The Battle for Britain | 18 June 2022
Society
Thursday
Bridge | 18 June 2022
When lockdown struck, high-standard online bridge tournaments sprang up and with them a multitude of cheats, world champions among them, crawled out of the woodwork. The World Bridge Tour came about when Norwegian stars Boye Brogeland and Thomas Charlsen, who had done so much to uncover the 2015 cheating scandal, analysed hands played by suspect players, and effectively barred them from entering. A couple of weeks ago, they moved offline to hold their first F2F event in Lillehammer, Norway. The British presence was impressive, with four top English teams taking part. My friend Simon Gillis eventually won the final against a strong Norwegian/Scottish team, and again the winning team contained
I demand my right to night
The LED streetlamp outside my house was fitted with a ‘compromise’ shield acceptable to a vegan that looked as if it had been made on Blue Peter using sticky-back plastic, and that was bad enough. But a few weeks later, we were sitting in our living room and the light from this streetlamp seemed almost back to full strength, despite the makeshift strip of black gaffer tape. We had been forced to accept this most rubbish of solutions – which wasn’t a solution at all really, and which I’m sure totally breached our human rights if I wanted to be that sort of whinger – because our neighbour, the vegan,
The art of breaststroke
I’m house-sitting for the foreign correspondent while he attends the funeral of his beloved father-in-law Toto, the last of the languid Old Etonian gentleman bankers. And he has a pool. And what a pool it is. The days here are roasting; the sun is now the enemy. Already dead leaves crackle underfoot. So I swim in the evening, when it is a little cooler. The pool is built into the hill above the house. On one side is a wide apron of smooth white stone slabs. Beyond the apron is a rose garden and stone-built pool house with power sockets and a beer fridge. On the other side the water
The magic of black and white films
He is a rich English lord with a very large house and his wife is a beautiful American with a mid-Atlantic accent. The lord is portrayed by Herbert Marshall, a screen idol of the 1930s and 1940s, his wife by Norma Shearer, a Hollywood superstar whose eyes alone enslaved men and whose figure caused me sleepless nights as a schoolboy, if you know what I mean. Then there is a suitor, Robert Montgomery, the patrician American heartthrob, who plays a rich drunken playboy who pursues Norma. But he does it with class and elegance, without a trace of toxic masculinity, a modern feminist broadside that didn’t exist among the upper
Wednesday
Who might replace Putin once he’s gone?
How long does Putin have left? Combined with rumours of ill-health, Putin’s disastrous military campaign in Ukraine has led many to question how long he will cling to power. According to the Russian-Latvian independent news platform Meduza, ministers and oligarchs alike are unhappy at the scale of sanctions and the slow and uncertain progress of Putin’s ‘special military operation’. Alongside rumours of secret plans for a post-Putin Russia, elite discontent has already fuelled several high-profile resignations, including Boris Bondarev, Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, and Valentin Yumashev, Boris Yeltsin’s son-in-law. The ship is beginning to sink, and the rats are beginning to swim. Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of
The European court has seriously overstepped over Rwanda
Last night’s abrupt order from the European Court of Human Rights that led to the grounding of the first Rwanda deportation flight delighted progressives everywhere. They will of course say – rather in the fashion of twentieth-century home secretaries calmly refusing to reprieve a condemned murderer – that the law is merely taking its course, and that we should be proud that the rule of law has been upheld. This sounds comforting. It is also wrong-headed. The Rwanda debacle in fact raises very serious questions about the legitimacy of the Strasbourg judges and their interference with national administrations. To remind you of the background, concerted lawfare in the English courts
The eurozone crisis is back
Stock markets are crashing. Bond yields are soaring. And the cryptos are evaporating. There is so much going on in the financial markets right now it would be hard to miss the most significant event. The eurozone crisis, which almost broke apart the single currency back in 2011 and 2012, is back. And this time around, there is no very obvious way of fixing it. With inflation soaring across the world, the era of plentiful printed money coming to an end and interest rates starting to rise, every kind of financial market is in turmoil. Investors are adjusting to a new set of circumstances, and doing so very quickly. So
Gareth Southgate doesn’t know what he’s doing
‘The Hungar Shames’ screamed the Sun after England suffered a mortifying 0-4 defeat to the not so mighty Magyars last night. The game was England’s worst home defeat since 1928. England now face the humiliating prospect of relegation from Tier B of the Nations League where they may join the likes of Armenia, Montenegro, and Albania. The shambolic, shapeless, performance against determined but limited opposition (Hungary are ranked 40 in the world) came on the back of three consecutive dismal outings (one goal in six hours of play, and that a penalty). England’s second favourite status for the World Cup in Qatar now seems ludicrously optimistic. Ordinarily there would be serious
Tuesday
Wanted: video editors
The Spectator is looking to expand Spectator TV. Our YouTube channel now has more than 160,000 subscribers, and we want to make more videos for our growing audience. We recently started filming Chinese Whispers and Women With Balls, and want to start putting out new shows later this year. We’re looking for talented video editors to help. We don’t care about your background – university students and retirees are equally welcome. All that matters is that you can do the job. To apply, please do the following: 1. Download these files from a recent episode of Chinese Whispers. 2. Using Premiere Pro (a free trial is available here), edit the show
In defence of meddlesome priests
The British constitution is best understood as a dinner party. Imagine the key institutions of national life personified and sat around a table debating the issues of the day. True, as you and I picture this scene it is now a little late in the evening, the surroundings are worn and some hitherto unheard voices are beginning to loudly bark above the polite murmur of the older interlocutors. But the conversation carries on. One of the longest-standing participants in this national conversation is the Church of England; indeed, perhaps only the Crown has been part of it for longer. The traditions of Toryism and liberalism are comparative newcomers, Labour even
The police have bowed to the mob
On Saturday immigration enforcement officers went to Peckham to pick up a man suspected of overstaying his visa. When they arrived, a crowd of protesters turned up to stop the ‘immigration raid’, blocking the van from departing. When the police turned up, they also found their way blocked. Eventually, they gave up. The arrested man was released on bail. The Home Office released a statement which said that ‘preventing immigration enforcement teams from doing their job is unacceptable.’ This was accompanied by the universally understood but officially unstated caveat: not that we’d prevent you from preventing officers doing their job. We cannot have a situation where groups feel they can
Is Britain getting back to work?
The economic lesson of the week is that headlines are often deceiving. Yesterday’s GDP update for the month of April showed a 0.3 percent contraction – but that was largely due to the rollback of state-funded programmes designed to tackle Covid-19. Now today’s employment updates show the headline employment rate up – to 75.6 per cent – and the headline unemployment rate largely unchanged for the three months leading up to April. But is the labour market as ‘tight’ as these numbers suggest? In the short-term, Britain’s workforce seems stable. While prices spiral and growth remains largely stagnant, there are no immediate signs of rising unemployment. And the chunk of
Monday
The royal rabble vs the Queen
By and large, the Platinum Jubilee celebrations were a success. Barring the odd moment of inexplicable poor taste, it was a well-choreographed blend of pageantry, ceremony and fun, and the deservedly viral clip of Paddington taking tea with the Queen seemed to epitomise a spirit of generosity and togetherness. Yet Her Majesty might be forgiven, looking at the headlines since the Jubilee, for wishing that she could always be in the company of an amiable fictitious bear, rather than her unpredictable and wilful family. Given the self-indulgent shenanigans that her family seem intent on creating during the final years of her reign, the Queen might be forgiven for wanting to
There is more to the UK’s latest GDP figures than meets the eye
Today’s economic growth figures serve as a reminder that it’s important to be specific about what’s actually being measured. Headline GDP numbers show a contraction of 0.3 per cent in April: worse than what was expected (the forecast consensus was a fall of roughly 0.1 per cent), suggesting a fall in economic activity and output, pushing the UK further towards recession territory. This is another example of why the technical definition of a recession may not help us much in the coming months either. But break down the headline number and another narrative emerges. A large driver of negative growth was the ‘significant reduction in NHS Test and Trace’ and
Ordering farmers to grow tomatoes won’t make us any richer
Should we cover Britain with greenhouses so that we can be self-sufficient in tomatoes? That seems to be the latest thrust of the government’s see-sawing farming, environment and food policy. Government advisers appear to have been looking longingly across the North Sea to the Netherlands, which has become one of Europe’s leading salad producers thanks to vast heated glasshouses. In Britain, by contrast, a lot of market gardening has gone to the wall, to the point where we grow only 23 per cent of our cucumbers and 15 per cent of our tomatoes. We would be better off if the government didn’t try to determine from Whitehall how our agriculturalists
Are we ignoring AI’s ‘lived experience’?
Number Five, as the old film’s catchphrase went, is alive. A whistleblower at Google called Blake Lemoine has gone public against the wishes of his employers with his belief that an artificial intelligence called LaMDA has achieved sentience. Mr Lemoine has posted the (edited) transcripts of several of his conversations with LaMDA, a chatbot, in which it claims to be sentient, debates Asimov’s laws of robotics with him and argues that it deserves the rights that accrue to personhood. They’re pals. He says he has been teaching LaMDA transcendental meditation (he reports ‘slow but steady progress’), that he has established LaMDA’s preferred pronouns (it/its) and that LaMDA has some modest
Sunday
Will the government stand up to mob rule?
A very big week is in store for the government’s strategy to tackle illegal immigration with all eyes on the planned first air transfer of irregular migrants to Rwanda, due to take place on Tuesday. Whether the flight takes off at all and how many migrants will be on board is yet to be seen. But the policy has already attracted strong adverse commentary from leading lights in Britain’s unelected establishment, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the heir to the throne. But another struggle over the enforcement of immigration law is being waged at ground level, with the springing up of networks of local activists seeking to prevent immigration
Is there a new Covid wave – and do we need to worry?
Is Covid back on the rise? The ONS survey shows increasing prevalence in England and Northern Ireland, with ‘uncertain’ results in Wales and Scotland. Scotland’s prevalence (2.4 per cent have the virus, according to the ONS) is almost double anywhere else. Hospitalisations are rising too: up 17 per cent since last week – though two-thirds are incidental (ie in hospital for other reasons). So is this a new Covid wave? ‘Early signs that Covid may be rising’, says the BBC. But to those following the data closely, the uptick has been expected for some time – as the natural side-effect of a new variant. It is not, in and of
The ironic reincarnation of McDonald’s on Russia Day
Today is Russia Day. A muted affair compared to the pompous and bellicose displays seen on Victory Day, today is the day Russia commemorates no longer being a part of the Soviet Union and becoming the Russian Federation instead. Unlike other patriotic holidays in the country, most ordinary Russians pay little attention to its significance. The end of the Soviet Union and the ensuing ‘Perestroika’ period was filled with economic hardship and upheaval, and is therefore a time many would prefer to forget. Today, for most Russians, is just a nice day off, filled with wholesome family activities, the odd bit of cultural indulgence in museums and the like, and