Society

Friday

Patrick West

The RSC should ignore the climate change mob and stick with BP

It is often said that Western culture worships youth. Yet this cult of youth worship has started to mutate into something a bit weirder, as it increasingly seems that ours is a society that now worships children. This year, for instance, has seen the rise to global ascendency of the 16-year-old Swede, Greta Thunberg. She has become the child-saint icon of the environmental movement, whose apocalyptic scorn is fawned over by liberal politicians and woke-conscious big business. Her teenage acolytes bunk school, with the blessing of their teachers, to raise awareness as to the plight of climate change. Elsewhere, we are told that it is imperative to hold a second

Thursday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

For political discourse to survive, we must be more honest about language

When I was an English literature undergraduate, we were all very careful to avoid what used to be called the ‘intentional fallacy’. This is the idea that you can use a text to get at what the author ‘really meant’. The so-called New Critics said, quite reasonably, that the text is all you’ve got to go on and, what’s more, it’s impertinent and irrelevant for a critic to start trying to figure out, say, whether Shakespeare is a racist from the evidence in ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’. This is a useful principle in academic literary criticism (or one sort of academic literary criticism; that’s an argument

The Spectator

Letters: We need judges with practical experience

Judges of experience Sir: In the midst of the furore about the Supreme Court judgment, many people are now questioning how the senior judiciary are appointed (‘Imbalance of power’, 28 September). Lady Hale is undoubtedly extremely clever. But perhaps that is at the heart of the problem. It is well established that the ranks of academia are now predominantly left-wing in their political views and this has unfortunately permeated down to the teaching profession in schools. I am a retired barrister who specialised in employment law, working in companies which were highly unionised. During my career I gained immeasurable practical experience, but as time went on I realised I was

The Spectator

Are childhood vaccination rates dropping?

Who speaks what The Chancellor, Sajid Javid, included a little Punjabi in his speech to the Tory conference. How many people in Britain would have understood him? In the 2011 census the ONS counted 273,000 Punjabi speakers in Britain. The other most common languages, besides English and Welsh, were: Polish 546,000 Urdu 269,000 Bengali 221,000 Gujarati 213,000 Arabic 159,000 French 147,000 Portuguese 133,000 Spanish 120,000   Death by gender The British Heart Foundation claimed women were needlessly dying of heart disease because they were receiving less good treatment than men. How do the causes of death differ between the sexes? Deaths per million in 2017 Men / Women Ischaemic heart

Taki

What you can tell about a man from his choice of underwear

New York It’s Indian summertime and the living is easy. There hasn’t been a cloud above the Bagel for two weeks and the temperature is perfect. But the noise of cement mixers and construction everywhere is unbearable, and there is gridlock while the world’s greatest freeloaders are in town for the annual UN assembly. Despite the great weather, the place feels joyless, the media full of dire warnings about safe spaces and racism. There’s something very wrong here. Pessimism rules an anxious, depressed and angry people. Well, I’d be depressed too if I took American media and its pundits seriously. And speaking of depressed and angry buffoons, a halfwit called

Jeremy Clarke

Will mindfulness turn me into a Remainer?

Mindfulness at our all-inclusive Turkish beach resort began at 11 o’clock. Our mindfulness teacher was a tiny, smiley, flexible-looking woman who was not much bigger than the wheeled amplifier she dragged in behind her on to the beachside ‘wellbeing’ platform. With her musical voice she led us in a few brief arm stretches and neck rolls, then asked us to lie flat on our backs and think about what we were thinking about. Our intention this morning, she said, was to bring our minds back from elsewhere in time and space to the here and now and try and keep it there. This is what mindfulness is, basically, she said.

Melissa Kite

Should I return to the land of my Italian ancestors?

When I was growing up, my Italian grandfather was my favourite person. He taught me to play a mean game of draughts. He told me stories about his childhood in a remote mountain village in Abruzzo. I couldn’t hear often enough about how he got the deep scar across the bridge of his nose. He was standing as a little boy behind his father who had a pair of shears slung over his back and they fell and sliced his face. He told me they had to stick the adhesive strip of an envelope over the cut. My mother told him to be quiet every time he gave me the

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I cope with university flatmates who can’t cook?

Q. For many years I employed around 60 people with whom I worked in an open-plan office. I moved on from this role, but in my social life I often come across some of these former colleagues and although I can vividly remember my sentiments towards them, I sometimes cannot put a name to their faces. This facial amnesia is no reflection of the degree of respect or fondness I feel towards them, but nevertheless it looks and feels bad that I cannot remember their name immediately. It is especially difficult when someone else joins our conversation because of course I cannot introduce them. As soon as I have the name everything

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

I’ve had my fill of brasseries: Moncks reviewed

If you review restaurants professionally you would not think Britain wanted to leave the EU. You would think she wanted to live happily in the twinkling golden stars of Europe like Emily Thornberry’s neck fat, eating, semi-eternally, at a European-style brasserie. British restaurants are a silent acknowledgement that native food is not very good unless you really like cabbage. Please don’t write to me about fungus from Maidenhead. I don’t care. Our cities reflect it; every-where I see European-style brasseries glinting with the promise of European–style bliss. Where is the courage of our seething psychological imperatives? Why don’t we put our madness where our mouths are? I daydream about a

Dot Wordsworth

Sweaty Betty, Acne: the fashion for nasty brand names

On my way to a party in Ealing I saw a shop called Pan Rings. A mental image popped up of a saucepan with marks from milk round the sides. It is, in fact, a jewellery shop. Fashion outlets happily attract attention with negative names. Nasty Gal was founded in 2012 and has I think been taken over by Boohoo. Nasty is a word that Swift used in poems of scatological curiosity. In one, Celia’s ‘basin takes whatever comes: / The scrapings of her teeth and gums, / A nasty compound of all hues, / For here she spits, and here she spews’. One of Swift’s resolutions for becoming old

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Tory conference, John Lewis cuts jobs and Duchess of Sussex sues

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, presented the EU with a proposed withdrawal agreement. It entailed Northern Ireland remaining for a large part in the EU single market, along with Ireland, until January 2025, with the European Court retaining jurisdiction during that time. After that, the Northern Ireland Assembly would be able to choose whether to remain in the single market. In the meantime, there would be a border with Great Britain in the Irish Sea and, with none of the United Kingdom in the customs union, another, invisible border with Ireland, with checks made away from the border on goods in transit. Dominic Cummings said: ‘If they reject our

Luke McShane

no. 574

Black to play. Here is my own tragedy, from Yuffa-McShane, Khanty-Mansiysk 2019. Needing a win, I tried 81 … Kg7-f7 to corral the knight, but it soon escaped. What should I have played instead? Difficulty: easy, but not for me! Answers via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk by Tuesday 8 October. 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 Qxf5 Last week’s winner Keith Escott, Erdington, Birmingham

Luke McShane

Visky business

‘Visky,’ said the man driving the taxi.   ‘Risky?’   ‘Visky.’   ‘Ah… whisky! Or vodka.’ I grinned as I got out. ‘Maybe see you last year,’ I ventured in bungled Russian.   There was no bottle to hand, but my wounded ego was soothed by the prescription. I’d been freshly eliminated from the World Cup in Siberia in a blitz tiebreak by Daniil Yuffa, an amiable young Russian. Two years ago, Daniil appeared on a Russian talent show (and YouTube). He simultaneously played three games of chess — blindfolded — and accompanied his own spectacle with a classical piano medley. Two days after beating me, he was out too.

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 03 October 2019

The world bridge championships are finally over — and I don’t remember another where the England players gave us such an exhilarating two weeks. All four teams — Open, Women’s, Seniors and Mixed — performed superbly. Particular congratulations to the Seniors, who won silver, and the Women, who won bronze.   But perhaps the biggest thrills and spills came from the Open team. In this toughest of fields, they made it to the quarter-finals, where they faced the mighty USA1 (every member a previous world champion). As winners of the round-robin qualifier, USA1 could choose their opponents, and in truth, few expected England to survive the two-day battle. But after

Doc

2428: Tracks to the isles

The unclued lights (one of two words), individually or as two pairs, are of a kind. Elsewhere, ignore one accent.   Across 1           Groups of helpers providing accompaniments to pop-singers (8) 5           Trembling like fish (6) 14         Some weekend supplement (3) 16         Lionel wrecked ornamental metalwork (6) 17         Pack animal in a shopping plaza from the east (5) 18         Climber following others’ lead, like a sheep (5) 20         Early satellite rattles around (7) 22         Minerva regularly gripped by desire to win (7) 24         Scandalous episode of trade show in unopened eatery (7) 25         Clans parking in groups (5) 26         Toss last bit of pepper into casserole (5) 28         Flies second

Laurie Graham

Young recycling zealots are talking rubbish

Church attendances may be falling, but there’s a new religion in town: recycling. Its followers are devout and full of missionary zeal. They follow the collection day rubrics to the letter and if you ask them what evidence they have that sorting their polyethylenes from their PVCs is any more effective than lighting a penny candle, they say: ‘But I believe.’ The road to a greener future seems paved with rinsed yoghurt pots that no one knows what to do with and I grow weary of being guilted, particularly by people who only recently learned to tie their own shoelaces. A couple of months ago I ran the gauntlet of

The Spectator

to 2425: Herein

The unclued lights are regular contributors to the pages of The Spectator week by week. 5/35, 8/10, 12/28, 13, 21A/33 and 21D, 39/26. DOC (in 25) had to be highlighted.   First prize Charles Barr, Norwich Runners-up Roderick Rhodes, Goldsborough, N. Yorks; Janet Ramage, Truro, Cornwall

Douglas Murray

The death of civilised debate

Today nearly all real public discussion has become impossible. Which is why nearly all public thinking has become impossible. Which is why the thinking has gone bad on nearly every major issue now facing us. It isn’t just politics that is finding it hard to operate. It is also the media and every other piece of sense-making apparatus we used to possess. The negatives accrued to any individual or institution for thinking or saying anything remotely controversial now means that they don’t bother any more. We’ve lost the art of discussion and with it the ability to find honest solutions. There are a number of causes. Take the collapse of

Owen Matthews

‘It wasn’t the Russian people who poisoned Skripal, it was just a few guys’: Alexander Lebedev interviewed

Who wants to be a billionaire? Not, apparently, Alexander Lebedev, the self-described ‘Russian ex-oligarch’ who has tried billionaredom and found it not to his liking. Lebedev opens his new book, Hunt the Banker, with a nostalgic riff on his happy youth in a tiny Moscow apartment and the observation that ‘the ideal menu consists of buckwheat (60 cents a kilo), extra virgin flaxseed oil, vegetables and a little fish’. Money, he reckons, ‘warms only a shallow soul. It shrivels the heart, gives no peace, and problems proliferate’. Why, then, did Lebedev leave a comfortable post as a KGB spy in London to pursue a career in banking in post-Soviet Russia?