Society

Friday

18 Feb 2022

State schools and the rise of posh apprenticeships

Recently, a friend forwarded me a letter he’d received from his children’s school, an independent secondary in London, to mark National Apprenticeships Week. The letter set out to parents everything the school was doing to provide children with information, options and contacts to explore apprenticeships, either in combination with or as an alternative to a university degree. The school isn’t household-name famous, but it’s still prestigious, exclusive and, yes, expensive: a year’s fees cost something close to the national average full-time salary. My guess would be that the vast majority of the parents who can cover such fees are themselves university graduates: a degree tends to be a minimum requirement

Ross Clark

Storm Eunice has nothing to do with climate change

I sat tight and braced myself for the worst this morning — not high winds but for the Today programme to blame storm Eunice on climate change. Sure enough, at a quarter past eight, it didn’t disappoint. While a report acknowledged that it was not possible to blame specific weather events on climate change, Baroness Brown, who sits on the government’s climate change committee, was hauled on the show to explore the link between ‘extreme weather’ and climate change. She suggested that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would be producing a very frightening report on it soon. The use of the generalised term ‘extreme weather’ — i.e. without including

Harry Clynch

Why is Lord’s dropping the Eton-Harrow fixture?

In an act of thinly veiled class war, news broke this week that the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) has decided to stop hosting two of the longest running fixtures in English cricket history: the annual Eton versus Harrow and Oxford versus Cambridge matches. A sporting tradition that stretches back 200 years is no more, as Lord’s becomes the latest institution to embrace the all-encompassing need for change. In a written statement, the MCC argued that cancelling the historic fixtures would help ‘broaden’ the fixture list and give a ‘wider range of players’ the chance to play at Lord’s. It’s a strange doublethink: how can removing two fixtures do anything but

Thursday

17 Feb 2022

Ross Clark

Should we vaccinate children against Covid?

Is there any point in vaccinating five to 11-year-olds against Covid? For months the policy across the UK was not to do this, on the grounds that few children suffered anything other than mild symptoms — so the possible side effects were not worth the risk. The Pfizer jab, which has formed the mainstay of vaccinations among the under-forties in Britain, has been linked with cases of inflammation of the heart muscle. However, this was mostly mild in patients affected — while the risk of inflammation was found to be less than a quarter compared with the same condition following a Covid infection. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation

Michael Mosbacher

The Tate’s grubby cancellation of Rex Whistler

Tate Britain’s Rex Whistler restaurant will never reopen the gallery announced yesterday. The restaurant – once known for its excellent and well priced wine list – won’t reopen due to the apparent offensiveness of the mural on its walls. Diners used to be embraced by the mural, The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, a painting by Rex Whistler, an artist best known for his decorative murals in grand country houses. He was killed in France in 1944 fighting the Nazis, in other words engaging in anti-racist action. When the Tate restaurant first opened in 1927 it was described as ‘the most amusing room in Britain’. It was a favourite

Mark Johnson

Do the Conservatives really care about free speech?

The Conservative Party Chair and Minister without Portfolio, Oliver Dowden, made headlines on Tuesday after a speech at the Washington-based Conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation. In his speech Dowden lambasted woke ideology, berated cancel culture and even argued that these concepts constitute a new brand of modern Maoism. Despite this sabre rattling, it is clear that this is not an administration that cares about free speech. While Dowden uses the language of cancel culture to defend a free society, the government is fast finalising plans for a censor’s charter which Dowden himself helped craft during his time as Culture Secretary. The Online Safety Bill, as it is formally known, promises

Rod Liddle

We blew our chance to befriend Putin

You have the advantage over me. It may be that you are reading this now in your makeshift fallout shelter, hair falling out and bleeding from the gums as the nuclear winter descends. More likely you are saying, rather smugly, to your neighbour: ‘I knew he was taking the piss. He’s a right one, that Putin.’ Or perhaps Vlad’s forces are already in London, having swept through western Europe in about eight hours, the Germans for once outdoing the French with their alacrity to surrender. Well, that should see an end to Stonewall and the Tavistock Clinic, no? Every cloud, etc. I would not wish to underestimate the threat posed

Martin Vander Weyer

Bad news, Governor: the wage-rise spiral is already raging

I’ve had the opportunity recently to take part in wage-rise discussions for several small entities in which I’m involved. The conversation has been much the same everywhere. ‘How about we offer them 3 per cent?’ ‘But that’s less than current inflation and they didn’t have a rise when they were on furlough last year.’ ‘So how about 5 per cent?’ ‘Safer to say 7, but they’d still be worse off than before the pandemic. And they’ll get 10 per cent or better if they move anywhere else.’ All of which was perfectly confirmed by official figures this week: annual pay settlements running at 3.7 per cent but (because so many

Olivia Potts

Steak Diane: the perfect date-night dish

Cooking for romance is no laughing matter. The stakes are high. Get it right and woo the love of your life — lifelong happiness, marriage, kids. Get it wrong, and who knows what will happen? At best, you’re serving up a disaster sometime around midnight. You’re not getting lucky. You may be poisoning your intended. Romantic meals should be for all year round, not just for Valentine’s Day — but there are a few rules that it’s wise to follow. Date night is not the time to try shucking oysters for the first time (unless you’re willing to risk a trip to A&E). Chocolate fondants, as dozens of disappointed MasterChef

Rory Sutherland

Why restaurant food at home beats eating out

‘The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.’ That’s Niels Bohr. Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: ‘In art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.’ Like physics and art, many other fields require that you embrace contradictions — because you can’t avoid them. Take innovation. Yes, a great deal of progress is combinatory: two or more technologies are combined to accomplish some hitherto impossible task. But, as the Soviet-era scientist Genrich Altshuller noticed, much innovation follows the opposite path, separating things

Julie Bindel

What explains the rise in lesbian divorce?

At one stage, I had a special tray in my study into which to throw all my lesbian wedding invitations. This was around December 2005, when lesbian and gay couples could first sign a civil partnership agreement, providing legal protection including a basis for next-of-kin and inheritance rights. Although the law still did not allow actual marriage between same sex couples, many lesbians went full throttle with their weddings. It didn’t seem to matter that the only requirement to enter a civil partnership was a trip to the town hall and a signature in front of a couple of witnesses. When I signed my own, my partner and I turned

Lionel Shriver

Our monetary bubble is about to burst

OK, I finally watched Netflix’s Don’t Look Up. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it — especially before its effective subtitle for us thickos, THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, YOU F-ING MORONS. Otherwise, the film might have playfully dramatised the more general phenom of fiddling with celebrity bodices while Rome burns. The comet at which I’m looking up could arrive far more immediately than perilous global warming. Money is in trouble. I’m not only referring to a cost-of-living crisis. Money itself is in trouble. Let’s contemplate, to coin a phrase, a basket of deplorables. US inflation just hit 7.5 per cent, the highest in 40 years. UK inflation, now 5.5 per

Douglas Murray

Work is no place for your ‘whole self’

One of the few things I have learned in this life is that Dante Alighieri was wrong. In the Inferno portion of The Divine Comedy (the only part most people read), the great Florentine poet describes hell as having just nine circles. Whereas whenever I survey matters it has always seemed me that this figure is on the low side. In fact I would go further. I would say that if you look down there is always a circle below every circle. The other week I wrote about our nation’s ambassador to the Ukraine — a woman who seems to think that expressions of vulnerability and not-quite-coping are somehow helpful

Ivo Dawnay

P.J. O’Rourke’s death marks the end of a great satirical era

There was something old school about P.J. O’Rourke, who died on Tuesday, something that felt like a leftover echo of the American Revolution. Visiting him in his ancient, low-ceilinged, clapboard farm-house in Sharon, New Hampshire, one half-expected Paul Revere to burst breathlessly into the kitchen warning that the British were coming. Though he was by birth an Ohio boy, New England felt like the tweedy satirist’s natural environment — a pioneer sensibility that combined American impatience with the Old World with a nostalgic yearning for the oak-panelled values and certainties of yesteryear. Never quite a ‘gonzo’ journalist, his departure to the cigar bar in the sky nonetheless marks the end

Ben Lazarus

The algorithm myth: why the bots won’t take over

Google once believed it could use algorithms to track pandemics. People with flu would search for flu-related information, it reasoned, giving the tech giant instant knowledge of the disease’s prevalence. Google Flu Trends (GFT) would merge this information with flu tracking data to create algorithms that could predict the disease’s trajectory weeks before governments’ own estimates. But after running the project for seven years, Google quietly abandoned it in 2015. It had failed spectacularly. In 2013, for instance, it miscalculated the peak of the flu season by 140 per cent. According to the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, this is a good example of the limitations of using algorithms to surveil

Andrew Watts

Sick jokes: why medics need gallows humour

Most jobs have their own joke books. If you’re outside the job, you don’t get the joke — and if you do get the joke, you’re on the inside; which is what the jokes are for. (It’s the same with all comedy: some, if not most, of the appeal of Stewart Lee is in being the sort of person who finds Stewart Lee funny.) But some jobs have joke books which, from the outside, are not just unfunny but actually offensive. Usually the most stressful jobs, those that involve the rawest emotions, have a gallows humour that is thought to relieve that stress. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Or

The Spectator

Andrew, Harry and the enduring prudence of the Queen

Prince Andrew’s decision to settle his case with Virginia Giuffre means he will be spared the potentially humiliating ordeal of a jury trial. It also means that, in the public’s opinion, he will forever occupy a no-man’s land between guilt and exoneration. Even though he has accepted no liability in the case, a return to royal life is surely impossible. As he celebrates his 62nd birthday this weekend, he must contemplate life as a retired royal. However Andrew might feel about his fate, it will bring relief for the monarchy. The darkest of clouds is clearing and the Queen can mark her 70th year on the throne without the reputational

Dot Wordsworth

Where’s the ‘mystery’ in mystery plays?

In The Archers, Ambridge put on its own set of mystery plays dramatising the Nativity and Passion. BBC Radio 4 broadcast them separately from the soap opera, in which the village policeman has been driven to conversion by playing Jesus. My husband, commenting on all this, said that ‘of course’ the word mystery meant a trade or craft, as the medieval plays were performed by companies of trade guilds. He might have been reading the website of the Chester Mystery Plays, due for their five-yearly performance in 2023: ‘The word mystery comes from the French mystère meaning “craft”, and apprentices joined the guilds to learn their mystery or craft. When

Bruce Anderson

A toast to Victorian Britain

Across oceans and continents, less favoured nations produce more history than they can consume. In these islands, the English — as opposed to the Scots and the Irish — merely consume a lot of well-written military history. The other evening, stimulated by a few decent bottles, someone raised a hoary question. If we could have been born in an earlier century — pre-20th — which would we have chosen? What epoch was worthy to compare with the Antonines and those Good Emperors, as praised by Gibbon? The consensus was that, assuming a strong constitution and plenty of money, the long 19th century in Britain, from the end of the Napoleonic

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I tackle the menace of strangers making mobile calls on speakerphone?

Q. As if it wasn’t bad enough to overhear one side of a conversation as it’s bellowed into a mobile telephone, there is now a worse menace on trains and in restaurants. Those using the speaker function for calls are creating intolerable noise pollution because others nearby are forced to overhear both the tinny caller from down the line and a voice raised to compensate for the distance between mouth and microphone. Mary, have you got any idea how to tackle this? — L.G., Fosbury, Wilts A. If you record a 30-second snatch of the conversation on your own smartphone (using the ‘voice memos’ app or similar) and then use