Society

Saturday

Margaret Lenton

Litigation, litigation, litigation

I love my job as a head teacher. It is really satisfying to be responsible for young people and to guide them in realising their potential. But sadly my time is increasingly occupied by lawyers and I have to divert an ever growing proportion of my budget away from staff, books and equipment towards defending and insuring against legal actions. Head teachers do, on occasion, have to exclude pupils. Parents are sometimes reluctant to believe that their child can do any wrong. In one case, a parent having chosen my school, which advertises discipline and strong sanctions, stated that discipline should not be imposed in any circumstances. He complained that

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 17 September 2004

The middle classes are apparently abandoning the work ethic in favour of leisure. Aristotle would have strongly approved — on condition that they knew what to do with it. ‘The dignity of labour’ is not a concept Greeks would have understood. There are two reasons. First, they did not have any unified concept of ‘work’ as one of man’s great functions. Instead, they saw a multiplicity of different occupations, one as boring as the next, whose purpose was simply to keep one from penury. In other words, work had no positive value. Second, Greeks did not distinguish, as we do, between a person and what he had to offer. So

Justin Marozzi

Diary – 17 September 2004

Before I relocated to Baghdad to participate in the reconstruction effort, several friends said they didn’t want to see me paraded on television in one of those natty orange boiler suits pleading for American and British troops to withdraw from Iraq with a rusty Swiss Army knife at my throat. Not a very original joke and I was grateful for their concern, but this beheading thing has sown a disproportionate fear among otherwise rational people. Yes, it’s extraordinarily dramatic and gruesome, hence the headlines all over the world that the terrorists so crave, but statistically it hardly figures. By my calculation, of the approximately 200,000 Coalition forces and foreign contractors

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 11 September 2004

‘In my opinion,’ said Doris Eades, 74, ‘the council has so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it and comes up with hair-brained schemes like this.’ So said a newspaper report on a scheme by Wolverhampton to get people to use bicycles. But was it hair-brained or hare-brained? The hare once played a larger part in the folk consciousness of England than the rabbit. The rabbit, or coney as it was called, was introduced by the Romans perhaps, but was popularised as a reserve of meat and fur by the Normans. I rather think the Anglo-Saxons, before they settled on the British mainland, were familiar with hares.

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 11 September 2004

Mr Andrew Smith resigned as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. This added interest to a Cabinet reshuffle by Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and provoked reheated speculation about his rivalry with Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Queen gave a donation for the people of Beslan, through the British Red Cross. Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said of the murders by terrorists at Beslan: ‘There are some things which happen amongst human kind which are almost inexplicable according to any basic moral norms — Nazism was and this is.’ Mr Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the editor of the al-Arabiya satellite network, said on BBC

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 11 September 2004

Q. Some time ago I introduced a friend of mine to a very distinguished journalist. Their friendship has clearly blossomed, because in a recent article the journalist glowingly described him as ‘the Essex historian and thinker’. My friend, for all his qualities, is a Toad of Toad Hall-like figure, both physically and mentally. The only recognisable part of the description is the word ‘Essex’; his only claim to being an historian is his ability to recite endless tedious lists of events and dates (focusing on those which show the French in a bad light), while his ‘thinking’ is confined to planning his next (gargantuan) lunch/dinner/cocktail or arranging his shooting calendar.

D J-Taylor

Where the funny meets the horrible

A century ago, Paradise might have appeared in the stout bindings of the Religious Tract Society and been distributed to the deserving young in the form of Sunday school prizes. Or perhaps not, given that it begins in the dining-room of an alien hotel where its heroine, all memory of her previous life temporarily erased, lugubriously breakfasts, having just committed a sexual act with an unappetising fellow-guest known only as ‘Mr Wispy’. However close its moral proximity to one of those Victorian temperance hymns with titles like ‘Don’t sell no more drink to my father’, A.L. Kennedy’s third novel is, in its relish of bedrock-level physical detail, quite thoroughly up

Stephen Glover

How Putin silences the journalists who criticise his brutality in Chechnya

The Prime Minister has enjoined us to be ‘in complete solidarity with Russia and the Russian people’, and invites us to draw a parallel between the terrorist threat from al-Qa’eda and the threat posed by Chechen lunatics. I am not so sure about that. Is it not possible that if Osama bin Laden had never been born and there had been no attack on the World Trade Center, Russia would still be besieged by appallingly cruel home-grown terrorists? It is easy to feel a sense of solidarity with the people of Beslan, even of Russia, but impossible to identify with President Putin and his government. We do not share the

The Spectator

Help the aged

Andrew Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, resigned this week, so he says, in order to spend more time with his family. Or maybe he was peeved at some of the comments made about him by his colleagues. What is certain is that he didn’t resign for the reason he ought to have done: that the government’s policy on pensions has been a failure. In 1997 our pension pots were brimming. Alone in Europe we looked forward to a well-heeled old age without impoverishing future taxpayers. Just seven years later, however, many seem doomed to a retirement on baked beans — bought with means-tested benefits. The change in fortunes for

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

A free market in religion

At nine in the morning, Cumnor in Oxfordshire looks like the setting for a Miss Marple mystery. Cotswold cottages run around the outside bend of a narrow high street and on the other side a grassy bank rises up to a graveyard. Nothing moves except the tops of fir trees growing among the tombstones. Standing in front of St Michael’s church I can see the roof of the Reverend Keith Ward’s house. Cumnor isn’t quite the sort of parish you’d expect to find the former Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, a liberal intellectual whom the Archbishop of Canterbury calls ‘a much loved and admired thinker’. In his book The

Frances Osborne

Lilla’s war with China

Little old ladies with bottles of ink, mounds of writing-paper and firm hands have long been the bane of government officials. There’s even a name for them: ‘Angry of Tunbridge Wells’. My great-grandmother, Lilla, whom I remember living in that venerable Kentish town, was Super-Angry. She was so angry that at the age of 100, after an extraordinary exchange of correspondence lasting 30 years and consuming many sheets of Basildon Bond, she succeeded in extracting a cheque from none other than the communist government of China. And when I was writing Lilla’s Feast, the story of her remarkable life, I discovered how she did it. Lilla had long been tough.

Mark Steyn

We still don’t get it

‘He is sedated,’ said Bill Clinton’s heart surgeon on Tuesday. ‘But he is arousable.’ I’ve never doubted it. That seems as appropriate a thought as any with which to consider the state of the new war three years on. Like former President Clinton, much of the West is sedated. But is it arousable? On the eve of this week’s anniversary, hundreds of children were murdered in their schoolhouse by terrorists. Terrible. But even more terrible was the reaction of what passes for the civilised world, the reluctance to confront the truth of what had occurred. The perpetrators were ‘separatists’, according to the Christian Science Monitor — what, you mean like

Friday

Diary – 10 September 2004

As somebody who loved model trains as a kid, and who took a year off school when he was 20 to work as a lineman for the Canadian National Railway, I got on the GNER train at King’s Cross for a trip to the Scottish Borders with a warm sense of familiarity and expectation. The carriages are like old Pullmans, which had a foot of concrete lining their bases to steady the ride and kept the cars upright in case of a derailment. The GNER cars have the smooth, fast ride of an old, comfy Cadillac. The trip to the Borders, an area with one of the world’s great set

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 10 September 2004

Today’s rich are not, apparently, giving enough of their wealth to good causes. The ancients would have known why. Euergesia — ‘benefaction, philanthropy’ — had always been seen as a virtue of the well-born Greek (for Aristotle it was an act that characterised the ‘magnificent’ man). It was, therefore, highly popular among the great and good of the Hellenic world, as the vast number of inscriptions and statues attesting such ‘euergetism’ indicate, whether erected by the euergetist himself or a grateful people. The culture spread to Rome too. Pliny the Younger, for example, endowed his home town, Como, with a school and a library, and in his will bequeathed it

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 4 September 2004

The Royal Mail paid £50 million in compensation after meeting none of its 15 targets in the first quarter of the financial year, delivering only 88.3 per cent of first-class letters on time between April and June, against a target of 92.5 per cent; Oxford saw only 68 per cent delivered on time. By July Glasgow still had one in five first-class letters late. The Electoral Commission recommended that all-postal voting should be dropped in British elections after reports of abuse and disorganisation in the pilots in June undermined public confidence; Mr John Prescott’s all-postal referendum on regional government for the North East on 4 November would have to go

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 4 September 2004

New Zealanders were amused to read that Mr David Blunkett required them to show fluency in English if they apply for British citizenship. New Zealand has produced some fine philologists, such as the late Norman Davis and Robert Burchfield, to teach us about our language. It has its own proper dialect that most of us neglect, or lump with Australian English. Oxford University Press has published a dictionary of New Zealand English and one of its slang, but popularly we still tend to conflate the two. Here are some examples I have found in newspapers or on the Internet: bach ‘small holiday home’; bludge ‘to sponge’; chook ‘chicken’; dairy ‘corner

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 4 September 2004

Dear Mary… Q. Last week I arrived to stay with some English friends near St Remy and was shown to a most delightful and certainly ‘best’ spare bedroom — with glorious views over the Camargue and beyond. You can imagine my astonishment when, on climbing into my luxurious bed later that night and folding the essential but always romantic mosquito net around the bed, a pair of extra-large men’s boxer shorts dropped on top of me. (I, incidentally, am a single woman and was travelling alone.) The pants had clearly been left behind by the guest immediately before me and had got muddled up in the mosquito net. My dilemma

Stephen Glover

It is now up to Lord Black to prove his innocence to the rest of the world

The excesses of Lord Black, former proprietor of the Telegraph Group, which owns this magazine, are mind-boggling. Of course they have not yet been proven in a court of law, and Lord Black continues to deny the allegations in his characteristically orotund language. But the author of the 500-page report condemning Lord Black is Richard Breeden, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in America, and his colleagues are equally well respected and disinterested people. Moreover, they have certainly provided chapter and verse to a level of detail that must — or should — be mortifying to Lord Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel. Lord Black may continue

The Spectator

Jobs for life

To the parents of Victoria Climbié, the eight-year-old girl who died in 2000 after being battered by her great-aunt and great-aunt’s boyfriend in a seedy Haringey council flat, the disciplinary procedures employed by British local government must seem to take place in a parallel universe. On Wednesday morning, listeners to Radio Four’s Today programme were treated to the pained tones of Lisa Arthurworrey, the social worker who had been responsible for Victoria’s welfare and who is now to appeal against her sacking by Haringey borough council for gross misconduct. Ms Arthurworrey complains that although she made mistakes she was misled by doctors and let down by her managers, and that

Friday

Simon Heffer

Diary – 3 September 2004

Whenever I feel psychotically depressed about this country — which, as I contemplate another nine years of Labour rule, is more and more often — I find myself being thankful that I do not have as my head of state President Chirac. I have come to believe that he is the price France pays for having Ravel, Manet, Cheval Blanc, Paris, foie gras and all those gorgeous pouting actresses. At the time of writing, slimy Jacques has not resolved the latest problem facing his country, the kidnapping of two French journalists in Iraq. Their captors have demanded that France drop the law forbidding the wearing of religious symbols in schools: