Society

Saturday

3 Mar 2012

Lyrics

Since my husband had retuned the television, importing channels that no person free from troubling neurosis could possibly want to watch, such as one devoted to the sale of steam-cleaning machines, I stumbled over Emeli Sandé singing her song ‘Next to Me’, which was No. 2 in the BBC singles charts last week, and may be No. 1 by now. It is poetic in a traditional sense, employing metre, rhyme and romantic images. ‘I wanna hold your hand by the sea;/ Wanna feel you next to me./ I wanna see the sunrise in your eyes;/ Wanna keep you by my side.’ The orthographic convention wanna could be replaced by want

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 3 March 2012

Q. A friend has asked me to a small birthday dinner, but she has also, unwittingly, asked a man with whom I have an embarrassing issue. In a nutshell, he invited me on a date and then didn’t call on the day or since. I have met someone else so I am not bitter. But I could have been really demoralised (because we snogged and so on). It was all against my better judgment anyway because, although he is very good-looking, he is a Tory and I am not, but I still think he should not get away scot-free, so can you recommend a way in which I can demoralise

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 3 March 2012

How do you stop children fighting on long car journeys? With three boys aged six and under, not to mention an eight-year-old tomboy, it’s getting to be a serious problem. Every journey seems to end in the vehicular equivalent of a cage fight, in which all four frantically try to undo their seatbelts so they can pile into the mêlée. No quarter asked, no quarter given. The fights are getting so vicious that instead of breaking them up I’m tempted to start filming them on my iPhone. A greatest-hits compilation on YouTube would get a million hits in less than 24 hours. My initial solution was to get a bigger

Robin Oakley

The turf: Update on winners

After a lifetime reporting politics, I am as well accustomed to spin as a washing machine. But a rich new example reaches me from the US. Researching her family tree, a Californian discovered that she shared a great-great-uncle, Remus Reid, with a US senator. Unfortunately, the great-great-uncle was a regularly convicted horse thief and train robber whose only remaining photograph was the one showing him on the gallows platform before he was hanged. She wrote to the Senator seeking any information he had on their shared relative. An aide replied that Reid had been a famous cowboy whose business empire grew to include ‘equestrian assets’ and ‘intimate dealings with the

Melissa Kite

Real life | 3 March 2012

Childishly, fatuously, I used to play a little game with Lambeth Council that saved me £20 a year. The game went like this: every time my residential parking permit was up for renewal, I used to not renew it for a month, during which time I would park my car five streets away where the parking was free. I called this Parking Freedom Month. The first day of Parking Freedom Month was a lot like tax freedom day, when you start working for yourself, and stop working for the taxman. The only difference was, Parking Freedom Month only applied to me, because I could never persuade anyone else in my

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 3 March 2012

At the moment we’re very interested in spiders, my grandson and I. If we see one we catch it and put it in a clear plastic pot with a lid that doubles as a powerful magnifying glass, and we examine it. Last week we caught a monstrous one. It filled the pot. It was intelligent enough to quickly realise that escape was impossible and sat there looking thwarted. We took it in turns to squint at it through the magnifying lid. Oscar has no aesthetic sense as yet, and his powers of expression are very limited, yet he was visibly disconcerted by what he saw. About once a week I

Taki

High life | 3 March 2012

Gstaad It’s early in the morning and very still in the silvery light of the heights up here as I look out my window. A company of wispy white clouds hide behind the surrounding mountains — a reminder that a perfect dawn makes for a perfect day’s skiing. The clouds play games. They wrap themselves around the peaks like snowcaps, then are chased away by the sun, only to return and play headdress again. Someone once compared the movement of ice to the passage of a soul to heaven. I watch the glacier across my house daily, but have yet to feel the movement of a soul, but then I’m

The Spectator

Letters | 3 March 2012

Pension scheming Sir: As a pensions professional who has witnessed his once-mighty industry’s sustaining of blow after blow, I was heartened to read The Spectator’s call for Conservatives to resist the temptation to make ‘yet another raid on pension funds’ (Leading article, 25 February). The government’s lack of understanding of pensions tax relief was revealed in the Chief Secretary to the Treasury’s reported comment on how much ‘we spend’ on higher-rate relief on pension contributions. The government is not ‘spending’ at all; the contributor is simply being allowed to retain more of his own money, as a reward for putting some away for exposure to future taxation. Zachary Gallagher Leicester

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: The point of ritual

Humanists are breast-beating about the wicked influence of Christian practice on civil life. Julius Caesar would have put them straight. There were no pagan scriptures underpinning creeds, belief in one true god, or moral and ethical standards. Polytheistic religion was simply a system of cult practice: performing ritual — doing the right things, in the right way, at the right time — taking auspices, and interpreting portents. It was performance-indexed piety, designed to help men keep gods onside and understand their will. Further, since worshipping one god did not prevent you worshipping any other, and morality did not come into it, only in very exceptional circumstances did the Roman state

The Spectator

Barometer | 3 March 2012

Sister ships The Costa Allegra, sister ship of the Costa Corcordia, suffered a fire off the Seychelles. Are families of ships jinxed? —The Titanic had two sister ships. The Olympic collided with a naval vessel off the Isle of Wight soon after its maiden voyage in 1911, and again with a lightship off New York in 1935. It survived both incidents, though the lightship sank, killing seven crew. The second sister ship, Britannic, was sunk after being torpedoed off the Greek island of Kea in 1916, a year after being launched, while serving as a hospital ship. —The Lusitania, which was torpedoed by a U-boat off Ireland in 1915 with

Miriam Gross

Diary – 3 March 2012

When we switched on the BBC’s 6 o’clock news on 18 February, we had no idea that it was the day of Whitney Houston’s funeral, and even less that the coverage of this sad event would blot out all other news. So we expected the item to come to an end. But it never did. I was spending the weekend with, among others, two teenagers and we were all transfixed by the relentless mawkishness of the proceedings. After about an hour, we switched off and had supper. When we came back, the tributes were still rolling on. But now a large subtitle had appeared at the bottom of the screen.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 3 March 2012

Home Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, lent his support to a series of amendments to the government’s Health and Social Care Bill that he said would limit its adoption of competition and privatisation. The British Medical Association said that two thirds of members had approved some form of action over plans to make them contribute more to their pensions. Len McCluskey, the General Secretary of Unite, called for industrial disruption during the Olympics. Police and bailiffs removed tents from a protest camp at St Paul’s Cathedral set up on 15 October. The BBC found that thousands of illegal immigrants from India were living in sheds, particularly in Slough and

The Spectator

Bad habits | 3 March 2012

Professor Hamid Ghodse, president of the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board, is not the first to observe that Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham have acquired ‘no-go’ areas of ‘fractured communities’ ruled by gangs. But if he were brave enough to venture just a little bit closer to the frontline of Britain’s drug problem he would realise that much of the rest of his analysis, delivered with the board’s annual report this week, is bunk. Making a case for a shift towards treatment and rehabilitation programmes, he claims that Britain offers proof that ‘it is no good to have only law enforcement, which always shows it does not succeed’. Whatever the solution

Fraser Nelson

May’s quiet revolution

Do you remember the great parliamentary battle over privatisation of police services? Me neither, which is why Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is proving a better minister than Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary. The drive for savings in the police budget is leading two constabularies, West Midlands and Surrey, to outsource certain services. The Guardian has got hold of the tender documents and splashed with the story today. Yvette Cooper is angry — but, crucially, there’s nothing she can do. Theresa May doesn’t need legislation to enact this reform; it’s not even being done under orders of the Home Office. This is two police forces who would rather save money

Jonathan Jones

Private policing is nothing new

‘Revealed: hidden government plans to privatise the police’, proclaims the Guardian headline this morning. The story is that, in an attempt to protect frontline services in the face of a 20 per cent cut in government funding: ‘West Midlands and Surrey have invited bids from G4S and other major security companies on behalf of all forces across England and Wales to take over the delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police. The contract is the largest on police privatisation so far, with a potential value of £1.5bn over seven years, rising to a possible £3.5bn depending on how many other forces get involved.’ This

Peter Coleman

Australian Notes | 3 March 2012

I cannot be the only one to have been irritated by the tears of Anthony Albanese MP. Yes, gender roles have changed over recent decades and it is now considered OK for politicians to cry like footballers in public. Yet Winston Churchill was able to lead his blitzed country against Hitler without blubbering in public. So was Charles de Gaulle. Harry Truman led the US through the Korean War without breaking down in public. But Albo chokes up when he thinks about the Labor party! I can’t believe he was just turning it on for the cameras, can you? ••• The Prime Minister was right to keep telling us that

James Forsyth

Politics: The Liberal Democrats hold the key to boundary reform – and therefore the next election

The Cameroons believe they have come up with a policy that will deliver at least 20 more Tory seats at the next election. No. 10 is, understandably, determined to get this measure through: nothing else promises them anything like the same electoral dividend. But this silver bullet isn’t a tax cut or a new approach to Europe. It is a set of changes to the constituency boundaries. This boundary review has been designed to limit the pro-Labour bias in the Westminster electoral system. It reduces the number of parliamentary seats from 650 to 600, which notionally reduces the number of Labour MPs by 28. If its recommendations are enacted, the

Matt Ridley

The windfarm delusion

The government has finally seen through the wind-farm scam – but why did it take them so long? To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by

James Bartholomew

Secrets of Singapore

They learned from us – now we need to learn from them The last time I visited Singapore, I stayed at the charmingly run-down, distinctly colonial Raffles Hotel. I drank a Singapore Sling in the Long Bar, contemplated a well-fed cockroach in my room and fancied myself to be following in the footsteps of Somerset Maugham. It was more than 30 years ago. I felt like Milord Anglais, making my tour around the still pretty exotic Far East. Well, that’s all gone. Visiting again earlier this month I found a Singapore so prosperous that any possible sense of effortless and, of course, undeserved superiority has been replaced by something close

Mark Mason

An astronaut at 80

In a couple of weeks, Alan Bean will turn 80. He’s not planning any special celebration. If he does go out, it will probably be to a local restaurant in Houston, Texas. ‘I’ve eaten barbecue at this restaurant once a week, have done for 15 years,’ he tells me. ‘Nobody there has any idea that I’m anyone other than this old guy who likes barbecue.’ Few people even recognise his name. This is probably because Alan Bean was the fourth man to do something. His late colleague Pete Conrad was the third man to do the same thing — and no one used to recognise him either. The first two