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Society

Thursday

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Don’t knock our fearless Fridge Kids

At this time of the year, well-meaning folk of otherwise sound mind start to get very sniffy about the impending Winter Olympics. Well, time to pipe down. Sure, we don’t have that many mountains, and we don’t have a great tradition of professional downhill racing (though we have some brilliant amateurs — after all we Brits more or less invented ski-racing in the 1920s). But these Games could be a chance for Britain to do better. The target is five medals, more than ever before. We might not have many downhill racers, but we do have the ‘Fridge Kids’, a bunch of outstanding and attractive young people, full of zest

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Forget a Channel bridge and celebrate Crossrail

This column has long been a sucker for a grand projet. ‘Time for a trip to Boris Island,’ I gushed in 2010 when London’s then mayor came up with his much-mocked (though in engineering terms not unfeasible) wheeze to shift Heathrow to a giant man-made landing strip in the Thames estuary. But even I could see no merit in the Foreign Secretary’s equally unscripted suggestion, during the recent Sandhurst summit with President Macron, of a bridge across the Channel — which would play havoc with vital shipping lanes and cost upwards of £120 billion. If the objective is to facilitate continuing trade with Macron’s compatriots after we leave the EU,

Elizabeth Roberts

Admission of failure

I am in a good position to report from the NHS frontline, having been in hospital with pneumonia for just over a week from 28 December. I was admitted following an early evening visit from a district nurse to the home I share with my younger daughter, her husband and their three children. The nurse rang A&E to advise them of my impending arrival but warned us that there was a four-hour wait for an ambulance. My daughter therefore decided to drive me in, and we arrived at a packed casualty unit. I was desperate for oxygen and my daughter begged at the reception desk for me to be triaged

Wednesday

Richard Dannatt

Britain needs to wake up to the threat from Hezbollah

Tomorrow, the House of Commons will debate the proscription of Hezbollah in its entirety. Abandoning the false distinction between the organisation’s ‘political’ and ‘terrorist’ wings would go a long way toward assuring our national interest and help avert a major new conflagration in the Middle East. Hezbollah’s own long-standing insistence that its organisational setup is indivisible is self-evident; nobody seriously believes that anyone other than Hassan Nasrallah has the final word in its chain of command, be it on politics or terrorism. This diplomatic fiction may have been partly believable when the Lebanese state was still conceivably comprised of Western-oriented elements versus Iran-aligned Hezbollah, but today that is sadly a

Madeleine Kearns

Robert Burns’ #MeToo moment

A year ago, I sang ‘Ye Banks and Braes’ by Robert Burns at the annual Scottish banquet at Manhattan’s University Club. Afterwards, my dinner partner, an American chap, asked me what it was about. Regret, I said. Just look at the last line. But my false lover stole my rose [virginity]. And ah! He left the thorn [unwanted pregnancy] with me.  The American is a feminist metropolitan, and so responded with due sensitivity. ‘Burns must have really understood women,’ he said. I agreed. From Burns’ love letters, it is evident that he used his way with words to climb inside their heads and, from there, into their beds. Burns fathered

Dot Wordsworth

How the word ‘gig’ found a new outlet in the gig economy

In the same song where the brilliant lyricist Ian Dury gave the world the couplet, ‘I could be a writer with a growing reputation/ I could be the ticket-man at Fulham Broadway station’, his narrator speaks of ‘first-night nerves every one-night stand’. Perhaps we are now more accustomed to one-night stand referring to a casual sexual liaison, but in the less metaphorical sense, dating from the 19th century and was later used by Bernard Shaw, it simply means a one-night musical engagement, or gig. Gig is first recorded in 1926, in Melody Maker. By 1939 it had given rise to the modern-sounding gigster, someone who plays gigs. Now in our day, it has found a

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

We can have an efficient health service or one no one complains about. We can’t have both

This piece first appeared in this week’s Spectator magazine.  Recently the NHS postponed a large number of non-urgent operations to cope with what is known as the ‘annual winter crisis’. Naturally, this outcome was treated as a scandal in the press, and there were predictable calls for Jeremy Hunt to resign. But the fact that non-urgent operations are postponed is not by definition bad. It might be evidence that the NHS is working well. Or at least that it is doing what it is supposed to do, which is to deploy necessarily finite resources on the basis of patient need, rather than some other criterion — such as profitability or

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Great Ormond Street is wrong to return the Presidents Club’s cash

The Presidents Club dinner is not the type of event to which I tend to be invited and neither do I suspect I would go were I to be asked – although in truth that is as much down to my native tightfistedness as to the reports of boorish behaviour from this year’s event. I don’t like the idea of anyone trying to get me drunk in order that I might lose my inhibitions and start writing a very large cheque for charity, however worthy the cause. I would rather make my charitable donations when sober, thank you very much. Were I running a charity, on the other hand, I

Harry Mount

Meghan Markle and the return of American Anglophilia

Prince Harry’s imminent wedding to Meghan Markle will reinvigorate the dying special relationship between Britain and America. It is a boost for the fading American regard for the monarchy. In America, the mother country is increasingly the forgotten country – and it has been fading for a century, ever since the First World War. As Sellar and Yeatman put it in 1066 and All That, after the allied victory ‘America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a full stop’. As the increasingly weaker party in the 242-year affair, we cherish the special relationship much more than the dominant partner. That great Anglo-American WH Auden – an exile

Tuesday

Tim Wyatt

The Church of England’s Bishop Bell battle

The Archbishop of Canterbury has once again been dragged into a battle between traditionalists and modernisers. This time though it’s not about gay marriage or women bishops, but the tattered reputation of one of the Church of England’s most-celebrated figures, Bishop George Bell. Justin Welby was sorely mistaken if he hoped commissioning an independent report into the claim that Bell was a child abuser would draw a line under this messy two-year row. Instead, the report found that the church has made mistakes in the way it handled the accusations. This infuriated Bell’s supporters, who always maintained his innocence. Now, some are calling for Welby to walk, or at least

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump will feel right at home in Davos

After a prolonged dry spell, the Donald, to borrow from Billy Bush’s memorable taped remark, has finally scored again. For the past week, Trump has been buffeted by revelations in the appropriately named In Touch magazine about his alleged dalliance with the porn star Stormy Daniels. Melania is reportedly so incensed that she will no longer join Trump on his trip to Davos. At the same time, Trump’s own staff immured him in the White House over the past few days so that he couldn’t disrupt Senate negotiations over ending a government shutdown. Now, however, Trump has something to crow about: the capitulation of the Democrats. Trump’s elation over the

Mark Piggott

In defence of extreme moderation

Reading Melanie Phillips in this morning’s Times made me really cross. Nothing unusual in that – except I’m cross because I agreed with every word she had to say about free speech, and the lunatic attacks on Canadian academic Jordan Peterson by activists who have the gall to call themselves progressive. Peterson, in case you didn’t know, has argued against proposals that Canada introduce new laws insisting personal pronouns be changed to ze and zir at the request of the addressee concerned. As someone who still thinks of himself as ‘left wing’ (Left and Right being, as I have said here before, somewhat outmoded), I hate agreeing with Melanie Phillips.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris is right about NHS funding – but he didn’t get his way today

Cabinet today was not the dramatic showdown over NHS funding that some expected. Boris Johnson was, unsurprisingly given that Theresa May knew what he wanted to say, not called on to speak first. Those Ministers who went before him emphasised that it would be better if these debates took place in private, not public. When it was Boris’s turn to speak, I am told that he slightly pulled his horns in. He made the case for more money for the NHS but he didn’t argue for a specific figure, I understand. Interestingly, and in a sign of how May still views the International Trade Secretary as her bridge to Brexiteers,

Monday

Sabuhi Gard

New year, new partner?

There is no doubt about it, getting a divorce is an expensive business. The average cost, according to Aviva’s Family Finances report, is £14,500 – which includes legal fees, child custody costs and changing homes. The report highlights how the cost of divorce has spiralled a further 17% since 2014 when divorces in the UK cost, on average, £12,432. It doesn’t stop there. There are also relocation costs. Those wanting to buy a new property have to spend an extra £144,600, or £35,000 in order to rent somewhere. Most people  going through a divorce don’t have money to burn – unless of course you are Ant McPartlin of Ant and

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Two Muslim cultures are emerging in Britain | 22 January 2018

Suppose you were a white supremacist who wanted to keep Muslim children down. Or suppose you were a Machiavellian middle-class parent, who wanted to handicap the competition your child would face when the race for university places began. In either case, you would be delighted by what is happening at St Stephen’s primary school in Newham. Despite having an intake of poor children from Pakistani and African families, the head Neena Lall and chair of the governors Arif Qawi transformed it into one of the best state primaries in England. Now it is falling apart. Qawi resigned last week. Lall faces angry parents, mosque leaders, and activists whipped up by the

James Kirkup James Kirkup

In defence of Cathy Newman

A woman and a man had a conversation. Other people watched and listened. The woman asked the man some questions. The man answered them. Some people liked his answers. Some people didn’t. Some people liked the woman’s questions. Some people didn’t. So some of them called her a bitch and a whore and talked about her dying and said they knew where she lived. And some other stuff too that wasn’t quite as nice as that.  Then the people the woman worked for got a bit worried, so they asked some other people to make sure the woman was safe, because, well, do I really have to explain why people

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The real reason why women aren’t attending their cervical smear tests

Are young women stupid? Apparently, 15 per cent of them would miss a cervical smear appointment for a gym class or waxing appointment. These strange upside-down priorities are outlined in a study of 2,017 women published by charity Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, which also found that two thirds of those surveyed weren’t aware they were most at risk of the illness. The charity also found a third of women were too embarrassed to get on with having the test, with 35 per cent saying they were anxious about their body shape, 34 per cent worrying about the appearance of their genitals, and 38 per cent worrying about smell. Sure, cervical

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Two Muslim cultures are emerging in Britain

Suppose you were a white supremacist who wanted to keep Muslim children down. Or suppose you were a Machiavellian middle-class parent, who wanted to handicap the competition your child would face when the race for university places began. In either case, you would be delighted by what is happening at St Stephen’s primary school in Newham. Despite having an intake of poor children from Pakistani and African families, the head Neena Lall and chair of the governors Arif Qawi transformed it into one of the best state primaries in England. Now it is falling apart. Qawi resigned last week. Lall faces angry parents, mosque leaders, and activists whipped up by the

Sunday

Linden Kemkaran

Is church the last bastion of boredom?

I was listening to Thought for The Day on Radio 4 the other morning. Well, I say listening, as most parents will know, that is something you can do only in an empty house. What I mean is: the radio was on, a religious man was speaking and I caught probably every fourth or fifth word in between shouting at my kids to hurry up. Anyway, the gist of what the man was saying was that it is good to be bored as it frees up the brain, and going to church may well be one of the last places on earth where that is entirely and routinely possible. I