Society

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Record migration, nurses on strike and Christmas turkeys struck down

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, proposed in his speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet to treat China with ‘robust pragmatism’. The Chinese ambassador to Britain was summoned to the Foreign Office following the arrest and beating of a BBC journalist, Ed Lawrence, in Shanghai. Net migration reached 504,000 in the year to June – the highest recorded, the Office for National Statistics estimated. A man was arrested in Gloucestershire over the deaths of at least 27 people who drowned in the Channel in a dinghy last year. Migrants with symptoms of diphtheria would be put into isolation, ministers said, as more than 50 cases were detected. The Online Safety

Douglas Murray

The new vandals: how museums turned on their own collections

This week I had the pleasure of going to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I say ‘the pleasure’ but visiting the Pitt Rivers was never precisely a pleasure. Twenty years ago, as an undergraduate, the collection was something of a rite of initiation. The place, filled with strange and wondrous objects, was famed above all for its gruesome pickled heads: artefacts reminiscent of the ‘coconut’ that the one-eyed Brigadier Ritchie-Hook collects in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.  What did we think of them in those now distant days? That they were part of another age, naturally – a collection of artefacts from another time, representing another era, with its interests

The Spectator

2581: In the balance – solution

The theme word is scales: 1D, 14 and 40 are creatures with scales; 5, 9 and 17 are musical scales; 13, 34 and 39 all gave their names of scientific scales. 33 was to be highlighted. First prize Mrs D. Selvidge, Vale, Guernsey Runners-up G. Snailham, Windsor; H.A. Hyman, London W1

Pabulum

2584: Song XI

‘10/30’ (4,1,4,3,2,4) is the first line of a song whose tune, originally called ‘1D’ (6,2,1,5), was composed by a future 40D/2 and was often played by 39/6. The song’s title explains 34. The composer’s surname will appear diagonally in the completed grid and must be shaded.         Across    1    City in Israel bloke traverses (5)    7    Mate inside once stole jelly (6) 12    Purgative rice pariah concocted (5-5) 14    Perhaps Daphne ruled wearing crown (9) 16    Danced tango with Pole (4) 17    Fish connect mentally (7) 18    Languishing Welshman cried continuously (3-4) 19    Short rope secures sail (3) 20    Wiseacre stops career criminal (7) 22    Veteran acquired gun

Ross Clark Ross Clark

It’s time we stopped subsidising the railways

Rail travel has never been cheap, but should we really each be paying £500 a year even if we never set foot on a train? That, according to figures released by the Office of Rail and Road today, is astonishing sum that each household had to contribute to government subsidies for running the railways in the year to March 2022: a total of £13.3 billion. That is just the subsidy for running existing services; it doesn’t include the billions being spent on HS2. Not that this largesse has, of course, prevented rail workers from demanding above-inflation pay rises, and striking when they are denied them. If they were working in any other

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Balenciaga and fashion’s child sexualisation problem 

For a long time now, high fashion – with the alibi of being ‘art’ – has tried on rape, self-harm, heroin-chic and of course the simple, timeless classics of anorexia/bulimia as titillating ‘looks’. Anything to keep an enervated haute couture industry (for many years selling mainly in Russia, China and the Middle East, though post-pandemic even these are dropping off) in the headlines.   Ambiguous – to say the least – about the beauty of the female body, the mainly gay male world of high fashion has, after a brief period of pretending to embrace ‘diversity’ (anything above a size eight) returned to physiques in which any semblance of female sexual

Lucy Dunn

Why not let pharmacists prescribe medication?

It started as a small red shadow on my nose that gradually began to spread as the inflammation took hold. Soon the lesion was painful. A golden crust appeared and my suspicions were confirmed: impetigo. Impetigo is an incredibly infectious skin condition – and if left untreated, it can scar. Topical antibiotics – fucidin ointment – work a treat, but I had just moved to London and had no GP in the city. I wasn’t too worried, though. The importance of the ‘multidisciplinary team’ had been branded on to my brain from day one of medical school and so I called my nearest Boots. ‘I have impetigo,’ I told them,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

In defence of fairy tales

One by one, life’s harmless little pleasures are outlawed by an overweening, repressive government. The Online Safety Bill has been doctored by MPs to stop people making use of ‘deep fakes’. This means that my enjoyable pursuit of Photoshopping the heads of politicians I dislike onto the naked, writhing bodies of Russian porn stars and sending the resultant images, anonymously, on Christmas cards to members of the local clergy is now illegal. In future I will have to get the consent of each politician before I send them off to the vicar. I had a great one recently of Liz Truss going at it like the clappers with Mark Drakeford,

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: poems to mark the centenary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb

In Competition No. 3277, you were invited to supply a poem to mark the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Fifty years ago, amid a wave of Tut mania, some 1.6 million people queued up to see the boy king at the British Museum. Nick MacKinnon and his mum were among them and he earns a commendation for his account of their outing. In a diverse, clever and technically accomplished entry, Roger Rengold, A.H. Harker, Michael Jameson, Paul A. Freeman, Donald Mack and Robin Hill also shone, but the prizes go to the seven printed below, whose authors snaffle £20 each. Three thousand years of strangers own his

Dot Wordsworth

When did oranges become ‘easy-peelers’?

‘Jersey Royals are easy-peelers and I don’t fancy one in my stocking,’ said my husband, lapsing into sense. I had been complaining about supermarkets labelling all little orange citrus fruits ‘easy-peelers’. We have called oranges oranges since the 14th century. The bitter orange became known as the Seville orange. Both Thomas Nashe and Shakespeare joked at the end of the 16th century about being civil like an orange. In contrast, the sweet kind was known as a China orange. Pepys was pleased to get hold of some China oranges in March 1666, but by the days of the racehorse Eclipse (foaled during the solar eclipse of 1764 and living till

Luke McShane

No. 731

White to play. Sindarov-Sarin, World Team Championship, Jerusalem 2022. Sindarov has an extra pawn and a dominant position. Which move did he play to ensure a quick knockout? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 5 December. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 Be5+! Bxe5 2 Qxe8+ or 1…Rxe5 2 Qf6+ and mate follows next move. Last week’s winner Cecil Taitz, London NW4

Luke McShane

World Team Championship

The young team from Uzbekistan, who took gold medals at the Olympiad in Chennai, came close to repeating that achievement at the World Team Championship in Jerusalem last month. They cruised through the group stage, quarters and semis, and met China in the final, who got there despite fielding none of their elite players, such as world No. 2 Ding Liren. The match promised to be close, and it was China who triumphed. Their star player was Jinshi Bai, who scored 8.5/11, including this crucial win from the final. Bai Jinshi-Shamsiddin Vokhidov World Team Championship, Jerusalem, Nov 22 In the diagram position, 34 Qa7 Rc8 is balanced, but Bai found a clever

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I stop guests at my overseas properties leaving with the plug adapters?

Q. I have become a lodger in a fortunate friend’s flat in Mayfair. We are both single and I am keen to start giving parties there. I had a trial run which was successful, bar the presence of one inebriated guest who went around indiscriminately insulting people – for example he walked up to a female guest and swore at her, before jeering at another guest’s hairstyle, proclaiming: ‘Only a Nazi would have hair like that.’ To top it all, he fell asleep on the dancefloor. He has a loyal harem of female handlers who look after him and go around apologising in his wake. Inexplicably this man is ‘best

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club: a peach-laden offer from Yapp Bros

I woke this morning to find blossom on our cherry tree. For a few blissful seconds I thought it was spring and that I’d slept through Christmas. The sun was shining, the birds were singing and I felt faint with joy. But reality – and Christmas Affected Doom, Depression and Despondency – soon kicked in: we’re still on the road to Noël. At least that means fine wine is still to be had. This peach-laden offer from Yapp Bros is our last but one this year. Do get stuck in. Quincy, in the Loire Valley, is the second oldest AOC in France and the 2021 Domaine des Bruniers Quincy (1)

Graeme Thomson

The art of protest songs

The extraordinarily brave anti-CCP protestors have been striking up ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ from Les Misérables in the streets of many cities. A song written in 1980 for a musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel has become an unlikely rallying cry in present-day China.  Like all the most effective protest songs, ‘Do You Hear…?’ has transcended its origins. In 2014, it was picked up during the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. There are now several ad hoc translations in Cantonese and Taiwanese. One of them – ‘Asking Who That Hasn’t Spoken Out’ – was heard during the Hong Kong protests in 2019, when students sang it over the

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Why I’m grieving for China

I’ve always loved the Chinese national anthem. I used to think I was the loudest Communist Youth League pioneer as my class belted it out, dressed in our little red neckerchiefs, during our school’s weekly flag-raising ceremony. ‘The March of the Volunteers’ was composed in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; it starts with ‘Stand up, those who refuse to be slaves’ and only gets more rousing. I could see, even at a young age in the early 2000s, that China wouldn’t be facing those days again – it was getting wealthier and more powerful. Standing in a Nanjing schoolyard, I was proud of China’s return to greatness.

Matt Ridley

The Tories’ wind power delusion

A very strange parliamentary rebellion has been taking place with Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and dozens of other Tory MPs demanding an end to the ban on onshore wind farms. Wind power is cheap and getting cheaper, they argue. And surely, if we’re engaged in an energy war with Russia, we need all the power we can get? It’s an argument that is wrong several times over. There is no ban on wind farms – it is actually a bog-standard planning requirement that they be confined to areas designated for that purpose and with community support. Nor do they offer a cheap solution: the costs are high and rising. In

Peter Jones

Plato and the problem with Netflix’s Atlantis

Whatever Netflix touches will almost certainly turn into trash. It’s the only way they know how to make money. In its latest example, it takes the fictional story of a ‘lost city’ called Atlantis and turns it into a ‘documentary’, a crock of evidence-free eyewash about a world-saving intellectual master-race. It was Plato (d. 348 bc) who made up the story, and put it into in the mouth of an old man, who heard it aged ten from his grandfather, who heard it from his great grandfather’s contemporary Solon (c. 590 bc), who heard it from Egyptian priests who were talking of a period 9,000 years earlier. Might that not drop a hint of sorts?

The Spectator

What was in the Wellcome Collection’s Medicine Man exhibition?

Not Wellcome The Wellcome Collection closed its own Medicine Man exhibition on the history of medicine, complaining that it was racist. Some of the treasures it displayed: – Wax and cloth head of Elizabeth I, half of which shows a face and the other half a decomposing skull being consumed by insects. – Pair of bellows used for blowing smoke into the rectum of people fished out of the Thames, which some doctors believed could revive them after near-drowning. – Charles Darwin’s walking stick, topped with a skull. – Napoleon’s toothbrush, made from silver and horsehair. – A Japanese papier-mâché figure adorned with acupuncture points, used as a teaching aid. Zero out How