Society

Thursday

Jon Moynihan

Falling short | 4 January 2018

Hedge funds have already spotted it: Jim Mellon’s latest book, Juvenescence, reviews the new science that will lengthen our lives by 20 years. Through regeneration (stem cell) and repair (DNA) technologies, we’ll soon be living healthily and happily to 110 or more. How soon? Who knows. But the repercussions will be enormous. Major insurance companies will go bust; speculators will make a fortune shorting them; 90-year-olds who bought annuities will become destitute when their annuity provider fails; there will have to be a total rethink of the nation’s state pension age. The annuity recipients; those without savings; company pension funds (many of which are already in negative cash flow): all

Lucy Vickery

Best foot forward

In Competition No. 3029 you were invited to provide a new year’s resolution (or more than one) in verse.   Woody Guthrie’s 1943 ‘new years rulin’s’ have considerable charm: ‘Dont get lonesome; stay glad; dream good; shine shoes; wash teeth if any…’ But perhaps it was Nietzsche who inspired Basil Ransome-Davies’s entry. In 1882, he resolved to become a yes-man: ‘I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers… I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!’   David Silverman’s spin on Thomas Hood’s ‘No!’ was nice. Alanna Blake, George Simmers

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

There’s a much bigger crisis in the NHS than the winter pressures

Whose fault is the current NHS crisis? Today Jeremy Hunt apologised to patients whose operations have been cancelled as a result of serious pressures on hospitals. There are ‘major incidents’ at 16 hospital trusts, and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine is warning that patients who do end up in crowded and chaotic emergency departments ‘are much more likely to have a poorer outcome and even die as a result of their experience’. The Health Secretary said the current situation was ‘absolutely not what I want’, while Theresa May argued that ‘the NHS has been better prepared for this winter than ever before’. The government has not met Simon Stevens’

Sam Leith Sam Leith

John Murray announces new prize for non-fiction in association with The Spectator

John Murray – the publisher of Byron, Goethe, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin, inter alia – turns 250 this year. This week, they’re launching – in association with The Spectator (a stripling at 190-odd) – a new international prize for non-fiction. Entrants, who must be previously unpublished in book form, are invited to submit an essay of up to 4,000 words on the theme of ‘Origin’ (to be interpreted as each writer chooses), together with a proposal for how it might be turned into a book. The winning entry will be published in The Spectator (in print and online), and its author awarded a £20,000 publishing contract with John Murray

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

It’s time to stop burying hard truths about the NHS

The philosophy of the National Health Service, as stated on its website, is that ‘good healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth’. This is why, in theory, Britain’s health service ‘covers everything’. Not this month. Last night, NHS hospitals were made to cancel all non-emergency surgeries until February in order to divert resources to this year’s flu epidemic, which is causing mass overcrowding. As a result, outpatient clinics will be shut down for weeks, and 50,000 appointments have been cut from the schedule. 50,000. Even in today’s world, where statistics are everywhere that number cannot pass by fleetingly. 50,000 patients, often in pain as they wait for a hip replacement,

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Keep Christmas going through January, for God’s sake

Is there anything more evil than Dry January as an unchristian abomination and a conspiracy against Baby Jesus?  Unless it’s Veganuary. It’s part, you know, of the war against Christmas and indeed against a sane approach to the seasons. Look around you, folks: this is a bleak month if you cut out decorations, tinsel, candlelight, hot wine punch and saturated carbs, satsumas and pudding. Nature didn’t intend us to be giving things up at this time of year. Giving up drink when it’s grey and cold is a rubbish idea. And doing it is a modern way of screwing up the seasons by extending the New Year’s resolutions idea into

Toby Young Toby Young

In defence of Toby Young, by Toby Young

Shortly after midnight on 1 January my phone began to vibrate repeatedly. Happy New Year messages from absent friends? No, I was trending on Twitter — the third-most popular topic on the network after #NYE. The cause was a story about me in the next day’s Guardian that had just gone live. The headline read: ‘Toby Young to help lead government’s new universities regulator.’ Now, that is wildly overstating it. I’ve been appointed to the board of the Office for Students (OfS), the new body created by merging the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Office for Fair Access — one of 15 people! But the Guardian’s spin

John Murray

The John Murray Prize with The Spectator

We believe strongly that the best non-fiction isn’t confined by category – as our history shows. Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of his five years exploring South America came out in 1814; it was a major influence on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and his seminal Origin of Species (1859) and both inspired Andrea Wulf to write her multiple prize-winning The Invention of Nature (2015). John Murray are immensely proud to have been the publisher of all three, very different books across over two centuries. We may be Britain’s oldest publisher but we are always looking for new writers and fresh ideas. Our current list include critically acclaimed and bestselling books

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rail fare rises are unpopular but that doesn’t make them wrong

As is traditional, the new year begins with harrumphing. Railway users appear appalled by the suggestion they pay a greater share of the cost of their journey. The current formula for determining railway fares, introduced by the last Labour government a decade ago, was designed to offer a better deal to the majority of citizens while asking those who benefit from trains – the wealthy, on the whole – to pay a little more.  So you can see why this is unpopular and the kind of thing designed to provoke a run on torches and pitchforks all across suburban England. The wealthy always dislike being asked to pay more; their

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

In defence of Toby Young

Turmoil in the Middle East, a reshuffle rumoured at Westminster, and Toby Young is offending the liberal establishment. So far, 2018 doesn’t seem all that different from 2017. The occasion for the latest sputtering is the Speccie columnist’s appointment to the board of the Office for Students. The OfS is the new regulator of Britain’s universities and, according to the Department for Education website, will ‘promote students interests’. (The possessive apostrophe will presumably have to look out for itself.)  Paul Mason describes Young as a ‘Tory eugenicist and educational apartheid guru’. Danny Blanchflower declares him ‘totally unfit [and] unqualified’ and calls for his removal from a post he has only

John Murray

The John Murray Prize: Terms and Conditions

Terms and Conditions for The John Murray Prize Those interested in entering should visit the main page here. The prize for this competition is an opportunity to have a book published by John Murray Press (“JMP”), an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton Limited (“Hodder”) with an advance of £20,000. The Winner will also receive at least two hours of mentoring and the Winner’s essay will be published in The Spectator. Entrants to the competition are required to submit: (1) a previously unpublished non-fiction essay of no more than 4000 words on the theme of origin and; (2) a separate outline of no more than 1000 words on how this essay

Monday

Quentin Letts

New Year, new world order

  Old establishment New establishment Order of the Garter BBC Sports Personality of the Year Parliament’s Woolsack The Supreme Court The Borgias Sir Nicholas Serota and friends William Rees-Mogg Owen Jones Jacob Bronowski Simon Cowell Ciggy soak and TV cook Fanny Cradock Clean-living (Deliciously) Ella Mills Shirley Williams Lily Allen MCC committee members BBC trustees Sid James Lord Sugar Oxbridge high-table dinners Institute for Government lunchtime talks Toad in the hole Sushi Richard Ingrams Guido Fawkes website Bishop of Sodor and Man Emma Thompson Young Conservatives Tinder The Astors The Kardashians The Dimblebys The Dimblebys Athenaeum Babington House BBC Facebook Morecambe and Wise Philip Hammond and John McDonnell Roast joints

Sunday

Ed West Ed West

Does alcohol make us more right-wing?

Although I wrote in my last post that social media makes people miserable, Twitter is also a fantastic resource for acquiring knowledge from experts and specialists in different areas. One of my favourite accounts is Rolf Degen, who daily tweets a number of scientific studies into human behaviour. Just before Christmas he linked to a story concerning the impact of alcohol consumption on politics, suggesting that booze makes us more right-wing. According to the paper ‘alcohol strips away complex reasoning to reveal the default state of the mind’ and drunkenness therefore encourages ‘low-effort, automatic thought’ and so promotes political conservatism. Similarly, as this study of the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam shows, ‘anxiety exerts a general inhibitory effect

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

In defence of 2017: 17 great things that happened this year

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. As 2017 draws to a close, one could be forgiven for remembering the past 12 months as an unrelenting parade of grimness. There was the inauguration of Donald Trump, the governance of Donald Trump, the tweets of Donald Trump…and that’s before one considers the terrorists attacks in Manchester and London, the disintegration of Venezuela’s economy and democracy, and the Las Vegas spree shooting. There’s no sugaring it: 2017 was sent to test us. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Here are 17 positives to come out of 2017. 1. Islamic State was routed The Iraqis seized Mosul from

Dot Wordsworth

Is ‘Hi’ the word of 2017?

A book that changed my way of looking at the world was The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. It showed how playground rhymes and games were handed down to new generations without direct involvement of grown-ups. Iona Opie, one half with her husband, Peter, of the team that brought out the book in 1959, died this year, aged 94. In their research, they built up the world’s biggest private collection of children’s books, now in the Bodleian Library. I remember the thrill of finding duplicates, with their bookplate, in the Charing Cross Road 30 years ago. Children, with their independent culture, can parody things from the adult world. One rhyme that

The Spectator

A portrait of 2017: Brexit stumbled forward, Big Ben was silenced and sexual allegations swept the world

January ‘No deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain,’ Theresa May, the Prime Minister, declared in a speech at Lancaster House. Britain would leave the single market and customs union on leaving the European Union, she said. The Supreme Court ruled that only by an Act of Parliament could Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty trigger Britain’s departure. Mrs May held the hand of President Donald Trump as they walked down a declivity at the White House; she asked him to make a state visit in 2017, but it was not to be. Mr Trump suspended entry to America for people from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia,

Paul Wood

Will Donald Trump be assassinated, ousted in a coup or just impeached?

We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 1: Paul Wood on whether Trump could follow in Nixon’s footsteps and be forced from office: The ‘most deadly adversaries of republican government,’ wrote Alexander Hamilton, arise ‘chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?’ Hamilton’s warning against ‘intrigue, and corruption’, published in 1788, speaks eerily to the Washington of today, where Donald Trump’s enemies imagine he is a Russian ‘agent of influence,’ bought or blackmailed by the

Saturday

Joanna Williams

Feminism is holding women back

It’s easy to see why the online dictionary Merriam-Webster chose ‘feminism’ as their word of the year. 2017 kicked off with women across the globe marching against Donald Trump and ended with Time magazine heralding the #MeToo ‘silence breakers’ as their person of the year. Every glossy double-page spread further established feminism as this year’s fashion. Head cheerleader Jessica Valenti, writing in the Guardian (naturally) is cock-a-hoop about feminism’s resurgence: ‘Now we just have to continue to make it the movement of the year (and next year, and the next) until women can start to feel safe in their own country.’ Which would make perfect sense if Valenti was referring to

The Spectator

Barometer: 2017’s missed targets

Slipping behind Some things which were supposed to happen in 2017: — Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. In 2007 Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of EDF, said that in 2017 we would be able to cook our Christmas turkeys from electricity generated by the plant. Anyone relying on his promise will have had cold turkey. The latest estimate for completion is 2027. — Universal Credit. When introduced in 2013, it was intended that the roll-out would be complete by 2017. That has slipped back to 2022, and is in some doubt altogether. — Electrification of the Gospel Oak to Barking line. Due to be completed in 2017 as part