Society

Monday

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 26 September – 30 September 2011

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which — providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency — you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’, which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write — so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game, from political stories in your local paper, to

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Miliband: cuts are okay now

I’ve just caught up with Ed Miliband on Marr this morning (transcript here) and his aim seemed to be burying Ed Balls’ complaint about cuts being too fast and too deep. In its place, he called for more growth. Here’s my take on his interview: 1) He doesn’t complain about cuts.  “The basic message is this: we’ve got to cut the deficit, but the best and most important way of doing that is to grow our economy… A year ago there was a contested argument whether the government strategy should work. It’s not working.” You don’t hear him talk about Ed Balls’ “too hard, too fast” cuts, just a reference

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

‘England’s most closely guarded secret’

Dennis Creffield is admired by artists but little known to the wider public. Andrew Lambirth meets this octogenarian artist as his new show on the theme of William Blake and Jerusalem opens ‘I’m a peripatetic architectural draughtsman,’ says Dennis Creffield, best known for his magnificent series of charcoal drawings of the medieval English cathedrals, commissioned in 1987 by the Arts Council. He has indeed travelled the country, drawing not only cathedrals but also Welsh and English castles, the pagodas of Orford Ness in Suffolk (laboratories that were used for testing the trigger mechanisms of atomic bombs), the stately pile of Petworth House in Sussex, and many aspects of London. He

The Spectator

Letters | 24 September 2011

Euro bonds Sir: In your leading article, ‘A new deal with Europe’ (17 September), you argue that as Brussels will not agree to radical reform and massive deregulation, the only remaining options are to renegotiate our membership of the European Union or ‘pull out entirely’. However, we must be clear that unilateral withdrawal is out of the question. Over half the UK’s manufactured exports to the EU would face zero tariffs whether we were in or out of the EU. But if the UK left the EU without any new preferential trade agreement the remainder would face an average EU tariff of over 5 per cent, a decisive handicap in

The Spectator

Barometer | 24 September 2011

Objects in space — The six tonne US Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite was due to fall to Earth, with Nasa calculating that it has a one in 3,200 risk of striking a human. It poses less of a risk, however, than the 75 tonne Skylab did when it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in 1979. In the event, it fell on an uninhabited region of Western Australia. — There is plenty more potential danger from space junk, with an estimated 19,000 pieces of man-made material greater than 100mm across orbiting the Earth, including a glove and a camera dropped by astronauts. Most will burn up in space when they re-enter, but

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 24 September 2011

Home The International Monetary Fund reduced its growth forecast for Britain this year from 1.5 per cent to 1.1 per cent and for next year from 2.3 to 1.6 per cent. A debate rumbled on in government about whether to spend more money on public infrastructure works as dark financial clouds loomed. ‘What I will not do is provide cover for ideological descendants of those who sent children up chimneys,’ Vince Cable, the Business Secretary told the Liberal Democrat conference in Birmingham, in a speech warning of ‘difficult times ahead’ for Britain’s finances. Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, told the conference that the better off should pay

Dot Wordsworth

Eponymous

Eponymous should be an unusual word, like haplology or apotropaic, used in a narrow semantic field. Yet it is all over the place, in the press and on the lips of media talkers. Properly, it applies to someone who gives his name to anything, especially, the OED notes, ‘the mythical personages from whose names the names of places or peoples are reputed to be derived’. In writing that definition, the lexicographer no doubt had in mind the dictionary’s earliest illustrative quotation of the word, from 1846: ‘The eponymous personage from whom the community derive their name.’ That was from the immensely influential History of Greece by George Grote (1794-1871). Just

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 24 September 2011

Q. My first book comes out next month and the publishers are launching it with a drinks party in a London bookshop between 6.30 and 8 p.m. I can count at least 20 old friends and family, to say nothing of my editor and publicist, who will naturally expect me to have dinner with them afterwards. We don’t have a London flat any more. My husband would love to take ten people out to dinner but not 20 — not because of the expense, but because of the noise and the chaos. How do I choose without upsetting people? —Name withheld, Warwickshire A. You could be certain of hurting no

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: My wife is a tough cookie

As winter approaches, with snow forecast for next month, I’m anticipating a massive row with my wife. The problem is that Caroline refuses to switch the central heating on before the first day of winter, which falls on 22 December. It doesn’t matter if temperatures plummet to below zero in the interim. ‘Put on an extra jumper,’ is her standard response. As far as she’s concerned, anyone who turns the central heating on before winter has officially arrived is a big girl’s blouse. I sometimes wonder if this is the legacy of having gone to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. As Evelyn Waugh pointed out, anyone who has been to a British

Alan Judd

Motoring | 24 September 2011

The imminence of paying for a 17-year-old to learn to drive brings with it the unwelcome question of insurance. Rather more welcome is recent publicity about insurance revealing yet another conspiracy against the consumer. Some premiums have jumped by up to 40 per cent. The reason usually given — uninsured drivers for whom we all end up paying — is only part of the story, and not the major one. That honour goes to the automotive ambulance-chasers, the scam whereby accident management companies and credit hire operators are in league with insurance brokers — all three sometimes owned by the same private equity company. They take over the processing of

Melissa Kite

Real life | 24 September 2011

You know you’ve officially become a slob when you look down at a puppy chewing a pair of £350 Manolos and think, ‘Oh, thank heavens, she’s gone quiet.’ I started this spaniel-raising business with a million good intentions about being firm and using every difficult moment as an opportunity to teach and improve. ‘No, Cydney, leave,’ I said endlessly for the first 72 hours. ‘Cydney, Cydney, leave, leave, Cydney, leave…No, no…’ On and on it went. ‘Leave it, leave it, leave it, leave the rabbit, Cydney! Leave it! CYDNEY! Not the phone, NO! Leave the BlackBerry! Leave, leave it…’ After a few days, I was whimpering, ‘Oh, god, please, Cydney,

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 24 September 2011

Somewhat frayed around the edges after The Spectator’s ‘End of Summer Party’ I drove up to Norfolk to visit my country cousins. The corpses on the A143 told me I was getting deeper into the countryside. As well as the usual pea-brained pheasants, I saw a bloody badger, a broken fox and a magnificent, unmarked hare that was bigger than either of these. Normally, I would have stopped and taken the fox’s brush as a present for my grandson, but there was a car up my arse. I stayed with my uncle and aunt on their smallholding and was given my usual bed in a spare room that doubles as

Taki

High life | 24 September 2011

Gstaad One of the safest countries on earth is in trouble. Good old Helvetia, a country more upside-down than sideways, according to Papa, could end up on its head. Its industrial base might melt as its currency is much too strong for its own good, and deflation might set in as the Swiss National Bank is printing good money to tie its fortune to the euro. Lashing the franc to the euro seems a suicidal thing to do, but such are the joys of global finance. Mind you, I don’t understand a thing and am on my way down to see some bankers who will explain things, not that I

Clarissa Tan

Obama’s new best buddy – Warren Buffett

The politics of ‘get the rich’ is going global and even the rich are joining in. While few countries have adopted the equivalent of Britain’s 50p tax, many are baring their teeth at the very well-off. In America, this is now being done by an unlikely alliance between Barack Obama and Warren Buffet. The billionaire investor is allowing his name to be appended to Barack Obama’s new tax-the-rich-more policy, which apparently follows the ‘Buffett Rule’. The Buffett Rule, which draws its basic principle from an op-ed Buffett wrote for the New York Times, is this: people making more than $1 million a year should pay a tax rate that’s at

David Blackburn

Medvedev clears the way for Putin

President Dmitri Medvedev has named his successor: one Vladimir Putin. Reports from Moscow say that Medvedev will step aside and support the man he succeeded in elections next March. This turn of events is not particularly surprising and Putin is a certain victor: as Pavel Stroilov revealed on Coffee House last week, Putin has been practicing that singularly Russian art of eliminating the opposition. Stroilov also warned Western governments against falling into Putin’s embrace. Russia is forecast to grow very quickly in the next 30-odd years, retaining its spot in the G7 according to PwC’s recent research paper, The World in 2050. Developed countries will covet those burgeoning resources; but,

Frances Weaver

The great euro swindle

Finally, the Eurosceptics have been vindicated. But will their dishonest opponents ever be held to account? Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse. Meanwhile the pro-Europeans find themselves in the same situation as appeasers in 1940, or communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The last Blairite

Jim Murphy is that rare breed, a genuinely working-class, modern British politician. We meet on the eve of Labour conference in a café in an upmarket shopping centre in his native Glasgow and he begins by talking about his childhood. Labour’s 44-year-old shadow defence secretary was born on a Glasgow housing estate and spent his early years ‘sleeping in a drawer’, he says, in a one-bedroom house containing four generations of his family. But there’s no self-pity or faux-nostalgia in his reminiscing. What defines Murphy and his politics is not his family’s poverty, but their determination. When his father lost his job, he simply got on a bus and travelled

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 24 September 2011

In Competition No. 2714 you were invited to supply a poem that begins ‘’Twas brillig…’ and continue, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, using your own neologisms. ‘Jabberwocky’ has, of course, spawned countless parodies and been translated into many tongues. Frank L. Warrin’s frabjous French version, ‘Le Jaseroque’, appeared in the New Yorker in 1931. Here are the first couple of stanzas: Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave. Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux Et le mômerade horsgrave. Garde-toi du Jaseroque, mon fils! La gueule qui mord; la griffe qui prend! Garde-toi de l’oiseau Jube, évite Le frumieux Band-à-prend! The germ there of a future assignment,

Bruce Anderson

Drink: Days of wine and unions

At Tory party conferences circa 1980, there would usually be a day when the Daily Telegraph team looked glum. One would enquire why. ‘Dunno why I’m bothering to write this. Word from London is that we won’t have a paper tomorrow. The inkies’ll stop the presses.’ In those days, the print workers’ unions would always use the Tory conference to remind the world who really ran Fleet Street. Then came Rupert Murdoch. His record may not be wholly angelic, but the victor of Wapping is entitled to the nation’s gratitude. Even when I joined the Sunday Telegraph in 1986, a few pre-Wapping vestiges survived. The canteen, a necessary source of

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rugby players are thick middle-class upstarts – at least footballers know their place

Apparently, England recently beat Georgia in something rather ambitiously called the Rugby World Cup. The word ‘world’ is used here in much the same way as the Americans deploy it in relation to other vanishingly unpopular sports such as baseball or American football, i.e. sports which nobody else in the world plays except for the Americans and their satrapies. Only 27 people in Georgia have even heard of rugby, and only 15 of those are under the age of 127. (They are very long lived in Georgia: the oldest people in the world come from that region of the Caucasus, which has led many scientists to study their diets extremely