The Battle for Britain – 14 March 2019
Society
Thursday
to 2396: Reader …,
Unclued lights were husbands (40A) of Jane Austen’s heroines. First prize Alison Hinder, Sholing, Southampton Runners-up Janet Dibley, Polegate, East Sussex; C.G. Millin, Ramleaze, Wiltshire
A dose of understanding
What a baffling group of people anti-vaxxers are. They rail against one of the miracles of modern medicine, peddling scare stories about vaccines which had nearly eradicated many deadly childhood illnesses in the developed world. Baffling, of course, is too soft a word for many: they’re dangerous, because their anti-science views don’t just put their own children at risk, but wider society. The uptake of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in Britain is at 87.5 per cent. This sounds a lot, but isn’t close to the 95 per cent threshold that the World Health Organisation (WHO) says will ensure ‘herd immunity’ — which is when a disease cannot spread
The Democrats’ anti-Semitism problem
Washington, DC Republican strategists have long complained about how, every election, the Democrats mobilise minority groups against them. Now they’re trying to turn the tables. Right-wing social media warriors, encouraged by @realDonaldTrump, have spent months talking about ‘Blexit’: a black voter exit from the Democratic party. This week, the President and others have begun calling for a ‘Jexodus’ — a Jewish exodus — too. How Trump must delight in those clunky portmanteaus. He knows that, while black voters usually vote Democrat, they are not altogether anti-Trump. He also senses that Jewish voters, traditionally the most left–liberal people in America, are alarmed at a new Democrat tendency to bash Israel. Suddenly,
A perfect Sunday in Lent
Life is far too important to be taken seriously. At least, that was the conclusion which we meandered towards as a Sunday lunch party eased into a symposium. Chaps had opinions to draft, articles to write, books to review. But no one was minded to defer to conscientiousness — especially as we had all made a solemn pledge not to discuss Brexit. Our host had consulted me about the bill of fare. Should it be lamb and Burgundy or beef and claret? I declared myself ready to settle for either, though both might be inadvisable. Beef it was, and grass-fed Aberdeen Angus at that. As I often remind vegetarians (too
IQ tests: the controversy that won’t go away
I have a dim memory from 1970 of a primly dressed distant relative visiting in a Baby Austin. This, I later learned, was the anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood. I googled her 45 years later and was astonished to find she had spent several years in the 1920s and 1930s living alone among Stone Age tribes in New Guinea. Her pet kitten so enchanted the normally fierce Kukukuku that they even built her a temporary house. Aside from her travels, what also surprised me was how close-knit the world of anthropology then was. Just a few hundred people gave rise to debates which are still alive today. Nature vs nurture, for instance.
The death of Shamima Begum’s baby is a tragedy – but not Sajid Javid’s fault
It would take a heart of stone – and occasionally I possess just such an organ – not to feel sympathy for Shamima Begum after she lost a third baby, her son Jarrah, barely three weeks old, in a Syrian refugee camp. But should we feel guilt as well as compassion for leaving the child – all unbeknown to him, a British citizen and possibly Dutch too – to fester in the camp occupied by IS refugees? More precisely, how responsible should the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, feel, having deprived Miss Begum of her British citizenship? The BBC news all day long has linked him to the death: criticism of
The false equivalence between ‘Islamophobia’ and anti-Semitism
I have been travelling in the Middle East for the last few weeks and slightly regret returning to the maelstrom of ancient animosities and unbridgeable sectarianism that is modern Britain. But in my absence I see that one of the worst tropes of our time has been stalking unhindered across the land. That is, of course, the latest push to make an equivalence between anti-Semitism and the crock term ‘Islamophobia’. It is not just in the UK that this play has been made. In America over recent days people have been able to follow the progress of the new Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar, with her supporters deciding to deflect attention
The Brexiteers have blown it
If, as Rod Liddle says, Brexit has been killed there is no shortage of suspects. 75 of them, in fact. That’s the number of Conservative MPs who voted against the Government in last night’s second – but not necessarily final – meaningful vote. They wanted Brexit and then, when they were given it, they decided it wasn’t the kind of Brexit they wanted after all. Fanaticism invariably devours its adherents and so it is with Brexit. The Brexiteers wanted the ball but once they had it they decided they did not actually want it after all. They had their chance and they blew it. All they had to do was
The view from a street corner in Beirut
A pale sun had emerged from wintry clouds and the hillsides were topped snowy white. But all around me was the workaday bustle of Beirut streets still wet from overnight winter rain. This was the Armenian quarter, near the docks, at morning coffee time. I was standing on the Rue Qobaiyat, opposite a downtown petrol station and outside a corner barber’s shop, Salon Anto. My partner and his mother wanted to go to a museum and I’m not a great one for museums, and needed a haircut. ‘There’s a barber just around the corner,’ said the helpful owner of the little Baffa House lodge where we were staying. ‘A bit
Bible bashers
Being a street preacher can be a thankless business. Since moving to Britain from Nigeria nine years ago, 64-year-old Oluwole Ilesanmi has toured the country reading aloud from the Bible, spending hours outside train stations, urging people to see the light. Sometimes he makes a convert; most of the time his preaching falls on deaf ears. Last month, it resulted in him being arrested. Saturday 23 February began like a typical day for Ilesanmi. He went to Southgate tube station in north London and preached for a few hours. His spiel included a disobliging reference to Islam, which seemed to rile a passer-by. To Ilesanmi’s surprise he was then accosted
A punk’s notebook
One of the great things about touring with a band is that it gets me away from my little west London bubble and out and about around the towns and cities that I haven’t been to in quite some time. So off we go with my new boots and panties and my escape-from-the-band book, Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, loaned to me by your very own Michael Henderson. The revamped, reformed, post-Sex Pistols punk popsters The Professionals are on their way. First stop Exeter and the obligatory stop-off for the Spinal Tap Stonehenge band photo. It has to be done. The film still strikes a chord with every band, and we’ve
It’s all me, me, me
Simon Amstell’s Benjamin is a romantic comedy about a young filmmaker whose second feature is about to première, and he’s nervous. Don’t be, says his producer (Anna Chancellor). ‘Some people,’ she expands comfortingly, ‘will like it and some people won’t be into it, but each and every one of them is going to die, aren’t they? Because we are all going to die.’ Fair point. If you can ever say there is any point. Amstell’s career has always been predicated on his own existential crises, but as I’m one of those who is quite into that, I rather loved this film, not that it matters. Does anything? Amstell is the
Forgive the IRA and we must forgive the Bloody Sunday soldiers too
In my 2010 short story ‘Prepositions’, a woman has lost her husband not in 9/11 but on 9/11 — when coming to the aid of a family whose distress had nothing to do with the World Trade Center. Composed as a letter to a friend whose husband did indeed perish in the Twin Towers, the narrator expresses her dismay at being left to a lonely, private grief, while her friend’s loss is heralded in grand ceremonies in lower Manhattan every year. The point: some deaths count more than others. While all bereavements haunt on an individual level, publicly only a small, elite subsection of fatalities is exalted as especially terrible,
Bloody liar
It is more than 15 years since the Bloody Sunday soldiers last appeared in public. For months I sat in the room with them to watch their evidence at Lord Saville’s inquiry. And while Lionel Shriver is right that the sight of terrorists benefiting from an immunity denied to our soldiers is grotesque, there are competing qualms. Not only because British soldiers should be held to a higher standard than terrorists. But because, having watched all of the Bloody Sunday shooters testify, I can say with certainty that they include not only unapologetic killers, but unrelenting liars. As one soldier after another appeared before Lord Saville, it became clear that
Why I’ve joined the SDP
I was down the pub with my wife last week, out in the tiny smoking section, when a woman with a glass of beer sat down beside us and opened a conversation. She was from Delhi, she told us, before announcing somewhat grandly that she was an ‘academic’. I suppose I should have got the hell out there and then, but I was enjoying my cigarette. Anyway, we chatted briefly about the university at which she worked and shortly after this she said that at the moment she was ‘preparing for 29 March’ and was aghast at the whole Brexit business. Oh, I said, I voted Leave. She responded somewhat
Irish ruins
The Celtic Tiger has come and gone. Over the past 30 years, billions of pounds poured into Irish houses and then drained out again. The ruins of Ireland have slumbered on through the peak, the trough and the current blessed recovery. Medieval castles, Georgian country houses, Victorian lodges… They cling on, disappearing under the ivy, slowly crumbling, in demesnes across the island of Ireland. As Robert O’Byrne, aka the Irish Aesthete, writes in his new guide Ruins of Ireland, we tend to think Ireland lost most of its great houses as a direct result of the Troubles of the early 1920s. Several hundred did get burnt to the ground then.
Wine Club 16 March
My old chum Jason Yapp is never less than chipper. Indeed, his ebullience is boundless. In springtime, this innate effervescence fair bubbles over and his enthusiasm for his wines and his distaste for spittoons are dangerously infectious. It took an age to whittle this selection down to six and I trust you enjoy my choices as much as I did and do. The 2017 Saint-Pourçain ‘Cuvée Printan-ière’ (1) comes from the upper Loire Valley and, in typical regional French style, there’s bugger all information on the front label and no label on the back to speak of. It’s only because JY insisted on wafting it under my beak and wouldn’t
Climate change | 14 March 2019
In Competition No. 3089 you were invited to put your own spin on a weather forecast. The seed for the task came from the Master Singers’ take on a weather report, soothingly intoned in the style of an Anglican chant. But as one competitor reminded me there is also that 1970s gem, courtesy of the Two Ronnies: ‘The sun will be killing ’em in Gillingham, it’ll be choking in Woking, dry in Rye and cool in Goole. And if you live in Lissingdown take an umbrella!’ The brief was deliberately open and it produced a pleasingly corpulent and diverse if somewhat gloomy postbag. An honourable mention goes to
A nervous traveller
My 1982 photo album is full of pictures of a well-travelled, privileged 11-year-old boy. I was at North Bridge House prep school, a cream stucco Nash villa on the north-eastern corner of Regent’s Park, north London. That photo album shows me, unsmiling, in a ski-pass picture on a family holiday in the Tyrol in January. In April, I went on a school trip to Normandy: there’s a picture of me sitting on the turret of an Allied tank overlooking the D-Day beaches. But the holiday that really sticks in my mind from that year was a school trip to Amsterdam in October. There are only a few blurred pictures in
