Society

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Is France on the verge of class war between Yellow Vests and Red Scarves?

The first thing that struck me when I emerged from the metro station onto the Place de la Nation was the amount of corduroy. It was without doubt the trouser material of choice for the middle-aged men participating in Sunday’s inaugural Red Scarf (Foulard Rouge) rally in support of the Republic and its institutions. As I meandered through the crowd, which numbered only half of the 20,000 hoped for by the organisers, I was also surprised by the number of blue and gold flags. Some demonstrators were waving the EU banner and others were wrapped in it, like football fans on their way to a World Cup match. I spied

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Does the Left want us to return to the pre-industrial age?

However misguided their ideas, until recently it was safe to assume that those on the Left did at least want to improve the lot of humanity – they wanted the global population to enjoy better health, a better diet and longer lives. They just disagreed with capitalists and free marketeers over how best to achieve those things. Now I am not so sure. An extraordinary piece appears in the Guardian today by Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at Goldsmiths College, which savages Bill Gates for tweeting, from Davos last week, an infographic showing several ways in which global poverty is declining. I can think of many reasons to savage Bill Gates,

Bruce Anderson

Brexit and cru bourgeois

Acouple of lawyers were disagreeing about a matter which could become increasingly relevant. Could a sitting president pardon himself? But there was a further aspect to this question. A friend of mine who has known Mr Trump for 20 years and who likes him detects a weakening in his mental powers. One of our number was a distinguished neurologist. Pressed to overcome his intellectual scrupulousness about television diagnosis, he thought it not impossible. So are we dealing with dementia, or is the President of the United States just demented? Might it be early stage Alzheimer’s, or merely chronic Trump-heimer’s? If the most notorious teetotaller since Hitler could be persuaded to

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The test of time

In past years, I have been a critic of HS2. I might now change my mind. One simple tweak might make HS2 worthwhile — while saving the taxpayer most of its £60 billion cost. For this to work, all you need to understand is that 1 x 200 is not the same as 200 x 1. To put it another way, commuting is not commutative. At present, all transport investment is driven by an economic model based on the purported economic value of overall time-savings for passengers. This, as David Metz shows in his excellent book Travel Fast or Smart? is a daft way to plan transport. Never mind that

Stephen Gibbs

Caracas Notebook

A man stopped me in the street in Caracas and grabbed my hand. I was alarmed, but tried not to look scared. This city sometimes ranks as the most dangerous capital in the world. The practical advice we tend to be given by security consultants boils down to ‘Don’t panic’. ‘Gringos,’ said the man, ‘are good people. Thank you. May God bless you.’ And he was gone. This has been an emotional week for millions of Venezuelans. And there are plenty here who believe the US administration’s endorsement of a rival president means help is on the way; that somehow, someone outside will solve this. The episode reminded me of an equally

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Millwall aren’t half as racist as you think

Where would you rather come from, Pakistan or Liverpool? Assuming you were somehow given a retrospective choice in the matter. It is not too tough a call for me. I could just about suffer being accused of a ‘cheeky’ wit and perhaps a sense of victimhood — both qualities maybe unfairly associated with Scousers — simply for the benefit of being born in England: it’s Liverpool for me, all the livelong day. This was the question posed, in an extremely offensive truncated form, by a minuscule sub-section of Millwall supporters during the side’s otherwise heroic victory over Everton in the FA Cup last Saturday. By minuscule I mean something well

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 2 February

He will hate me saying this, but Anthony Barton — now in his late eighties — is the grand old man of Bordeaux. Co-owner with his daughter, Lilian Barton-Sartorius, of the fabled Châteaux Léoville & Langoa Barton, Anthony represents the eighth generation of his family in Bordeaux, the links having first been forged in the 1720s when Thomas Barton (‘French Tom’) left Ireland for the Gironde to found the wine-shipping firm of Barton & Guestier. Anthony, too, left Ireland for Bordeaux (in the 1950s) and is famed for his easy-going, French-polished, Irish charm, his unshakeable integrity and for producing the most fairly priced fine wines in the region. I can

David Butterfield

Cairns

There are piles of stones and then there are piles of stones. Anyone can place one rock upon another, but it takes a special endeavour to get the Ordnance Survey to take notice. Once a clutch of cartographers formally recognise a cairn, it will stay mapped for centuries, if not millennia. Wander around Britain’s fells, moors and coastline and you’ll find all manner of rock piles punctuating the landscape. Often some 5,000 years old, these are our island’s most ancient standing constructions. Although they might look similar, cairns are not all the same. Summit cairns, for instance, indicate the precise pinnacles of hills. Many originate from the tradition, still known

Elisa Segrave

Drunken confessions

I have always found the parable of the Prodigal Son sickeningly unfair, and I felt this again while driving a close relative down a motorway in a frightful gale at night to a residential rehab. -That morning I’d had an emergency consultation in London on behalf of the said relative, with the head of the rehab place, who I’ll call Dr X. Throughout, I’d had the uneasy feeling that Dr X was subtly trying to make me feel at fault for not being sympathetic enough to my relative’s situation. Actually, I have suffered for years from his wild and selfish behaviour while on cocaine and alcohol, and have often tried

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Old flame

It was a close-run thing for my friend who’s having a new kitchen installed in her house in Chiswick. After a persuasive campaign by her eloquent architect, who has an induction hob in his own house and loves it for its clean lines and hyper-efficiency, she had got as far as ordering one for herself. Having placed the order, she couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned, worrying about the imminent change to her cooking life that the induction hob would (literally) induce, let alone the need to buy a whole new set of ‘induction-ready’ pans. No more knobs to turn a fraction to the left while frying an omelette, ever

Lucy Vickery

Tweet beginnings

In Competition No. 3083 you were invited to submit a poem or a short story that begins ‘It started with a tweet…’.   Hats off to Philip Machin for an appropriately pithy submission: It started with a tweet — There’s nothing wrong in that — But, sadly, indiscreet: It ended with a cat. Elsewhere, in a varied and engaging entry, there were echoes of Shelley’s skylark, Lear’s owl and Hitchcock’s Birds. The winners below are rewarded with £25 each. It started with a tweet, a joke at his expense, okay, but just a quip intended to provoke a smile or some quick counter-thrust: instead he opted to deplore its tone,

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: is it time to stop working?

In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by Josh Cohen, author of the Not Working: Why We Have To Stop (reviewed here by Houman Barekat). Josh is a literary critic and a working psychoanalyst, and his book is a thoughtful and subtle discussion of the way in which work dominates not only our lives and identities but our leisure time too — and a speculation about some of the ways we might set about changing that. His references range from Max Weber and Freud to Orson Welles, Andy Warhol, Emily Dickinson and David Foster Wallace. Is it all the fault of “late capitalism”? Has the digital age made quiet contemplation impossible? And why, I wondered, does

Tuesday

Amy Proffitt

Doctors cannot be neutral on assisted dying

The Royal College of Physicians will soon begin yet another consultation with its members on the subject of ‘assisted dying’. The college is opposed to legalisation, but a minority are unhappy with this. They know there is no chance of persuading a majority to support such practices. So they are pressing for the college to declare itself neutral. Whether the law should be changed, they say, is a matter for society rather than for the medical profession. In one sense they are right. Whether the law should be changed to permit people to be supplied with lethal drugs to take their own lives is a social rather than a medical

General Sir Mike Jackson

What we can learn from the British Army’s help in the fight against Boko Haram

For two decades, violent, extremist organisations have had a devastating impact on the African continent. Attacks by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Boko Haram, and their splinter group Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have displaced millions within and across national borders and decimated vital services,  education, healthcare, and businesses. Since 2009, Boko Haram have claimed more than 27,000 lives in Nigeria and Cameroon, and as the Nigerian presidential election in February approaches, the terrorist group has renewed its campaign of violence. British military support for African states is therefore vital in tackling the scourge of violent extremist organisations. The British Army is actively engaged in operations across the globe,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Does the Left want us to return to the pre-industrial age? | 29 January 2019

However misguided their ideas, until recently it was safe to assume that those on the Left did at least want to improve the lot of humanity – they wanted the global population to enjoy better health, a better diet and longer lives. They just disagreed with capitalists and free marketeers over how best to achieve those things. Now I am not so sure. An extraordinary piece appears in the Guardian today by Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at Goldsmiths College, which savages Bill Gates for tweeting, from Davos last week, an infographic showing several ways in which global poverty is declining. I can think of many reasons to savage Bill Gates,

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson: my sister on fighting cancer with faith

The photo above is of my sister Carmel and me having tea a few days after our mother’s funeral. She looks cheerful, doesn’t she? That’s because she was: although we both missed our mother intensely, and always will, we had done most of our grieving before she died, as we watched her tortured by Parkinson’s disease and severe dementia. Carmel looks well, too. And she thought she was. Ovarian cancer plays that trick on women. The first symptoms tend to be annoying rather than alarming. A few weeks after this photograph was taken, I was reassuring her that Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a common response to bereavement – which it

Patrick West

There’s nothing ‘elitist’ about kids following in their parents’ footsteps

Children of doctors are 24 times more likely than their peers to become doctors. Children of lawyers are 17 times more likely to go into law, and children of those in film or television are 12 times more likely to enter these fields. The same pattern is repeated in architecture and in the performing arts. These are the revelations announced in a new book, ‘The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged’, by Sam Friedman, a professor at the London School of Economics, and Daniel Laurison. The book sets out to explore the “helping hands” that allow the well-connected middle-classes to retain their domination in elite professions. Dr Friedman calls

Monday

Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

Why Generation Z is turning away from alcohol 

Actress Anne Hathaway grabbed headlines recently with a somewhat unorthodox parenting strategy: she revealed she has given up alcohol until her two-year-old son turns 18 because she does not want him to see her drunk. Hathaway’s approach might seem puritanical to anyone who’s no longer in their twenties, but for Generation Z it’s the new normal. According to the Institute of Alcohol Studies, only 38 per cent of 11 to 15 year-olds have even tried alcohol, let alone gotten drunk. So why has drinking fallen so rapidly out of favour? To those who inherited the social freedoms of the 60s and rebelled against the stiff upper lips of their parents it

James Landale

Davos’s guilty secret

Somehow I had managed more than a quarter of a century in journalism without ever going to Davos. It had become almost a badge of honour, the one gathering of global nabobs I had been able to dodge year after year. But here I am in the mountains of Switzerland, a new boy amid the pilgrims come to worship at the altar of globalisation. I am international by profession and inclination — could a diplomatic correspondent be anything else? — but I can report that this annual meeting of the world’s great and good makes itself easy to lampoon. One friend, also on his first Davos tour, says it is