Society

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Benefits for people who don’t live here? Great idea

Yet another exciting discovery from the world of Islamic science. As you are probably aware, Islamic culture has always paid a high regard to science and Muslims will tell you proudly that they invented absolutely nothing. That is, they have provided the world with the mathematical representation of absolutely nothing, what we now know as zero. Where would we be without nothing? In the tenth century the scholar Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Khwarizmi decided that it would be useful to draw a little circle to signify zero if you were doing some complex calculation. He called it sifr. There is some dispute as to whether this really was the first time

The Spectator

A new coalition

From ‘The National Government’, The Spectator, 29 May 1915: We do not suppose that the war, or the need for patriotic effort, has suddenly turned all the men on the new Cabinet list from very human human beings into angels. We do believe, however, that the war has changed them from politicians into fighting men… To put it plainly, they know that there is nothing behind them, that the reserves have been brought up, and that they must either hold the trench or die in it. This thought will keep the Cabinet together till success crowns their effort.

Liam Halligan

Unequal struggle

‘How do you feel when you go back to Gary?’ I ask Joe Stiglitz. ‘Well, frankly, I get depressed,’ he replies. ‘The American middle class was created in places like my home town and is now struggling badly — which makes me sad.’ Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist and the closest thing the left has to an intellectual superstar, grew up in Gary, Indiana, during the 1950s, when it was the heart of the booming US steel industry. His father sold insurance and his mother was a teacher. ‘We had a modest detached brick house, with a lawn all around — it was safe and secure,’ he recalls. ‘Back then,

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Len the loser

It is not only Russian oligarchs and multinational corporations who run to the ‘capitalist courts’ — as we used to call them on the left. Have an argument with Len McCluskey and you find that the leader of Unite is prepared to spend his money, or more likely his members’ hard-earned dues, on hiring the libel lawyers of Carter-Ruck at £550 an hour (plus expenses, of course). Carter-Ruck can charge a little more than the minimum wage because its many wealthy clients know that its lawyers will push as hard as they possibly can to defend clients’ interests, as our spat with McCluskey showed. Last week I published a brisk

Simon Barnes

The farm that went wild

It was the nightingale I liked best. Or maybe the auroch. The nightingale sang strong and marvellously sweet when all the other singers had given up, his voice filling the night. Each nightingale has a personal repertoire of 250 phrases made from 600 individual sound units. I ran into the auroch at six the next morning: enormous, uncompromising and emerging from the bush with a formidable set of horns. Now it’s true that aurochs went extinct 400 years ago; they were the wild cattle of Europe, Asia and North Africa, ancestors of all our domestic stock. But this wild and extraordinary place is full of free-ranging old English longhorn cattle,

Lucy Vickery

Occasional verse | 28 May 2015

In Competition No. 2899 you were invited to write a poem commemorating the birth of Princess Charlotte of Cambridge. The impetus for this comp was Carol Ann Duffy’s failure to deliver the goods. This made some people very cross, but as the official website of the British Monarchy makes clear, modern laureates are under no obligation on this front: ‘It is up to the individual poet to decide whether or not to produce poetry for national occasions or royal events such as weddings and funerals.’ Some may even argue that it was a wise decision on Duffy’s part; after all, previous laureates have produced royal-inspired verses that might have been

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Which behaved worse: callous Thomas Cook or cynical Barclays?

Which is worse, morally and reputationally — to be Thomas Cook, shamed by its refusal to show proper human concern, for fear of being taken to admit responsibility, over the death of two children by carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty boiler while on holiday in Corfu; or to be Barclays, fined almost $2.4 billion (heading a list of banks fined more than $9 billion between them for similar offences) for conspiring to manipulate the foreign exchange market over a five-year period? Ethicists could agonise over that one for weeks. But in terms of customer response, it’s clear that the travel agent — whose mistake was not to reject legal advice

Wednesday

Christopher Snowdon

The new ban on ‘legal highs’ is unworkable. The government doesn’t even know what it’s banning

The man in the pub’s solution to the ongoing panic about legal highs is to ban them. ‘Ban ‘em all! S’obvious, innit? I can’t believe politicians haven’t thought of it already. Yeah, go on, I’ll have another…’ Here’s the thing. It is obvious and politicians have thought of it already. The reason that it never went from the idea stage to the planning stage is that it isn’t as simple as that. Previous home secretaries such as David Blunkett and Charles Clarke didn’t baulk at the idea because they were lily-livered pussy cats with libertarian tendencies. They rejected it because it’s a bad idea, not just illiberal but also unworkable.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

As a gay atheist, I want to see the church oppose same-sex marriage

I see. So now we have the result of the Irish referendum on gay marriage, and now we’ve heard the Roman Catholic Church’s chastened response, we shall have to rewrite Exodus 32, which (you may remember) reports Moses’ (and God’s) furious reaction to the nude dancing and heretical worship of Moloch in the form of a golden calf: the Sin of the Calf in the Hebrew literature. Moses had come down from Mount Sinai bringing God’s commandments written on two tablets of stone. ‘And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot…

Sebastian Payne

Podcast special: the 2015 Queen’s Speech

In this View from 22 special podcast, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss the first Conservative Queen’s Speech in 19 years and the government’s legislation plans for the next 12 months. We discuss the challenges David Cameron will face trying to pass these bills, as well as the traps for the Labour leadership contenders.  You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

From the oldest pub in Britain to the most stupidly named pub in Britain

Should one of the oldest pubs in Britain – ‘Ye Olde Fighting Cocks’ – really change its name to ‘Ye Olde Clever Cocks’? This is what the animal rights organisation Peta is proposing, after deciding that the pub – which has had the same name since 1872 – should choose to celebrate ‘intelligent, sensitive chickens’. Thinking about where your food comes from is one thing, but is pretending that cockfighting never existed, and re-writing the history of this country, really the best way of encouraging people to do that? The pub landlord, Christo Tofalli, told Vanessa Feltz on Radio 2 earlier today that he agrees that ‘chickens are cool’, but alas

Andrew Lavelle

Young people should be wary of the Guardian’s university league table

This week, the Guardian published its annual university league table. The rankings are as bewildering to anyone acquainted with the reality of university reputations as they are misleading to anyone who is not. Should you wish to study Economics, for instance, you are told that you would do better taking an offer from Surrey (4) than LSE (13). If you’re really short of options, then you could settle for a place at Manchester (54) or Newcastle (60). Equally, for an aspiring physicist Leicester (5) or Hertfordshire (6) are deemed superior to Imperial (8) or indeed UCL (12). This list does not reflect what graduate employers actually think. From an employer’s perspective,

Simon Barnes

Fifa’s fantasy kingdom is finally starting to collapse

Can it be that the great fantasy kingdom of Fifa has finally collapsed? Is this the fall of Oz? Is it possible that this vast sporting organisation – one that has survived for so many years on sheer effrontery – is now on collision course with reality? The Swiss police’s dawn raid on the headquarters of the organisation that runs football across the world, arresting some of its most prominent citizens on charges of corruption, must surely bring revolution and destruction in its wake. That is what happens in the end to most fantasy kingdoms. It’s what happened to the International Olympic Committee, but Fifa never took the warning. Sepp

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Pope Francis is right to avoid television. It’s the dumbest medium known to man

Unlike Pope Francis I can’t actually remember when I consciously gave up television and I have in fact watched it occasionally in other people’s houses on various occasions. But it was probably at least as long ago as he, twenty odd years ago. When I went to university there wasn’t a television in our room and there was an awful lot going on; fun stuff, more fun than looking at a screen. And at that point I broke the habit. It’s a bit like giving up sugar in your tea for Lent: the first time is awful; by the next Lent it’s easier; by the end, it’s normal. And so, term by term,

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Equine squatters: the topic that united the Countryside Alliance and the RSPCA

In September last year I wrote about horses being illegally grazed and abandoned, and the inability of landowners to do anything about it. Back then, the government were poised to debate the topic for two hours in a bid to find some kind of solution to the problem. It’s not an issue that gets all that much attention in the media – after all, how much of a problem can a few ponies be? But fly-grazing, as this is called – actually causes a huge amount of trouble, for the horses themselves and for the people whose land they end up on, be that a private landowner or a local

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Italy’s contribution

From ‘What Italy Brings To The Allies‘, 29 May 1915: THE more the entrance of Italy into the war is contemplated the more romantic and gratifying it seems. Italy has joined the forces of Freedom with whom her heart has long been beating. It is her right and natural place. Why, then, it may be asked, did she ever join the Triple Alliance, tie herself to the Teutonic cart-tail, and consent in 1912 to re-tie the ropes which had held her in odious bondage? We pointed out in an article called “The Bridge of Peschiera,” published on October 26th, 1912, that Italian statesmen dared not forget the standing menace of Austria-Hungary

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Ian Austin sees red over black cab protest

Ian Austin has come under fire this afternoon for tweeting his rage about today’s black cab strike, which saw cabbies obstruct roads as they called for tougher rules on minicabs: Many users on Twitter were quick to ridicule Austin for using a cab for the journey, especially given that in his bio on the site he references his love of cycling. However, it turns out that he was in fact driving his own car: While that’s cleared that up, there’s currently no further word on whether Austin still thinks it’s right to support Uber – who have been accused of having ‘unfair’ tax practices – instead of black cabbies exercising their right to protest. Surely an off-brand position

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

‘Trigger warnings’ are tools for censorship. They have no place in academia

I get defensive when feminists are accused of being prudes. There’s nothing prudish in critiquing a monotonously promiscuous culture; in despairing of unrealistic body standards, or believing, as I’ve argued before, that porn is healthy, even necessary, when it’s privately stashed under the mattress, but doesn’t belong on the high street. Then a bunch of students does something so reactionary in the name of feminism that we may as well scatter séance candles about the university library and revive en masse the spirit of the Victorians. At Columbia University – where Emma Sulkowicz’s campaign for redress against an alleged rapist has inflamed debate about universities’ approach to sexual assault – four undergraduates

Daniel Jackson

Why are ordinary British women blowing their savings on gruesome facelifts?

A ‘jobless mother of four’ from Cumbria has jetted off to Budapest for another round of cosmetic surgery. Andrea Dalzell has been saving child benefit money since 2003 for a string of procedures including face and eyebrow lifts, botox injections and a ‘designer vagina’. At that price the question on my lips is ‘designed by whom?’ On Facebook the 48-year-old grandmother said her latest trip to Budapest (for a cheek and brow lift) cost £3,500. The package included flights, food and accommodation. Without wishing to cast aspersions on her particular surgeon, at that price there’s a huge danger of corners being cut, so to speak. ‘Package surgery’ is still a relatively new

Sebastian Payne

Malcom Bruce defends Alistair Carmichael: ‘lots of people have told lies’

Alistair Carmichael’s battle to remain an MP is turning into a debate about whether it’s acceptable to lie in public office. The SNP are keen to talk the up the notion that Carmichael lied (and got caught) and therefore has to go. On the Today programme, his SNP opponent in Orkney and Shetland Danus Skene focused what Carmichael said when the memo was leaked vs. what has become apparent during the investigation: ‘The issue is not the offence but the cover-up, he did actually lie about this, by claiming at the beginning of April that he didn’t know about this memo until the journalist approached him about this … there is a lie here and that’s