Society

Wednesday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy in six graphs

Nicola Sturgeon has announced that she is resigning, after eight years as First Minister. She has been in charge for a long time: a full generation by some definitions. This is certainly time enough to make your mark on a country with devolved powers unparalleled in the democratic world. But as she prepares to leave the political stage, how much difference did she actually make in Scotland? 1. Life expectancy for Scots men and women has seen the sharpest fall in 40 years – accelerating in the time Sturgeon’s been in power.  Scottish men born today can expect to live 77 years, the lowest of any UK country (it’s 79

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 18 February 2023

o think for a long time, I feel a strange mix of awe and inferiority. It’s not the fact that they’re thinking, of course – we all do that. It’s the awareness that when it comes to difficult hands, their thought processes resemble mine as much as an Olympic sprinter resembles a contestant in an egg-and-spoon race. They enter a higher dimension of awareness, skill and clarity. Take my friend David Gold: he found an extraordinary solution to make a tricky 3NT during the recent Reykjavik Bridge Festival (see diagram). South led ◆Q and David (East) ducked. South continued with the ◆J, won with the ◆K. North discarded a club.

Aidan Hartley

The man who makes money where no one else dares to go

Rwanda The mineshaft is dark, the air humid and starved of oxygen. I follow Marcus Edwards-Jones out of the muddy tunnel towards a window of light and at last we emerge into the evening. The sun is going down over Rwanda’s green hills, dotted with banana groves and eucalyptus stands, with a river snaking away into the distance. Around us are men carting away lumps of rock, which on close inspection are streaked with veins of a black metal called tantalum, a high-value mineral used in the manufacture of mobile phones, nuclear reactors and spaceships. ‘I’ve never seen a deposit like this,’ says Marcus. ‘It’s all been worth it.’ I

Melissa Kite

My eight-year campaign to cancel my mobile phone contract

The man in the phone shop greeted me with what I presume is a look specifically designed and reserved for those asking to cancel their contracts. This look could best be described as ‘You are dead to me. Get out.’ I have been trying to cancel this contract for many years. I never use the phone, I have another one, with another company. But the bill for the old Sim card still comes out of my bank account and I can’t work out how to make it stop. I rang them as usual at the start of the year – this has been my New Year’s resolution for seven or

Jeremy Clarke

Kicking a football has been one of the joys of my life

Two nights running I was incontinent of urine and woke up with warmly weighted pyjama bottoms. Former nurse Catriona didn’t bat an eye. When she first came to France she was a carer for three geriatric English expats, a lady and two gentlemen, and both gentlemen wore nappies in bed. Less than an hour after I’d confessed, she had run down to the chemist and returned with a ten pack of culottes/broekjes/cuecas/pants for medium urinary leakage. Though elaborated with decorative frills around the elasticated leg holes, the pads were not of the same thickness and high quality that her two gentlemen wore. She was apologetic about it. But if my

Matthew Lynn

Why is it so hard for Britain to control inflation?

We are not leading the world in deregulation, or in creating new ‘green industries’. We certainly don’t lead in tax-cutting, or innovation, or technology. Still, there is one respect in which the British economy can claim to be ahead of everyone else. Rising prices. When the world is caught up in an inflationary spiral, the UK always seems to suffer more than anyone else – and that is turning out to be just as true in the 2020s as it was in the 1970s and 1980s.  When the inflation date was released today, it did at least record a modest fall. The rate at which prices are rising dropped to 10.1

Taki

The new face of wealth management

Gstaad Attendees listened intently and cheered her to the rafters. She got a cool million for a one-hour appearance, which is more than Boris or Blair could ever hope for. And it wasn’t even her speciality – she’s an ecdysiast – but Kim Kardashian was the star speaker at the recent Miami Hedge Fund Week. That tells me all I want to know about hedge fund managers, and I had a good teacher long ago, one John Bryan of toe-sucking fame. Luckily, my father was still alive back then, and after my less than profitable experience with Bryan, old dad put his foot down. ‘I have a drawer full of

Tuesday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

In praise of meat-free Fridays for Lent

The bishop of Norwich, the Right Reverend Graham Usher, has suggested that Anglicans might like to abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent. We could eat fish instead, he says, in keeping with the tradition that is still observed by many Catholics, and was semi-observed by most Brits until about fifty years ago. The point of the old tradition was to encourage remembrance of the events of Good Friday, through a minor piece of abstinence. The bishop is doubtless all for the remembrance of Christ’s suffering, but he emphasises a more practical purpose. Such a practice would help to reduce climate change. If Anglicans opted for meat-free Fridays all

Andrew Tettenborn

Solar farms and the trouble with net zero

Say it quietly, especially when there’s a Green listening: but there’s one certainty about Net Zero 2050. It won’t happen. As any honest MP will admit in private, it is stymied not only by the need to keep the lights on following the Ukraine energy shortage, but also for another reason: because no democratic majority will tolerate the cutbacks in their quality of life necessary to maintain the headlong dash to carbon neutrality in 27 years’ time. Unfortunately there is also another certainty about Net Zero. While it remains official policy, however quixotic, corporate capital is being handed a heaven-sent opportunity at the expense of you, me and the country

John Keiger John Keiger

Europe’s centre of gravity is shifting towards Poland

The President of the United States of America flies into Poland this month. Not to Germany or France or even the UK. There is great symbolism in this gesture, which goes further than Washington merely showing solidarity to the front-line states in Russia’s war against Ukraine. It is emblematic of a trend which has seen Europe’s geopolitical fulcrum shift eastwards. Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed the impotence of the western-European establishment Once upon a time Europe’s centre of gravity was west of the Elbe. This was underlined by the reality of the Cold War, by economic might, by western Europe’s military ascendancy reinforced by the United States’ physical presence,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why no one wants a Ford Fiesta anymore

The world of business has long been creative with feeble excuses. Even so, the explanation given by Tim Slatter, chairman of Ford in Britain, for slashing 1,300 jobs in the UK, 1,000 of them in product development, does take the biscuit. The company is moving towards a wholly electric fleet of cars by the end of the decade, he says, and as they are simpler cars they will need less product development. Really? Electric cars may have fewer moving parts than their petrol equivalents and in that sense are less complicated. But they are also relatively novel, especially from a mass-market perspective. There are a great number of technological problems which

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Britain’s absent workers are slowly being lured back into employment

The latest labour market update – published by the Office for National Statistics this morning – looks a lot like last month’s update: that’s to say, a mixed bag of news. Unemployment rose again, up 0.1 per cent between October to December, to 3.7 per cent. But this quarterly rise was once again off-set by a fall in economic inactivity: down 0.3 percentage points, largely thanks to young workers entering (or re-entering) the workforce.  Overall, it’s a trade-off worth making: the official unemployment figure has failed for some time to reflect the true number of people out of work, as over two million people of working age are thought to be

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

What UEFA won’t tell you about the Stade de France fiasco 

UEFA has published its independent review into the chaotic Champions League final last May and it is brutally honest in admitting its own failings. The events in and around the Stade de France as Liverpool played Real Madrid in European football’s showpiece event made global headlines for all the wrong reasons. Television pictures of French police teargassing supporters, including children, were beamed around the world and caused a political furore in Paris. The government, notably the Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin and the Minister of Sports, Amélie Oudea-Castera, initially blamed English fans for the trouble, a position they maintained for weeks until the accumulation of evidence elicited what can best be described

Nigel Jones

Why ‘spy wars’ are back in the open

The news headlines this week brought a warm glow of nostalgia to anyone brought up during the 20th century’s Cold War. The US shot down four UFOs which are suspected Chinese surveillance balloons. Not to be outdone, China accused the US of violating its airspace with spy balloons of its own. It was widely known that embassies on both sides of the Iron Curtain maintained ‘diplomats’ whose real mission was to spy In Britain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reassured us that the RAF were quite capable of dealing with hostile UFOs threatening our security, thank you very much. Meanwhile, a London court sentencing hearing has heard how David Smith, a

Monday

Sasha Lensky

How Russia is weathering the storm of Western sanctions

After war broke out in Ukraine a year ago, amidst a slew of shop closures, sanctioned products and predictions about the ruble falling to rock bottom, there was a wave of panic buying in Russia. Many expected supply chains to fully collapse by the end of 2022 as internal stocks of this and that ran out. Meanwhile pro-war Russians, or at least economic optimists, repeated the mantra that the world needed Russian oil and gas, and that Western companies could barely do without the vast Russian marketplace to sell their products in. Everything, they said, would return to normal. As of February 2023, we’re caught somewhere halfway between these two

Julie Bindel

How did the Tavistock gender scandal unfold?

Another week, another blast of evidence as to why putting kids on hormone blockers is an abomination. Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by BBC journalist Hannah Barnes, which is released on 16 February, is dynamite. The revelations it contains are horrifying: former clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London, detail how some children were placed on medication after one face-to-face assessment, despite many having mental health or family issues. More than a third of young people referred to the service had moderate to severe autistic traits, compared with

Robert Dingwall

Do face masks work?

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, international agencies, national governments, and local public health departments claimed that their policies followed ‘the science’. The imposition of face masks in public areas was a prominent example.  ‘Hands, face, space,’ we were told; the belief was that wearing a mask would prevent the transmission of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Critics who called into question the evidence for that claim were accused of peddling ‘misinformation’. Yet the latest review of mask wearing studies suggests they were right – and that masks made little to no difference in curtailing the spread of Covid. When the virus first arrived in the UK in 2020, the official view, based on the science of the

Sunday

Rakib Ehsan

The Knowsley disruption shows the UK’s incompetence on asylum

This week’s public disorder outside a hotel accommodating asylum seekers in the town of Knowsley in Merseyside was in some ways inevitable. A total of 45,756 people entered the UK on small boats via the English Channel last year – which, according to the 2021 Census, is a number larger than the entire population of English towns such as Dover in Kent, Boston in Lincolnshire and Kirkby in the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley. Britain’s asylum regime should be prioritising the world’s most persecuted peoples, especially women and girls at major risk of sex-based violence in their conflict-ridden homelands. Instead, it has been reduced to a survival-of-the-fittest system which has been

Melanie Phillips

The Westminster Holocaust memorial ignores Jewish suffering

It’s groundhog day all over again for the long-planned Holocaust memorial and learning centre in Westminster’s Victoria Tower Gardens. This huge, Brutalist construction would destroy a quiet green oasis valued by local residents. Last July, the Court of Appeal upheld a ruling that the structure was prohibited by a 1900 Act of Parliament, passed to protect the park from such developments. Yet now the government – which previously overrode Westminster council’s objections – has declared it will legislate to cancel out that 1900 law. It will thus ride roughshod over a historic legal protection for the local community. Is this really a desirable context for a project supposedly devoted to

Nigel Jones

Ukraine shouldn’t cancel Russian culture

It is entirely understandable that the barbaric attack on Ukraine launched a year ago by Vladimir Putin has sparked enraged reactions among Ukrainians as they endure Russian missile strikes and await Putin’s much anticipated spring offensive. Attacking the culture of an enemy nation has a long and ignoble history, and it rarely ends well But in spurning and destroying Russia’s incomparable musical and literary culture the long-suffering Ukrainians are hitting out at the wrong enemy. The Times reports that Kyiv Opera House is deleting the music of the Russian composers Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev from a ballet, The Snow Queen, that is currently in rehearsal. The work’s director Serhii Skuz calls