Society

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 20 September 2008

OK. I’ll be honest. It’s been a bad fortnight, and I simply don’t understand any of the things you might expect me to be writing about. I don’t understand the fuss about teaching creationism in schools, because I can’t see that it would take very long. (‘God did it. Don’t go to the Galapagos. Class dismissed.’) In fact, I don’t understand anything about creationists at all. I don’t understand why there are suddenly so many of them if nobody even goes to church, and I don’t understand whether Sarah Palin is a creationist, or isn’t one, or how it can be possible for this to be in any way vague.

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 20 September 2008

Today’s Friday so we must be in Spain Recently a Syrian lorry driver, making his cumbrous way across Turkey and Europe to Gibraltar, and following his satellite navigation system and online mapping service, found himself in Lincolnshire, on the Gibraltar Point Nature Reserve. These devices cannot make allowance for monoglot ignorance and soggy IQs of that magnitude. Nor do they merit the attack on what she called ‘corporate cartography’ recently launched at the RGS by Mary Spence. She is president of the Cartographic Society and ought to know better. Route maps on a ‘need-to-know’ basis, that is, omitting everything you don’t need, are not new: far from it. The distinction

James Young

Competition | 20 September 2008

In Competition No 2562 you were invited to write a soliloquy by someone prone to malapropisms or misquotations, or a dialogue between them. The trouble with this comp, as I realised when the entries started to come in, is that the two categories overlap; a misquotation often is a malapropism. Happily this didn’t put too many of you off, and there were plenty of verbal absurdities that would have had ’em rolling in the aisles in 1775. It’s many years since I read The Rivals and I didn’t find it very funny then; even less so now. Too much Sheridanfreude, as Mrs M would have it. Today malapropisms prompt embarrassment,

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 20 September 2008

I recently saw a photograph of a street vendor’s stall in Argentina. The menu reads simply Orange Juice $5. Jugo de Naranja $4. Here unsuspecting Anglophones are paying a premium of 25 per cent for not knowing Spanish. It’s a practice known to economists as price discrimination — in other words setting a price in proportion to a customer’s propensity (or indeed ability) to pay. There’s a lot of it about — and in the internet age we can expect to see it more and more. How low a price will a website quote you for your new Mini Cooper if it knows you already own a Jaguar? It’s reminiscent

Sarfraz Manzoor

I found an undiscovered country: Great Britain

This summer, as a consequence of the credit crunch, rising air fares and a strong euro, more than half of all Britons chose to spend their holidays in this country. Predictably this was also the summer that proved to be one of the dullest and wettest on record. August may have been, according to the Met Office, the UK’s seventh wettest since records began in 1929, but for me there was a silver lining to the rainclouds. Like many working-class British Asians of my generation, we never went on holidays during my childhood. In recent years I have attempted to make amends by travelling as much as possible, but this

Prue Leith

Pay attention at the back of the class, Mr Balls

When I first met John Abbott 20 years ago he told me a story: as a young teacher at the prestigious Manchester Grammar School he had led several expeditions of boys to study agriculture in rural pre-revolutionary Iran. After a week the village headman felt he knew John well enough to ask him a difficult question: ‘These young men,’ he said, ‘they are so tall, so strong, so beautiful. But what use are they? They cannot reap, they cannot ride a donkey, they cannot make a fire, they cannot even sew or sweep or cook like our girls.’ This stopped young Abbott in his tracks. The Iranian headman had a

The Spectator

Long live capitalism

Detached amusement might describe the reaction of many people to the sight of well-paid Lehman Brothers employees being escorted off the bank’s premises, carrying their personal possessions in champagne boxes tucked beneath their arms. Displaying either greed or financial acumen to the last, one newly unemployed banker managed to buy himself 30 bananas to use up the credit on his girovend card while he still had the chance. But amusement is far from the most appropriate response; we have the right to feel anger at the way bankers have collectively managed to trash their industry. For those who, like this magazine, have been staunch defenders of free markets and light

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Global Crisis Deepens

Uganda’s ethics and integrity minister recognises that these are perilous times. Women wearing mini-skirts, he says, are a danger to public safety, responsible for all manner of traffic accidents. What’s wrong with a miniskirt? You can cause an accident because some of our people are weak mentally.” He continued arguing that, “if you find a naked person you begin to concentrate on the make-up of that person and yet you are driving.” According to Foreign Policy: The BBC notes that [Mr] Buturo is seeking to rid Uganda of its many vices, and inappropriate dress is just one of the many indecent items that appear on the minister’s list. Among others

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Lance Armstrong: A Sceptic Writes…

More Culture11: I’ve a piece arguing that no-one should be terribly happy about Lance Armstrong’s decision to come out of retirement next season. Snippet: Unlike fans in other sports, such as baseball or track and field, many cycling fans simply don’t see doping as a criminal or ethical offense. In its way, then, cycling is the purest distillation of the logic behind elite sport: Super-human performance demands supra-human resources. It is the cost of doing business. We might more profitably ask why our attitudes to drug-use have changed. Everyone has known for decades that the peloton has been a pharmacy on wheels. Until recently, this bothered few people. These days,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Labour form book: Alan Johnson

Coffee House is running a series of posts on the contenders to succeed Gordon Brown as Labour party leader.  The latest is below.  Click here for our profile of David Miliband, and here for Jon Cruddas. Alan Johnson, 58, Secretary of State for Health Pros Impossible to hate: Johnson is, as one political operative put it to me, the only member of the Cabinet who when he appears on TV  doesn’t make the public want to throw something at the set. After 11 years in government, having a leader who the public are at least prepared to listened to would be a major boon for Labour. While dampening the public’s

Michael Millar

How to make money out of turmoil

This is the best financial advice I’ve heard all week: If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it  would now be worth £4.95.  With HBOS, earlier this week your £1000  would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now  be worth less than £5, but if you bought £1000 worth of Tennents Lager  one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium  re-cycling plant, you would get £214. So based on the above statistics  the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. For more from Michael Millar, head over to Trading Floor.

Henry Rymill

Join the discussion

Over at the new Spectator Wine Club, we’ve got a discussion board on which you can instantly post and respond to threads on any aspect of the wine world.  The debate’s already kicked off – so click here, sign up, and make sure you don’t miss out!

Mark Daniell

The Ryder Cup tees off

We’ve all been there: the first tee, the dimpled white orb sitting serenely on its throne, the shimmering green fairway, sirenlike in the distance. We’ve all felt the weight of the club in our one-gloved grip, the flex of the shaft; envisaged the crack and ping of contact. The 37th Ryder Cup starts today and that exact same feeling of expectation will be experienced by each of the European elite as they take on the much-scorned might of American golf. Of course, I had to stop the personalised introduction at a rather crucial place for it to have any validity, as after that point the comparison quickly wanes. Whereas the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

China steps in

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for – China moving in to the chaos and snapping up the giants of Western capitalism. Bloomberg reports that China Investment Corp. may be buying half of Morgan Stanley. The Gulf States got burned by using their sovereign wealth funds to take a chunk of Citibank when the bear market still had plenty to go. I suspected China would wait until the market bottomed, then move with a vengeance. America is particularly allergic to Chinese deals – remember that kerfuffle over New York’s ports coming under Arab control a couple of years back? But things were liquid then. If it’s a Chinese takeover

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Sports for people who don’t like sport

At Culture11, Michael Brendan Dougherty has a fine piece on how the people who run sports are more interested in catering to people who don’t like sport than for those who, like, actually do. He’s writing about the modern baseball experience but everything he says also, of course, applies to cricket. Especially Twenty20 cricket: Like so many modern stadiums, the Nationals Ballpark experience doesn’t trust the show it is ostensibly putting on: a baseball game. It partakes in the sensibility the brain-zapped sensibility that’s come to dominate live sports. That’s perfect for the jerks who don’t care for the sport. For the rest of us, though, it’s disheartening. The operating

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Taxpayers’ Fantasy Football

Small guest-posting at The Plank on taxpayers’ football. We have Newcastle United and Northern Rock, the Americans get AIG and Manchester United. Sums up the “Special Relationship”, you might say… [Link corrected. Thanks NDM]

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Newsnight’s focus group offers encouragement to Clegg and a warning to the Tories on tax

Frank Luntz is the Marmite of polling: you either love him or hate him. His focus group on Newsnight tonight comparing the three party leaders made—as expected—for interesting viewing. Although I’d have preferred to see the potential Labour leadership candidates tested. I imagine that the Lib Dems will be crowing for weeks about its finding that people warmed far more to Clegg than the other two party leaders. The first thing that struck me was how Tony Blair still so dominates British politics. The panellists saw both Brown and Cameron through the prism of Blair. When the group were offered the chance to bring Blair back, they went for it

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Labour form book: Jon Cruddas

Coffee House is running a series of posts on the contenders to succeed Gordon Brown as Labour party leader.  The latest is below.  To read our profile of David Miliband, click here. Jon Cruddas, 46 Pros Clean hands: Cruddas has served in neither the Brown nor the Blair cabinets so it would be harder for the Tories to pin Labour’s failures on him, and he is not compromised by association with the failed Brown premiership. Also, Cruddas hasn’t been a participant in the Blairitie-Brownite wars so he gives Labour a chance to break out of that destructive cycle. Anti-politics politics: Cruddas doesn’t look or sound like a typical Westminster politician.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown’s dangerous interventionism

Yesterday, Downing Street was keen to take the credit for the Lloyd’s HBOS deal. But Brown is playing a dangerous game. First of all, there is the issue highlighted by Alphaville of whether there has been tinkering with the deal to make sure that Edinburgh remains a major UK financial centre. It also appears that someone has leaned on Lloyds not to make the maximum efficiency savings. Then, there is the question of what Brown is doing apparently telling Lloyds to lend in the way that HBOS did. The FT’s Westminster blog reports Brown as saying, “We’ve also insisted on assurances from the new company [Lloyds/HBOS] about their mortgage lending