Society

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

The bottle I’m most looking forward to pouring

There is one advantage to a stay in hospital followed by confinement to barracks: time to read and to think. I have devoted a lot of thought to great topics; do I hear ‘sublime’ and ‘ridiculous’? My two subjects have been the existence of God and the prospects of the Tories winning the next election. I have become fed up with hearing about serious bottles and not partaking God first. I have reaffirmed the conclusion which I’ve held for many years. There is no route from reason to faith. You either believe or not. I remain someone who is deeply religious by temperament but who cannot believe. There it is.

Wednesday

Xinran

The Cultural Revolution is still a part of China today

This year is the Chinese Year of the Rabbit. The spring festival began on 22 January, and in Chinese culture the rabbit represents the moon. Some say it is because the shadows in the moon resemble the animal, but it also reflects its characteristics. The rabbit’s quiet personality hides its confidence and strength: it is moving, steadily moving, towards its goal, whatever the obstacles. Some also say that it lives in fear all the time, finds it difficult to open up to others and often turns to escapism. I never really thought about the meaning of a ‘rabbit’s pure characteristics’ in Chinese daily life until I read these two books

Tom Wilson

The Prevent review shows the system needs a complete overhaul

One of the most surprising things to come out of today’s independent review of Prevent, the government’s flagship counter-terrorism programme, is how much of its activities have nothing to do with terrorism.  The scheme was created by politicians to stop people from being radicalised into terrorism. Yet according to William Shawcross’s landmark review, the reality is that the programme spends much of its time and energy focused on subjects outside of terrorism.  When broken down, the referrals to Prevent of course comprise people drawn to jihadist and neo-Nazi worldviews. But there was another, somewhat inexplicable category that few outside of the programme could find out very much about, labelled: Mixed, Unclear, Unstable,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

There was nothing funny about PMQs

PMQs looked like a comedy routine. But there was nothing funny about it. President Zelensky, AKA Uncle Volod, has come to town to address a joint session of both houses. As a warm-up act, MPs behaved like a gang of armchair Rambos and competed to fawn over Uncle Volod while pledging taxpayers’ cash to the defence of his borders. This wasn’t a debate but a scripted event staged to please a leader who appears to have no trouble travelling the world, or welcoming celebs like Boris to his capital, even though he claims to be personally locked in a life-or-death struggle with the largest country in the world. The party

John R. MacArthur

America’s woke assault on English

Each time an American institution commits a new corruption of the English language in the name of ‘social justice,’ US wire services, assisted by the internet, circulate the latest absurdity to the four corners of the world. Nearly everyone I know has commented on the University of Southern California School of Social Work’s recent ban on the use of ‘the field’ when referring to the world outside the classroom because it might have ‘connotations for descendants of slavery or immigrant workers that are not benign.’ In my circle of friends we laughed, a bit ruefully, and increasingly so do a few mainstream publications such as the Week, which headlined its item ‘Only in America.’ ​I tend to take these assaults on speech and writing more seriously than

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Why Ukraine needs British war planes

‘We have freedom,’ said Zelensky in his address to Westminster Hall. ‘Give us wings to protect it!’ This sums up the message of his visit to the UK: to thank Britain for the weapons, without which Ukraine would not have survived so far, but to ask for planes. The last time he was in London, he said, he left enjoying delicious English tea. ‘I will be leaving parliament today, thanking you in advance for powerful English planes’. His audience laughed – but Zelensky is certainly not joking. Zelensky spoke about Ukrainian troops going ‘deep into occupied territory’ but he believes this cannot be done without bombers. Ukraine’s Soviet-era air force

Dalibor Rohac

The EU is sleepwalking into a debt trap

It’s been less than three years since the EU made the unprecedented decision to issue €750 billion of its own debt to help finance the EU’s post-pandemic recovery. Despite this supposedly being a one-time policy, the idea of issuing new debt is now rearing its head again – this time to fund the EU’s industrial policies. The European Commission is pressing ahead with a ‘European Sovereignty Fund’, as a way of responding to the Biden administration’s Chips Act and Inflation Reduction Act, which created subsidies for electric vehicles. By doing so the Commission hopes to prevent member states from introducing their own national industrial policies that could fragment and distort Europe’s common market. 

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rishi reshuffles, Truss talks and a trigger warning for Shakespeare’s Globe

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, rearranged the deck chairs. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy was broken up, and Grant Shapps, the Business Secretary, was put in charge of a new department: Energy Security and Net Zero. Kemi Badenoch, the Trade Secretary, added business to her portfolio, as the new Secretary of State for Business and Trade. Michelle Donelan, the Culture Secretary, became Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport had its ‘Digital’ lopped off and was put under Lucy Frazer. The new Conservative party chairman is Greg Hands, reckoned a safe pair. The King told Royal Mail

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The rise of the nursery spy app

Do you know what you were doing at 10.03 a.m. last Tuesday? Or what you had for breakfast three weeks ago? I don’t. You probably don’t either – unless you’re a spy, or you’re putting together an alibi for a murder. But like millions of parents, I know these things about my son. Not because I was there, but because I wasn’t. NurseryCam is supposed to be about peace of mind for the parent. It feels like a slippery slope My one-year-old goes to a local nursery three days a week. On those days, I know his every movement, bowel or otherwise. This is thanks to an app that parents

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Heseltine’s great, misguided speech

On Monday in the Lords, Michael Heseltine, 90 next month, orated (I employ that Welsh usage because it fits him so well) in favour of the European single market. He regarded its regulations as ‘one of the most successful concepts ever developed by humankind’. He deplored the fact that the government is trying, post-Brexit, to escape them. He attacked Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black and compared Jacob Rees-Mogg to Robespierre. His stirring words reminded me of another great nonagenarian performance in the upper house – Harold Macmillan’s maiden speech as Earl of Stockton in November 1984, which I watched from the gallery. The old actor rose slowly and totteringly, but

Tristram Hunt

Tristram Hunt: How to repatriate art

At the start of last year, the Leopard Inn in Burslem, the scene of the celebrated meeting between potter Josiah Wedgwood and engineer James Brindley to agree the navigation of the Trent and Mersey Canal, ‘went on fire’. Close by, the Wedgwood Institute, founded by William Gladstone in 1863 as a design school, and proudly decorated with terracotta panels narrating the art of ceramics, stands empty. And last week, a 10ft-high red-brick bust of Wedgwood, designed by Vincent Woropay for the 1986 Stoke-on-Trent Garden Festival, was knocked down. By using weathered brickwork to sculpt Wedgwood’s coiffured hair and penetrating gaze, Woropay captured both the aesthetic delicacy of his subject and

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The electorate’s strange sense of entitlement

How are you coping during this cost- of-living crisis? Have you made your way to the food bank yet? I am interested to find out. On Tuesday I listened to an edition of Radio 4’s You and Yours for which listeners were invited to call in and explain how they were managing in these desperately bleak times. A good dozen or so shared their experiences with the presenter Winifred Robinson – and all but one dutifully explained that they were about to embark on a nice holiday. Further, of those going away for a bit, all but two were taking a holiday abroad – the Algarve, Benidorm, Catalonia were some

Fieldfare

2591: Get over it

The nine individual unclued lights form three sets of three, each set related to a theme word in a different way. The theme word is hidden in the grid and should be highlighted. Across 5    Most appropriate page in a quiz (6)10    I’m praised for moving to retain university committee (10)12    Queen is taking a line to get tough (6)13    City that lies between Pakistan and Bulgaria (8)16    Bug is hanging on the wall (5)17    In recess, is earth to be put on dead sheep? (7)25    Bird’s leg bone stripped (3)26    In wood, cat chewed energy biscuit (7)28    One top player receiving kiss, no longer a man? (7)29    Once close

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: The Sound of Sunak and other political musicals 

In Competition No. 3285, you were invited to supply an extract from the libretto of a musical based on the life story of a politician. Berlusconi: A New Musical, which comes to Southwark Playhouse next month, is described enticingly on the theatre’s website as ‘a hilarious, naughty, noisy exposé of the original perma-tanned media mogul and populist politician… like Evita on acid’.  Tim Rice didn’t get much of a look-in in the entry, swept aside by the spirits of Sondheim, W.S. Gilbert, Irving Berlin and Oscar Hammerstein. Opening the show is Basil Ransome-Davies’s riff on Frank Loesser’s ‘If I Were a Bell’ . He and his fellow winners pocket £30.

Luke McShane

No. 738

White to play and mate in two. This position was published in the Bonus Socius (The Good Companion), a treatise from the 13th century. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 13 February. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1…Nf1! 2 Nxg7+ Kd8 3 Ne6+ Kc8 and White resigned. The checks soon run out, and Rd2-h2 will be mate. Last week’s winner Geoff Weekes, Bath

Luke McShane

Chequered history

I picture a medieval priest, hunched over a desk with bells clanging in his ears. He is on a deadline – tomorrow is Sunday and his congregation have heard enough sermons about the spiritual value of threshing. The leatherbound book in front of him, Summa collationum, sive communiloquium, is his source of inspiration. It’s a recent edition of a book written some 200 years earlier by a Franciscan monk, John of Wales (Johannes Gallensis), who died c. 1285. One section, known as ‘The Innocent Morality’, presents chess as an extended allegory for life. The priest pores over the Latin: ‘The world resembles a chessboard, which is chequered white and black

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why do we associate Christian funerals with burial?

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is all very well, but nowadays the melancholy business of disposing of human remains can be expedited with caustic soda. I only know this because the Church of England’s General Synod has been asked to consider the burial alternative of water cremation, or resomation, which uses a bath of hot water and potassium or sodium hydroxide to dissolve flesh and bones. The family ends up with the ashes from the bones, and the biofluid from the process is disposed of in the sewers. This is legal in the UK, but so far water companies have been reluctant to embrace human remains.  The synod, which

Dot Wordsworth

Where does ‘knocked up’ come from?

Anthony Horowitz (Diary, 4 February) tells us he was advised by a ‘sensitivity reader’ to remove the word scalpel from a book with a Native American character lest it suggest scalps (though the words are unrelated). I’ve stumbled across the birth of a new forbidden phrase on Twitter, that social media swamp for the older swampster: knocked up. A California lawyer called Johnathan Perk declares in a tweet: ‘The phrase “knocked up”, referring to pregnancy, originated with US slavery. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the expression back to 1813. Back then the price of enslaved African women was “knocked up” by the auctioneer when she was pregnant – promoted as