Society

For once I find myself on the other side of the argument in agreeing that ‘Big Chief’, the erstwhile tomahawk-wielding mascot of the Exeter Chiefs rugby club, deserved to be axed. He was an affront to Native Americans, perpetuating the calumny that their ancestors were – to quote the Declaration of Independence – ‘merciless Indian savages’. Exeter has retired their mascot but retained their ‘chiefs’ moniker, explaining that they have gone by the nickname for nearly a century. Rugby clubs in Devon had a tradition of referring to their 1st XV as the ‘chiefs’ and that is why it was chosen in 1999 when the club wanted a gimmicky name. For

I recently heard on the radio that last year an average of 14 pensioners a day had to sell their house to pay for their care. This was supposed to shock us. Actually, the figure seems remarkably low (a little over 5,000 a year) and, in principle, reasonable.  Rather like home ownership itself, care in old age is a likely, though not certain, cost in an average British life. Many people with enough money to buy a house are also in a position to make some provision for that care. By the time they need care, significant numbers find themselves in houses too big and expensive for their needs.  It is

When I worked in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur long ago, my office looked across Jalan Tun Razak, a boulevard named in honour of the country’s second prime minister and ‘father of development’. This week his son Najib Razak, its sixth prime minister (2009-2018), was convicted of charges relating to the disappearance of $4.5 billion from a sovereign wealth fund called 1MDB which he once controlled. More trials await, but 1MDB may go down not only as the world’s biggest corruption scandal but also the most vulgar — proceeds that might have helped Malaysia’s poor having been frittered on private jets, penthouses, parties in Las Vegas and the financing

Of all the sad and surreal things to happen in the past few months, the Catholic church’s decision to abandon the dying was, for me, the worst. The Church of England abandoned its churches, forbidding first congregants then priests from setting foot in them, making it clear that in fact it actively dislikes church buildings. But the Catholic church in England betrayed the people who needed it most: the men and women who found themselves in the awful eye of the storm, dying of Covid-19 without family and, as it turned out, without even the possibility of a priest. As our infection rate begins to rise again, and with talk