Society

Thursday

William Cook

Bright spot in the Baltic

In the historic heart of Riga, Latvia’s lively capital, stands a monument which sums up this country’s stormy past. The Freedom Monument was built in 1935 to commemorate the war of independence in which patriotic Latvians fought off the Germans and the Russians to finally establish Latvia as a sovereign state. That first bout of independence lasted barely 20 years. In 1940 the Soviets marched in, then in 1941 the Nazis marched in and kicked them out, and in 1944 the Soviets marched back in again and stayed until 1991. Yet despite being earmarked for demolition, the Freedom Monument survived. In the 1980s it became the focus for protests against

John Gimlette

A tomb with a view

Death is not the end but the beginning of a long, hard climb. At least that’s what the Bara people believe. No sooner have your bones been scraped clean than you’re off, into the Isalo Massif. Fortified with rum, your relatives will shin up the cliffs to find the perfect niche, at heights of up to 4,000ft. The greater you were, the higher they’ll climb. Occasionally they’ll fall, and there will be more rum, more climbing and more coffins. But eventually, you’ll be properly dead, enjoying eternity from the top of the world. For outsiders, it’s a tricky business, getting to Isalo. For a start, Madagascar is stupendously big and

The Spectator

Letters | 11 October 2018

Bathroom politics Sir: James Kirkup’s article (‘The march of trans rights’, 6 October) discussed many of the complexities created by the issue, and rightly so. It also briefly mentioned the ‘bathroom battles’ in the United States. Such episodes illustrate the practical problems with legislating against such societal developments — new laws often do not solve but escalate the issue. In North Carolina in 2016, legislation was introduced to prevent transgender individuals from using particular bathrooms. The policing of this law presented practical issues. It would be impossible to guard every gender-specific public bathroom in the state. Either it would require a significant increase in police numbers, or be up to

Taki

High life | 11 October 2018

Gstaad   The bells are ringing, the bells are ringing, ding dong, ding dong. The cows are down from up high, where they’ve been grazing since spring. I look at them from my window and they stare back. I love hearing cowbells day and night. Their sound accompanies me as I hit the makiwara. I like it best when the cows cosy up and examine me up close. They have a complete absence of expression: no emotion, no curiosity, serene. The one that grazes just outside my window I call Emily, and she has even more tsuki no kokoro — ‘mind like the moon’ in karate parlance — than the

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 11 October 2018

I told Oscar to wait outside and I went in and said to the barman: ‘Would it be all right if my grandson came in to watch the football?’ ‘Of course,’ he said. My notion that children aren’t allowed in pubs must be a quaint one because his harassed, hardworking face creased into a bemused smile and a man seated at the bar laughed. We had four screens of various sizes to choose from: one behind the bar, one above the pool table, one above the fireplace and one fixed to the wall at the end of the bar. About a dozen customers were half paying attention to the screens

Melissa Kite

Real life | 11 October 2018

Teacher training is terrific fun. Oh yes, I am thoroughly enjoying myself on my evening course at Guildford College. Don’t worry, I’m not actually becoming a teacher. The Snowflakes of Britain are safe. No, I hit upon the idea of running a writers’ group. But of course you can’t just run anything in this country any more. Once you look into the Kafkaesque nightmare of having strangers in your house or of hiring a venue in which you will interact with other human beings, you start to fall into a dark and terrifying pit of equality and health and safety legislation. Naturally, the first thing anyone wants to know if

Robin Oakley

The turf | 11 October 2018

Racing is full of risk-takers, not least those who fork out hefty sums to buy yearlings or unraced two-year-olds. Back at the Keene-land Sales in 1983 Sheikh Mohammed paid a record $10.2 million for Snaafi Dancer, a colt by the great Northern Dancer. Snaafi Dancer alas proved so slow that he never made it to the racecourse. Retired to stud, he had fertility problems and only ever sired four foals. In 2006 a frantic bidding war at Fasig-Tipton between two great racing empires — Sheikh Mohammed’s John Ferguson bidding against Coolmore’s John Magnier — saw Coolmore pay a new world record price of $16 million for The Green Monkey. Despite

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 11 October 2018

Good news for bridge if the Open World Championships in Orlando are anything to go by. Far from dying, it is spawning and nurturing young players who are making their mark spectacularly. In the first two tournaments (Open Teams and Open Pairs) Michal Klukowski (22) won his fifth world title on the Zimmermann team and the Swedish twins Mikael and Ola Rimstedt (23) chalked up their second gold medal this year, winning the Open Pairs.   In 2006 the Open Pairs in Verona was won by the (then) relative newcomers Fu Zhong and Jack Zhao of China. Here is Fu, 12 years later, showing he hasn’t lost his touch:  

Toby Young Toby Young

The police should chase down theft, not thought crime

West Yorkshire Police hit the headlines twice this week. First we learned that the fourth-largest force in England and Wales has decided to ‘screen out’ 46.5 per cent of cases a year, i.e. not investigate them. And these aren’t minor crimes, but things like theft, assault and burglary. Apparently, West Yorkshire Police’s 5,671 officers will spend their time on ‘more complex’ offences instead. What do they mean by that? A clue was provided by the second story which concerned the verbal harassment warning the force has given to Graham Linehan, a television comedy writer, after a Twitter dispute resulting from Linehan referring to a transgender activist as ‘he’ rather than

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 11 October 2018

Home EU officials were suspiciously cheerful over the prospects of Brexit negotiations running up to the next summit on 18 October. ‘I think there is a chance to have an accord by the end of the year,’ said Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, did a little dance in humorous emulation of Theresa May’s dance moves the week before at the Conservative party conference. British ministers invented the concept of the ‘hybrid backstop’ for Northern Ireland, involving some more checks and an extension of the United Kingdom’s membership of the customs union. Crawford Falconer, the Department of International Trade’s chief

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 11 October 2018

Q. An old friend shares aesthetic sensibilities and tastes in people. Hence we have sustained a highly enjoyable correspondence over some decades. However, having recently had significant professional success, he is no longer fulfilling his side of the bargain. Even 1,000 words from me will now elicit only a perfunctory response. Yet whenever we meet in London he apologises that he is too busy to respond at length and begs me to continue with my own musings, on which he insists he ‘depends’. Mary, how, without seeming querulous, victimy or even ‘queeny’, can I make him see this has become an unfair exchange? — Name and address withheld A. While

Dot Wordsworth

Scumbag

President Vladimir Putin of Russia remarked of Sergei Skripal, whom his agents tried to kill, ‘He’s simply a scumbag.’ Scumbag at least is how the press translated his words. I’m afraid that from my sheltered life I did not know the literal meaning of scumbag. Look away now if you’d rather not know and I’ll join you at the next paragraph. Literally it is ‘a condom’, an Americanism first recorded in 1967, which is also the first year in which scum meaning ‘semen’ is recorded. An equivalent derogatory term also of American origin, used in the television cartoon Family Guy, is douchebag. This is older than scumbag in its literal

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 October 2018

Although, in David Goodhart’s famous distinction, I see myself as one of the ‘Somewheres’ rather than the ‘Anywheres’, I do not believe in nationalism (as opposed to patriotism). Nationalism always involves falsified history and sees identity as a zero-sum game. Nation states should be respected, not deified, and are usually the better for not being ethnically ‘pure’. But the Anywheres’ attacks on nationalism are interestingly selective. They hate Viktor Orban’s Hungarian version, for instance, but love Leo Varadkar’s Irish one. The avowedly internationalist EU uses Irish nationalism as its biggest moral justification for blocking Brexit. And thus does Scottish nationalism, being seen as left-wing, escape criticism for its coercive righteousness.

Doc

2380: Dedover

All the unclued Across lights are of a kind, as are all the unclued Down ones. They can be paired appropriately, and can be confirmed in Brewer.   Across 4    What’s blocking criminal courts I bet around five? (11) 11    Land adviser returning to wharf without question (7) 16   Suave young socialite leaves broadcasting (5, two words) 21    Not half remarkably rapid. It’s the limit! (4) 23    Surrounded by endless birdsong, aim and shoot (7) 24    Concert walk at the seaside (4) 25    One going in lower, not both (7) 30    Select group making lake bed, first (7) 31    Bird to drop head for nothing (4) 34    Wild ox hiding

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The cautionary tale of Karen White, the transgender rapist

Karen White is a rapist and child abuser who has committed several acts of sexual violence against vulnerable people. One of the women Karen White raped was pregnant. Karen White is now going to spend a long time in jail. Next week, a Government consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act 2004 will end. That’s the law that allows someone, for example, born male to be legally recognised as female, under certain conditions: you have to show you’ve lived in your new gender for two years, and a doctor has to certify that you have gender dysphoria or another condition that underpins your transition. Some people think those conditions should be

Fiona Unwin

Pret a danger

Each year, about ten people in Britain die from allergic reactions to food. The case of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died after eating a sandwich from Pret a Manger, was a nasty reminder of how allergies can claim young lives at any moment. But it also raises a difficult question: to what extent are businesses that serve food culpable? Why do so many people, after this case, want to blame Pret and only Pret? It’s territory with which I am familiar, as a mother of two children with severe allergies. When Alastair, my son, was eight years old we attended one of the first allergy clinics at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.

The Spectator

to 2377: Service book

The twelve unclued lights can be arranged into the sequence yielding phrases from ‘First’ to ‘Twelfth’. First 21, Second 24, Third 4A, Fourth 37, Fifth 30, Sixth 15A, Seventh 3, Eighth 9, 19 Ninth, Tenth 34D, Eleventh 25, 29 Twelfth. ‘Second’ in the solutions at 8D and 17D indicates the sequence.   First prize Norman Melvin, Twickenham, Middlesex Runners-up Peter Wild, Brighton, East Sussex; John Bartlett, Shirley, Solihull

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The dishonesty of the abortion debate

There was an interesting article in the Guardian today about one of the less discussed aspects of miscarriage: the language employed about it by the NHS. “How dare they call my lost baby a “product of conception”’ was the headline for Katy Lindemann’s moving piece about her miscarriage, where she describes how “a baby” – as her unborn child was described when still gestating – was, after dying in the womb and being surgically removed, referred to as the “retained products of conception”. She notes: “From the outset of your antenatal care, the NHS refers to “your baby”’ but not when he or she dies. And she goes on to

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The staggering hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton

Today Hillary Clinton slammed the Tories for failing to join the recent pile-on against Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban. In a speech described by the Guardian as ‘stinging’, Clinton said it was ‘disheartening’ that Conservative MEPs in Brussels voted to ‘shield Viktor Orban from censure’. She was referring to the 18 Tories in the European Parliament who last month rejected the invoking of the punishing Article 7 of the Lisbon Treaty against Orban’s Hungary for being a prejudiced and illiberal state. Hungary is no longer a real democracy but an ‘illiberal’ one, said Clinton — and it’s shameful that Tories are cosying up with such a regime. It’s hard to