three years ago, The Spectator devoted its cover to a revolutionary proposal for welfare reform. The proposed Universal Credit seemed, then, to be one of those ideas too sensible actually to be implemented. It proposed replacing the rotten, complex layers of benefits with a single system that paved the way to work rather than dependency. Its goal was as simple as it was audacious: that everyone should be able to keep a significant chunk of the money they earn. The welfare trap, in which so many millions are caught, would be dismantled. Its author, Iain Duncan Smith, had then abandoned hope of getting back into government, which perhaps explains

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Salman Rushdie, A Hero for Our Time – Spectator Blogs

It’s twenty years since I read The Satanic Verses. I didn’t much care for it back then, chiefly, as I recall, because Rushdie’s satirical and comic scenes left me untickled. But today – especially today – is a good moment to read the New Yorker’s excerpt from Rushdie’s forthcoming Fatwa Chronicle, Joseph Anton. If you can’t read it today, read it tomorrow. But do read it. Among other things, it made me want to go back and re-read The Satanic Verses. There are many dates you could choose from which to start a chronicle of our times but, at least in terms of one big question, Valentine’s Day 1989 is