Society

Summer has arrived early in Vienna and the city of Strauss and Schubert has never looked lovelier. The parks are full of students, basking in the sunshine. The elegant cafes along the Ringstrasse are full of debonair businessmen and businesswomen, making contacts, doing deals. You could almost be back in the Habsburg Empire a hundred years ago, when Vienna ruled over a Reich that stretched from Trieste to Transylvania. However despite its prosperous appearance, all is not well here in the Austrian capital. The bad news for the Viennese is that Austria has become important again. Throughout the Cold War, surrounded on three sides by the Iron Curtain, Austria looked

Barbara Bush, who has died at the age of 92, was a feminist’s nightmare. She dropped out of Smith College, from which the women’s lib movement would later explode, to marry and raise a family. Firmly independent but a dutiful wife, she was a liberal on abortion and gay rights but learned to keep mum for her husband’s sake. She was also tougher than him but ploughed her energy into stiffening his spine. As First Lady, she was content to be the strong woman behind a successful man and was proud to be known to millions of Americans for her clam chowder and chocolate chip cookie recipes. ‘I don’t fool

Tony Gilkes is a very English hero. The Middlesborough pensioner wanted nothing more than what all hungry Englishmen want: a hearty meat pie. Yet when he tried to procure pastries from his local Morrisons at 8.45am he was rebuffed; staff at the supermarket refused to serve him before 9am. So what did Gilkes do? He went to war on the retail chain until it backed down and agreed to serve flaky fare from 7am. But most English of all was Tony’s suspicion that sinister motives were afoot. He mused: ‘There’s more to this. Morrisons have got their own agenda. They don’t want people to know about it. They have given too many ridiculous

There’s a curiously two-faced aspect to the British take on the Commonwealth, wouldn’t you say? On the one hand, there’s justifiable contrition about the treatment of the elderly Windrush generation and a general feeling that the Commonwealth leaders assembled for this week’s summit might be justified in taking Britain to task for its cavalier approach to postwar Caribbean immigrants. On the other, when Commonwealth countries get uppity and show signs of not conforming to the social norms of this country, why, they get very short shrift indeed. There was an ugly little interview this morning on the Today programme which expressed precisely this ambivalence. Homosexual acts are illegal in Trinidad,

How did the government manage to create such a terrible row over the Windrush generation? The Home Office has told many people who arrived here as children in the late 1940s and 1950s that they are in fact illegal immigrants because they cannot produce documents from 40 years ago about their residence here. That in itself might have been a terrible cock-up, but Number 10’s decision to then turn down a request from the representatives of 12 Caribbean countries for a meeting was totally bizarre particularly given those representatives are in London for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting this week. Inevitably, since the row about this broke, the government

Last week there was an exclusive in the Times – widely followed up – revealing majority support for NHS-linked tax rises. ‘For the first time in more than a decade, a majority of Britons say that they are personally willing to pay more to increase spending, according to the respected British Social Attitudes survey’. It followed this up by a leading article to this breakthrough, saying: ‘Ministerial hearts may be gladdened, therefore, by a new poll published in The Times today. It suggests that 61 per cent voters back higher taxes to fund the health service, with 25 per cent saying that the government should raise existing taxes and 36