Society

Saturday

Interconnect

Dumbing down: the proof

As a service to Spectator readers who still have any doubts about the decline in educational standards, we are printing these exam papers taken by 11-year-olds applying for places to King Edward’s School in Birmingham in 1898. ENGLISH GRAMMAR 1. Write out in your best handwriting:— ‘O Mary, go and call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,Across the sands o’ Dee.’The western wind was wild and dank with foam,And all alone went she. The western tide crept up along the sand,And o’er and o’er the sand,And round and round the sand,As far as eye could see.The rolling mist came down and hid the land —And

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 20 November 2004

BBC television is devoting a frenzied week to a children’s knockout spelling competition. Goodness knows, spelling needs attention, if Veronica’s vagaries are anything to go by. But even where words are spelt correctly, there is the difficulty of their pronunciation. ‘What about Julia?’ said my husband, trying to be ‘helpful’. I couldn’t think there was much doubt about the name’s pronunciation, but it turned out that he was talking about Herrick’s poem, with its couplet, ‘Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows/ That liquefaction of her clothes.’ The OED, 100 years ago, described that pronunciation of clothes, without sounding the th, as careless or vulgar. It admitted that in all English

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 20 November 2004

A white paper proposed a ban on smoking in restaurants and pubs that serve hot food. It also proposed the banning of television advertisements for ‘unhealthy’ food before 9 p.m., but this would be ‘ineffective and disproportionate’ according to the television regulators, Ofcom. The Hunting Bill was amended in the Lords to restore the government’s original provisions for the licensing of hunts; when it returned to the Commons the amended Bill was defeated by 321 to 204. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in a speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London that Europe and America must co-operate to find peace in the Middle East: ‘It is not

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 20 November 2004

Although hunt supporters are right to point out that people of all classes hunt, Labour MPs are equally right to see their ban on hunting, now at last being enacted, as a great blow against the upper classes. Very occasionally, you meet an upper-class person who is against hunting, but this is usually because of being made to do it by disliked parents, practically never because he or she considers it cruel. As for actually banning it, that way of thinking — passing laws just because you don’t like something — is foreign to the upper-class mind (perhaps instinct would be a better word). Hunting is close to the heart

The Spectator

Feedback | 20 November 2004

Oborne off target Peter Oborne seems to have spent too long in his stuffy London office and has developed a conspiracy theory too far concerning rural sports. He makes a number of unsupported assumptions in his comment on the Hunting Bill (Politics, 13 November). Perhaps he needs to get out more. BASC remains steadfastly opposed to the Hunting Bill, and has supported the Countryside Alliance through its legal protests in the run-up to the Bill. Tens of thousands of BASC members attended the marches in London and I have spoken at a number of rallies including one in Parliament Square and the recent demonstration in Brighton. We have privately and

Taki

Terror tactics

New York With the exception of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — whose circle of defenders and sympathisers have just come together at the Museum of Jewish Heritage here for a new documentary celebrating their martyrdom — there is no greater Cold War icon than Alger Hiss, the patrician, high-ranking state department official who passed government secrets to the Soviet Union. Hiss was exposed 60 years ago and did time for his crimes. The Left, however, always insisted he was framed despite the overwhelming evidence of his guilt. I sat next to Hiss once during a Spectator lunch and caught him red-handed telling a whopper about Bill Buckley and myself. As

Deborah Ross

Restaurants

Alas, half-term is over, my son is back at school, and I have the house back to myself during the day. Oh, how I miss him, or would do if I wasn’t so thrilled to get rid of the pesky old so-and-so. Oh dear, school today, I said on the first morning while pushing him out of the door, double-locking it from the inside and drawing the bolt. I did think about quickly moving while somehow forgetting to leave a forwarding address but then realised it would mean packing and that would be too boring for words. Still, it’s not as if I can forget him entirely during the day,

Frank Keating

Nation of league

This Saturday, 20 November, and next, Twickenham’s presumptuous clan gathers its travel-rugs round its knees and bays for colonials’ blood. Likewise, the hipflasks will warm cockles and loosen throats to raise the rafters for the boys in green, blue and red to strut the hard yards in Dublin, Edinburgh and Cardiff. While rugby’s autumn internationals will provide fun and a few telling pointers, the results, broadly, do not matter. With no World Cup to bother about till 2007, the domestic rugby season is focused on the ravishingly competitive Heineken Cup and, in the New Year, the age-old weekend-break traditions of the Six Nations tournament. Both these European fiestas, for the

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 20 November 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I don’t know whether you can help me but I thought it worth a try. About 15 years ago, I was charged, while on holiday in Australia, with a very minor offence which I felt was quite unjustified, and did not feel disposed to cancel my flight three days later and wait to appeal in court more than two weeks later. (I might also have lost my job, if I was three weeks’ late home.) I would now like to visit Australia again and am wondering if I will be turned back at the airport and/or charged with the original alleged offence and/or arraigned for skipping the

Danny Kruger

Diary – 20 November 2004

I’m in Sedgefield, County Durham, contesting the nomination for the Conservative candidate who will fight the Prime Minister for his seat in Parliament. I make my speech to the assembled Tories: tax, Europe, crime, education, pensions. Afterwards I go into the corridor and make agonising conversation with the other finalist. I smoke a cigarette. I go to the loo. I smoke another cigarette. They are taking an extremely long time. Eventually the chairman emerges and delivers the verdict. The other chap takes it well, slipping away with a smile and a handshake. The chairman takes me to the pub. In 1997 Mr Blair promised a low-tax government, to make education

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 20 November 2004

Government advisers are suggesting that religious education in schools should teach Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh beliefs. The purpose is to encourage ‘tolerance and respect’. Greeks and Romans would have found this incomprehensible. In the absence of divine and therefore authoritative scriptures, monotheistic, jealous gods did not exist in the ancient world, let alone ‘churches’ with a ‘priesthood’, imposing creeds, beliefs and moralities. Religion was a form of cult, hallowed by tradition, centred on rituals carried out in the right way at the right time. At its heart was sacrifice (lit., ‘making sacred’) when something useful to humans was made over to the god. With luck, the god

David Caute

What the President saw

A staff writer for the Boston Globe, Mark Feeley is also a lecturer in American Studies at Brandeis University. I mention this because evidence has been accumulating these past 20-odd years that American Studies departments, like Cultural Studies, Film Studies and, of course, Media Studies are busily engaged in subverting that central but antiquated notion dear to traditional history departments — ‘because’. Causality is oldhat, it’s risible, and it’s out. The new history is virtual history, or ‘alternate’ history, the kind that did not happen but might have happened, just as novels and movies and genre paintings depict realities which somehow failed to occur. In some cases like Oliver Stone’s

Jaspistos

Greenery-yallery

In Competition No. 2367 you were invited to supply an imaginary extract from the libretto of the flop musical Oscar Wilde. ‘I am going to stand my ground and fight,/ The things you two do just can’t be right,’ sang the Marquess to Bosie in that ill-starred production. Criticised for his lyrics, the author, Mike Read, loftily retorted, ‘Rhyming couplets didn’t do Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan much harm.’ There was a tricky contradiction in my request for something that would both amuse readers and make them squirm with embarrassment: some of you were too polished to embarrass and others too clumsy to entertain; still others offered lyrics that it

Paul Johnson

Dirge for the decline and fall of the Western intelligentsia

Whatever else the re-election of Bush signifies, it was a smack in the face for the intelligentsia. Like a crazed Kappelmeister sitting at a nightmare organ, they pulled out all the stops, from the bourdon in lead to the fiffaro, not excluding the trompeta magna, and what emerged, far from being a thanksgiving gloria in excelsis, was a lugubrious marche funèbre. In America they were all at it, from old Chomsky to that movie-maker who looks like a mushy jumbo cheeseburger. In Germany the Heidegger Left were goose-stepping in force. In France the followers of ‘Jumping Jack’ Derrida were at the barricades. Here in England all the usual suspects were

Christopher Fildes

We do our best to measure our pleasure but somehow it’s lost in the post

The postman who calls at 30 Able Road may be a new urban myth but, as myths do, he tells a story. The people at number 30 found that they were getting post for 30 Baker Street, 30 Charlie Avenue, 30 Dog Mews, 30 Easy Street and so on. When they compared notes, they worked out that this postman could read Arabic numerals but was still at sea with English street-names. Disbanding the old guard and taking on helpers like this under contract must have given a boost, however temporary, to the Post Office’s finances. This week its omnipresent chairman, Allan Leighton, will take some time off from stalking Sainsbury’s

Stephen Glover

Sacking Johnson is by far the best thing Howard has done since becoming leader

One of the hazards of writing a column about the press is that sooner or later you are bound to be cornered by an editor or journalist whom you have teased. I shall never forget the time I was harangued in the street by the charming wife of my old friend Peter Stothard. Sometimes one is cut in the lavatories of clubs by people whom one has quite forgotten having written about. A worse experience is waking up to find that an editor whom you have ragged has been appointed to the editorship of the paper for which you write. Such was my fate when Sir Max Hastings was made

The Spectator

How to be generous

The last few days have seen some hysterical over-reporting of a minor adjustment in the personnel of the Tory shadow arts team, and a woeful under-reporting of an excellent new policy proposal. John Whittingdale, the Shadow DCMS secretary, has announced a plan that could help rescue the finances of museums, libraries and galleries, and encourage a new culture in this country, of generosity, philanthropy and pride. Until Mrs Thatcher’s economic and fiscal reforms of the 1980s, Britain was noted for its ‘brain drain’. This, thankfully, was halted, yet in its place has been formed a cultural drain. Paintings, manuscripts and other private chattels are still being whisked across the Atlantic,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Lies, damned lies and education

When Tony Blair made his famous pledge to concentrate on ‘Education, education, education!’, maybe we all misheard, and he really said: ‘Obfuscation, obsfucation, obsfucation!’ After all, that is what his education ministers have spent the past seven years doing with school exam results. It isn’t hard to find a teacher these days who thinks there has been a lowering of standards of GCSEs. The dramatic improvement in pass rates over the past few years have not been achieved by better teaching or brighter children, they say, but by spoon-fed examination answers, excessive reliance on coursework, making it easier to get your parents to earn your qualifications for you. Easy though

Theodore Dalrymple

Second opinion | 20 November 2004

Many of my non-medical friends complain of the pointlessness of their jobs. What they do has no meaning, they say, no intrinsic worth, apart from paying the bills. My friends feel like caged mice which run incessantly inside wheels: an expense of spirit in a waste of effort. ‘At least,’ they say, ‘your job is worthwhile.’ ‘In what sense?’ I ask. ‘You help people.’ If only they knew. Compared with the doctors in a hospital like mine, Sisyphus had it easy. Light recreation such as his would come as a relief to us. There is, for example, a lady well-known to our hospital who attends every two weeks or so

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Death to Iraqis, not to foxes

In the scheme of things, it may not greatly matter whether fox-hunting survives in England. We live in a world of woe and suffering, of pestilence, poverty and war, where millions die each year from hunger or violence, where a vast crisis in western Asia threatens to erupt catastrophically. A sense of proportion should tell us that the future of a traditional country sport enjoyed by barely a quarter of a million people in a damp little island off the north-western corner of Europe cannot be of the highest importance. And yet the hunting controversy is also like a great sheet of lightning which has lit up the whole political