Society

Sunday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Dividing his time

I don’t know if you watched the show, but there was a bravura performance from the British historian Simon Schama on Newsnight last Thursday evening. He spent much of the time furiously condemning the venality and greed of the bankers in accepting large bonuses. He was, for a while, wracked by a sort of camp hysteria, spluttering with fury, eyes revolving, hands flailing, in the manner of a nonagenarian dowager aunt addressing the question of immigration. Mr Schama divides his time, as he admitted, between the US and Britain. I wonder in which of the two countries he prefers to pay his income tax — the UK, where it’s about

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Raise the tax threshhold and let youth prevail

Youth unemployment is approaching crisis levels in Britain. For almost two decades, Britain’s more flexible labour market had favourable effects on youth employment. But the re-regulation of the British economy has narrowed the difference between our jobs market, and that of the continent. Meanwhile the British poverty trap has been strengthened by a dysfunctional welfare state: British workers can in some circumstances keep as little as 5p in every extra pound they earn if they find work. Who would break their back for less than 50p an hour? We’re paying people not to bother, so little wonder that most of the employment rise — in the last government, and under

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Get

English teachers are often remembered for two reasons. I don’t know which is more damaging. The first is for having made a pupil think she was writing well. The second is for having inculcated a few arbitrary rules, such as not to split an infinitive or to end a sentence with a preposition, thus enabling a pupil in future years to say: ‘I was always taught that…’ Someone wrote to me this week saying: ‘I was always taught that get is a word to be avoided. There is always a word you can use instead.’ Perhaps so, just as one could avoid the word lambent or entasis. The frequent use

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Food: Conference call

The Grand Hotel, Brighton, is the most beautiful hotel in England. It is bright and shiny like Simon Cowell’s teeth, surrounded by something very ugly, like Simon Cowell’s face. It even managed to look beautiful when the IRA blew a cartoon hole in it, from which Margaret Thatcher emerged covered in dust and more dangerous than ever, like ­Grendel’s mother. Maybe it is the memory of all that adultery, but the Grand is a happy place, the hotel that Londoners flee to, have bad sex and look out the ­window at the English Channel, a stretch of water so boring it looks more like paint than water. The English Channel

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 25 February 2012

Q. How, without causing offence, can you stop someone sitting next to you on an aeroplane or train from talking to you all the way through the journey? I find this often happens to me, and once you engage it is hard to bring the conversation to a close. I count on these journeys as opportunities to catch up on reading. — H.A., London W8 A. First soften the blow by talking animatedly for a few minutes. Then put your hand over your mouth and confess in despairing mode, ‘I always get so tempted to talk when I meet someone interesting on a plane/train. Will you promise to stop me

Melissa Kite

Real life | 25 February 2012

We few, we happy few. South London-based working cocker spaniel owners, I mean. We meet up on Tooting Common most days to exchange tips for cocker crisis management. The dogs play together as we have our group therapy sessions. Cydney’s best friends are Betsy and Mable, both black with white bibs like her, and then there’s Rusty the roan, who is the veteran of the bunch. These animals are not indigenous to south London, but then who is? At least mine gets to go to the country every other day where she flushes stray partridge to her heart’s content. She has learnt to trot alongside the horse and once a

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 25 February 2012

On Valentine’s Day I took a young lady out on a date. She was so young that the forms of address that she used in the brief flurry of emails leading up to the big day were entirely new to me and I had to Google them to find out what she meant. She called me ‘biatch’, for example, which I now know is the latest all-purpose variant of the African-American slang word ‘bitch’ — a term of endearment for one’s girlfriend. I was very excited and even a little nervous as I hadn’t been out with a young lady for a long time. Fortunately, the swollen half of my

Taki

High life | 25 February 2012

Who is worse, the pusher or the addict? I’d say it’s 50–50 as they sustain each other, although the addict has the moral high ground. Greece is the addict, and the pushers are German and French banks, with Brussels the overall godfather shipping the stuff in from Afghanistan. The godfather is not the cuddly type played by Brando and De Niro, but an autocoprophagous degenerate who managed a coup d’état while Europe slept and is now defending his turf with Caligulan levels of depravity. If I could have one wish it would be to see the dregs of Europe — dwarfs such as Barroso, Draghi, Rehn, Van Rompuy and the

The Spectator

Letters | 25 February 2012

Forfeiting the VC Sir: Although Charles Moore (Notes, 18 February) is correct to say (quoting Colonel Tim Collins) that a holder of the Victoria Cross cannot be stripped of it whatever subsequent disgrace he suffers, he could have added that this is so only thanks to royal intervention. Early in the last century, some functionary proposed, in a characteristic display of official spite, that VCs should lose the decoration if they were convicted of a serious offence. This came to the attention of King George V, whose sense of decency, just as characteristically, was outraged. As he protested, the VC was awarded for supreme gallantry, which nothing could subsequently efface.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 25 February 2012

This column is written from St Andrews, where our son is in his last year as an undergraduate. It is the most perfect university town I know. Held in on two sides by the Firth of Tay and the sea, and by the famed golf course on the third, it can scarcely expand at all. So when you breast the hill on the Anstruther road, you see the spires and the old stone wonderfully compacted in front of you, and the water beyond. North Street and South Street seem subtly to curve (I am not sure if they actually do) so that they converge on the noble ruins of the

Roger Mosey

Diary – 25 February 2012

When I took the job as director of the BBC’s coverage of London 2012, my cousin asked if anything about the job kept me awake at night. The truth is nothing — so far. I can see that Britain’s television screens going black at the start of the 100 metres final would be bad, since there isn’t much recovery time in 9.6 seconds. Fortunately, however, we’re not wholly dependent on live events; and the pleasure of recent weeks has been seeing previews of what will make the whole year feel special. The best example is the ‘Sceptred Isle’ soliloquy by Patrick Stewart from our new television production of Richard II,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 25 February 2012

Home Immigration officials did not check the details of 500,000 people entering Britain by Eurostar trains, and left unread the biometric chip in passports of people entering the United Kingdom on 14,812 occasions in the first half of 2011, according to a report by John Vine, the independent chief inspector of the UK Border Agency. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, told Parliament that the UK Border Agency would be split in two, with the UK Border Force becoming a separate law-enforcement body. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, confirmed the controversial appointment (opposed by the Business, Innovation and Skills select committee) of Professor Les Ebdon, the vice chancellor of the University

The Spectator

George should listen to Danny

Britain is in the middle of the deepest slump in our modern history. What can be done? The best idea we seem to have is one which Danny Alexander drew up on the back of an envelope. When advising Nick Clegg, the now Chief Secretary to the Treasury came up with the idea that no one paid below £10,000 a year should pay income tax. His short-lived predecessor, David Laws, reprised the idea this week, calling for the policy to be financed by cutting higher-rate tax relief on pensions. The Liberal Democrats are rightly exploiting one of the more worrying gaps in British politics: the vacuum where a Tory growth

Peter Hoskin

Willetts tries to dampen the flames around Ebdon

Siphoning the contents of two brains through one mouth and on to a single page will generally produce eclectic results. And that’s certainly the case with David Willetts’ interview with the Times (£) this morning. The universities minister manages to range across subjects that include Robert Falcon Scott, climate change, the Falklands and universities access. He even reheats one of his old theories about Feminism and social mobility in a way that (coupled with the interview’s headline: ‘Moving on and up is very hard — and feminism is partly to blame’) makes it sound far more provocative than I think it’s meant to be, and much weaker for it. The

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A few kind words of advice for Rachel Cusk

How can we help the talented writer Rachel Cusk to overcome the extraordinary hurt she has suffered as a consequence of losing her family and, far more importantly, her feminist identity? Mrs Cusk has been explaining, at some length, and repeatedly, to like-minded souls at the Guardian the anguish occasioned by the apparent disappearance of this latter possession. She first detailed, over what seemed to be many, many thousands of words, how she felt now that her marriage had come to an end. She left her husband because she was tired of him, it seems, and her children now shuttle back and forth between the two domiciles — one familiar

Avi Shlaim

An Israeli spring?

The revolutions sweeping through the Arab lands present Israel with a historic opportunity: to become part of the region in which it is located and to join with pro-democracy forces in forging a new Middle East. So far, however, the Arab Spring has not resonated well at any level of Israeli society. Israel’s leaders have ignored the opportunities and greatly inflated the risks and dangers arising out of the Arab Spring. Consequently, the dreams of the young pro-democracy protesters have turned into the stuff of nightmares for Israeli strategic planners. A reappraisal is urgently needed to stop the Arab Spring from becoming Israel’s winter. Israel has always prided itself on

Florence King

Three men and a vote

The contest for the Republican nomination is stuck in the rogues’ gallery stage Fredericksburg, Virginia An election year in America is just that — a year. The 2012 race has just kicked off and still has eight months to go, but it is already having a critical effect on me: keeping up with the contest for the Republican nomination makes me want to run away and join the ladies’ auxiliary of the French Foreign Legion. Choosing the nominee for the out-of-power party is a process of elimination. We start with an omnium gatherum, reduce it to a rogues’ gallery, and end up with a candidate. As I write this we

Ferdinand Mount

Class is back

…and the divisions are more bitterly felt than ever Until recently, the British middle classes felt quite good about themselves. The class war was over, and they had won it. Pretty much everyone wanted to join the middle classes. If they were not already members, the way things were going they very soon would be. ‘Embourgeoisement’ was the sociologists’ word for what was happening. Contrary to Marx’s flight plan, the bourgeoisie was turning out to be the preferred destination of History. No longer was British society shaped like a pyramid, with a steepling summit of idle toffs and an enormous broad base of deprived and discontented proles. It had already

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Beware – I would say to believers – the patronage of unbelievers

This goes to print on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. So allow me to pitch in to February’s religion-versus-secularism debate from a new direction. As an unbeliever I wish to complain on behalf of serious religious belief. Faith is being defended by the wrong people, in the wrong way. ‘Faith’ means faith. Doubt is not faith. Faith is not seeking but finding. Real Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Jewish believers are being patronised by kindly agnostics who privately believe that the convictions of those they patronise are delusions. A lazy mish-mash of covert agnosticism is being advanced in defence of religion as a social institution. But ‘whatever floats