The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 5 July 2018

Home In an attempt to distract the nation from the toothache of Brexit, the government announced a £4.5 million scheme to encourage homosexuals to hold hands; a law would be considered to ban corrective therapy, which Penny Mordaunt, the Equalities Minister, said could involve rape. A man known as Nick, whose true name is withheld for legal reasons, who alleged there was a paedophile ring at Westminster, was charged with perverting the course of justice. Labour restored the whip to Jared O’Mara, the MP for Sheffield Hallam, from whom it had been suspended in October. Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, was interrupted during a statement to the Commons by the voice of Siri on his mobile phone.

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To convey intelligence

In the basement of The Spectator office, there is a 12-volume version of the paper in its original incarnation. That journal, started in 1711 by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, lasted barely two years. But collections of its essays could be found in almost every educated household for generations after. The first Spectator was seen as an example of something extraordinary: a journal full of humour, wit and civilised discussion at a time when Britain was being torn apart by partisanship and war. It was a freak of its time. On 6 July 1828, a Dundonian printer named Robert Rintoul relaunched The Spectator. He had the good sense to adopt Addison’s formula: ‘the pleasures of books, conversation and the other accidental diversions of life’.

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to 2363: Case ending

In Henry VI part II, Dick says to Cade: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’, thus potentially victimising Atticus Finch (3A), Perry Mason (20D) and Rumpole (30D).   First prize Mrs R. Bailey, Swindon Runners-up Mrs E.

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The Spectator’s Mission

190 years of The Spectator   5 July 1828   The principal object of a Newspaper is to convey intelligence. It is proposed in The Spectator to give this, the first and most prominent place, to a report of all the leading occurrences of the week. In this department, the reader may always expect a summary account of every public proceeding, or transaction of interest, whether the scene may lie at home or abroad.

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Out – and into the World

190 years of The Spectator   4 June 1975   At no time during the campaign have the opponents of our membership of the EEC been remotely as unbalanced, as hysterical or as deliberately personally insulting as those in the opposite camp. Naturally, as in any vigorously fought campaign, there have been some fibs and half-truths on both sides; and each partisan has looked eagerly at evidence which may have several possible interpretations in order to find material that will support his cause. But nothing on the anti-Market side has even begun to equal the tirade of personal insults, and the sickening appeal to fear, that has characterised everything the pro-Marketeers have done.

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Sweeping the streets

190 years of The Spectator   6 September 1957 There are two ways of looking at sexual immorality. One is to regard all illicit intercourse as a crime; the other is to regard it as a sin but not as something which concerns the State unless it has obvious anti-social consequences. The first has been out of fashion since the 17th century, when adultery was still a capital offence, and in most civilised countries the second attitude now prevails. But in England for the last 80 years there has been one notable exception. Since the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 homosexual actions between consenting males have been criminal, even when they are performed in private.

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Review: Mr Oscar Wilde’s poems

190 years of The Spectator   13 August 1881 The reading of this book fills us with alarm. It is evidently the work of a clever man, as well as of an educated man, but it is not only a book containing poems which ought never to have been conceived, still less published, but it is almost wholly without thoughts worthy of the name, entirely devoid of true passion, with very few vestiges even of genuine emotion, and constituted entirely out of sensuous images and pictures strung together often with so little true art that they remind one more of a number of totally different species of blossoms accumulated on the same stem, than of any cluster of natural flowers.

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The duty of England and the American crisis

190 years of The Spectator   1 June 1861 The time has arrived when the national will on the American quarrel ought to be expressed. A party, numerous in Parliament and powerful in the press, is beginning to intrigue for the recognition of the South. They are aided by the fears of the cotton dealers, who dread an intermission of their supplies, by the anxiety of commercial men, who see their best market summarily closed, and by the abiding dislike of the aristocracy for the men and manners of the North. For the moment, their object is apparently to deprecate debate. They dare not as yet brave openly the prejudices of freemen, or advocate a cause based on antagonism to all that Englishmen hold dear.

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The country gentleman and the Corn Laws

190 years of The Spectator   14 January 1843   The country gentlemen of England never committed a greater blunder than when they passed the Corn Law of 1815. If they would but allow themselves to examine dispassionately their own objects, they could scarcely fail to discover this, and also the necessity of retreating as speedily as possible from the false position in which they then placed themselves. The country gentlemen are the most powerful body in England, and they are fond of their power and proud of it. But the passing of the Corn Law gave a rude shock to the opinion favourable to the power of the country gentlemen. It placed them in the invidious light of men who perverted the office of legislators into the means of passing a law to keep up rents.

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To our non-political readers

190 years of The Spectator   21 May 1831   Lucretius tells us, in some famous lines, that it is a pleasant thing to watch the sea in a tempest, from the shore: it is a far more gratifying employment to be throwing out Manby’s lifesaving apparatus, and saving the sinking mariners from the wreck. We have more than once observed, that it is difficult to be a mere spectator in times like these. It is all very well, in the piping times of domestic content, to sit still and report progress; but when, as in the great business of Reform, everything is at stake, it is the duty of even neutrals to arm. It is sometimes criminal not to take a side — there are cases in which he that is not with us must be against us.

Thursday

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Letters | 28 June 2018

Harvard’s racial quotas Sir: While I largely agree with Coleman Hughes that racial quotas are counterproductive (‘The diversity trap’, 23 June), he misuses Martin Luther King Jr to buttress his argument. King said that he hoped his descendants would ‘be judged…by the content of their character’, not by their standardised test scores. The grim pursuit of purely quantifiable ratings for intelligence and achievement in American schools — by Asians and white Protestants alike — is an even greater scourge these days than the illiberal goal of ‘diversity’ at any cost.

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Barometer | 28 June 2018

Nursing numbers Was there ever a time when the NHS wasn’t in crisis? According to a report by NHS Health Improvement in February 2016, the health service was then short of 15,000 nurses. A year later the Royal College of Nursing was claiming a shortfall of 24,000. But that is a lot less than the shortage of nurses reported in its early years. In December 1948, five months after the NHS was founded, it was reported by the government to be short of 48,000 nurses, 30 per cent of the number employed. The shortage meant that 53,000 beds were lying unused (a disproportionate number in women’s psychiatric care). In early 1949 the NHS recruited an extra 4,000 full-time and 2,250 part-time nurses.

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Portrait of the week | 28 June 2018

Home The Commons voted in favour of a new runway at Heathrow by 415 votes to 119. Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, who had previously promised to lie in front of the bulldozers, absented himself from the vote, instead meeting the Deputy Foreign Minister of Afghanistan in Kabul. ‘My resignation would have achieved absolutely nothing,’ he said. Greg Hands resigned as trade minister because he opposed the runway. The Scottish government said it still supported the runway even though SNP MPs at Westminster abstained. Spanish-owned Ferrovial, which operates Heathrow, is to move its international headquarters from Britain to Amsterdam because of Brexit.

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An unhappy birthday

When Nye Bevan launched the NHS on 5 July 1948, most of the British population could not expect to celebrate a 70th birthday. Life expectancy at birth for men was 66 and for women 71. That this has since grown to 79.1 years and 82.8 years respectively is in part — though far from entirely — thanks to the NHS. Many insist that Bevan’s description of the service as the ‘envy of the world’ remains true. For Lord Lawson, a former editor of this magazine, the NHS is ‘the closest thing the English people have to a religion’ — an assertion confirmed during the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, when NHS nurses jumped joyfully up and down on old-fashioned hospital beds.

Wednesday

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Full text: Liz Truss’s LSE lecture – ‘I want to take a zero-tolerance approach to wasteful spend’

As an economics geek, and a committed free marketer, I’ve always admired the London School of Economics. Despite its left-wing reputation, it was the academic home of Hayek. But even more than that, it produced my husband, Hugh O’Leary. It means that whenever I want a late night discussion about supply side reform or econometrics, there’s always someone on hand. And why do I love this stuff? Because I care about freedom. I’ve never liked being told what to do. And I don’t like to see other people being told what to do. Britain is a country that is raucous and rowdy. We have a younger generation of self-starters growing up, who are desperate shape their own futures.

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 21 June 2018

Well oiled The government last week ordered a review into the medical use of cannabis. Some cannabis oil available on the internet: — Hemp oil for pain relief. ‘Great peppermint flavour. Promotes overall health and wellness when combined with a regular workout routine and diet.’ $24.97 — Ultra hemp 500 oil drops. ‘Helps with anxiety, chronic pain, sleep, mood, skin and hair. Boosts immunity, sharpens brain function and helps with sleep.’ $36.98 — Heaven’s Bounty ultra refined premium hemp oil. ‘Better sleep, healthy skin and smooth hair… no earthy aftertaste.’ $39.99 Track trespassers Three graffiti artists were killed by a train in south London. Where did people most trespass on railways in 2016?

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Letters | 21 June 2018

Song of myself Sir: As a disabled writer, I thoroughly despise the idea of being the beneficiary of a publisher’s tokenistic diversity initiative (‘When diversity means uniformity’, 9 June). If I’m going to achieve success, I’m going to do so on merit alone. In spite of the added challenges I face as a man on the autism spectrum, the notion that I might be treated differently from any other writer is an affront not merely to my dignity but to everyone else’s. Lionel Shriver is absolutely justified in her condemnation of what appears to be a thinly veiled attempt by Penguin Random House to enforce equity dogma in the publishing domain. It’s important to note that equity is not the same as equality of opportunity.

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Refugee lives matter

The photographs of children in cages at US migration centres, apparently separated from the parents with whom they illegally entered the country, do not reflect well on the Trump administration. Talking tough on migration helped the President to win the election but there is a difference between building a wall and carrying out a policy which appears to use cruelty as a shock tactic. Yet there is a policy towards migrants that is ultimately far crueller, and which is being pursued beneath our noses in Europe. That is to tempt migrants into unseaworthy boats to cross the Mediterranean. Last year, according to the International Organisation for Migration, 3,116 people died attempting to reach European countries from North Africa by sea, in addition to 5,143 deaths in 2016.