Books & Arts opener – 12 January 2017
From our UK edition
The Spectator
Thursday
Bonds of friendship
From our UK edition
From ‘The Rome conference and bonds of alliance’, The Spectator, 13 January 1917: There may be the greatest possible good, nay, even salvation, in partnership or alliance; but the fact that partnerships and alliances do involve loss of free will, and that a man cannot when he is in partnership be wholly master in his own house or office, must never be forgotten. Yet, strangely enough, this is a fact which is constantly ignored even by our experts in foreign affairs, with results which are often not only exceedingly unfair to the British nation as a whole, but grossly unfair to individuals.
Tuesday
Full text: Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit speech
From our UK edition
Listen to the whole speech here: Whether you voted to Leave or to Remain, you voted for a better future for Britain. One thing is clear, the Tories cannot deliver that. So today I want to set how Labour will deliver that vision of a better Britain. This government is in disarray over Brexit. As the Prime Minister made clear herself they didn’t plan for it before the referendum and they still don’t have a plan now. I voted and campaigned to remain and reform as many of you may know I was not uncritical of the European Union. It has many failings. Some people argued that we should have a second referendum. That case was put to our party’s membership last summer and defeated. Britain is now leaving the European Union.
Monday
Full text: Theresa May’s ‘shared society’ speech
From our UK edition
Thank you for inviting me to be here this morning to deliver the prestigious Charity Commission Annual Lecture. I am delighted to have this opportunity to express my appreciation for all those who work in our charity sector and for those who freely give their time, money and expertise in the service of others. We are a country built on the bonds of family, community and citizenship and there is no greater example of the strength of those bonds than our great movement of charities and social enterprises. But the strength of that civil society – which I believe we should treasure deeply – does not just depend on the ingenuity, generosity and commitment of countless volunteers, social entrepreneurs and philanthropists.
Thursday
Letters | 5 January 2017
From our UK edition
Yet another kind of snob Sir: May I offer another definition of a ‘snob’ to the one described by Bryan Appleyard (‘A different class of snob’, 31 December)? I have always believed that a snob is someone who has risen in the world and now looks down with disdain on those they have left behind. This is an altogether more cynical and divisive form of elitism than that of the serial narcissists Mr Appleyard describes in his article. In the United Kingdom the abolition of grammar schools and the incursion of cheap foreign labour have damaged the legitimate aspirations of those wishing to improve their lot in life, stalled social mobility, and polarised society.
Barometer | 5 January 2017
From our UK edition
Village people The government announced plans for 14 ‘garden villages’. The concept of a garden city or village is attributed to Ebenezer Howard, who founded the Garden City Association in 1899 and Letchworth Garden City in 1903. But he was inspired by his time in Chicago, which had already been nicknamed ‘Garden City’. — The term ‘garden village’, however, was coined by Alexander Turney Stewart, a Northern Irish Protestant who emigrated to the US with a suitcase full of linen and went on to found the world’s biggest department store, on Broadway, New York. — In 1869, looking for new ventures, he purchased 10,000 acres of Long Island.
Portrait of the week | 5 January 2017
From our UK edition
Home Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s ambassador to the EU, resigned; he had been expected to play an important part in talks on Brexit. In a lengthy email to staff he said: ‘Free trade does not just happen when it is not thwarted by authorities.’ He referred to ‘ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking’ and noted that we do not know the ‘negotiating objectives for the UK’s relationship with the EU’. Southern railways advised hundreds of thousands of commuters not to try to travel during a three-day strike by train drivers, due to begin on Monday. China began a direct freight rail service to Barking in London.
Sir Ivan’s exit
From our UK edition
The wonder about Sir Ivan Rogers’s resignation as Britain’s ambassador to the EU is that he was still in the job. He may have possessed useful knowledge about the workings of the EU, but he was also heavily associated with a failed way of conducting negotiations with it. It was he who advised David Cameron last February on his unsuccessful renegotiations of Britain’s relationship with the EU, which failed to convince the British people to vote to remain in the union. It would have been better and less disruptive had he resigned in the wake of the referendum last June, along with the Prime Minister.
A killing to celebrate
From our UK edition
From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 6 January 1917: The war has been crowded with romantic adventures by sea and land in every part of the world, but perhaps nothing is more sensational, more reminiscent of blue lights and the accents of warning and suspense from the orchestra, than the murder of the monk Rasputin in Petrograd… Whether those who took his life did so on the grounds of private revenge or of patriotism remains to be seen. In any case, we agree with Reuter’s correspondent that the disappearance of this sinister figure is a subject for congratulation for all true friends of Russia.
Wednesday
The only mystery about Sir Ivan Rogers is why he was still in his job
From our UK edition
The wonder about Sir Ivan Rogers’s resignation as Britain’s ambassador to the EU is that he was still in the job. He may have possessed useful knowledge about the workings of the EU, but he was also heavily associated with a failed way of conducting negotiations with it. It was he who advised David Cameron last February on his unsuccessful renegotiations of Britain’s relationship with the EU, which failed to convince the British people to vote to remain in the union. It would have been better and less disruptive had he resigned in the wake of the referendum last June, along with the Prime Minister.
Sunday
2017’s forgotten anniversaries
From our UK edition
2017 is the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution.
Saturday
What were the worst predictions of 2016?
From our UK edition
Some rubbish predictions made for 2016: Nikki, ‘psychic to the stars’: ‘Huge crash at Formula 1 race, killing many; Scottish riots; helicopter will crash into Empire State Building; earthquake in Denmark’. Simon Reich, ‘the man who got almost everything right about the year before’: ‘Donald Trump will not be republican candidate, but yes, Hillary will be Democratic candidate — and will be elected president’. Baba Vanga, blind Bulgarian billed as ‘Nostradamus of the Balkans’, who made her prediction before she died 20 years ago: ‘Europe will cease to exist by 2016 — will be empty spaces and wasteland’. Did anyone get anything right?
Portrait of the year | 31 December 2016
From our UK edition
January The cost of an annual season ticket from Cheltenham to London rose to £9,800. Oil fell below $30 a barrel, compared with more than $100 in January 2014. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that once his negotiations with the EU were done, ministers could campaign for either side in the referendum on Britain’s continued membership. Junior doctors went on strike for 24 hours. In Germany, women protested in the street after gangs of men of Arab or North African appearance assaulted dozens of women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. David Bowie died two days after releasing an album, Blackstar, on his 69th birthday. February The World Health Organisation declared the Zika virus a global public health emergency. Junior doctors went on strike for another day.
Thursday
Letters | 29 December 2016
From our UK edition
Unencumbered Sir: Matthew Parris’s bizarre reference (‘Unforgiven’, 10 December) to the UK economy as merely ‘medium-sized’ is a classic instance of Remainers’ tendency to pass Britain off expediently as a vulnerable country on the margins of Europe, which couldn’t survive without our EU umbilical cord. The UK is actually the fifth or sixth largest of the world’s nearly 200 national economies. If we are only medium-sized, how can all the world’s ‘even smaller’ economies — such as India, Canada, South Korea or Australia — possibly hack it as independent sovereign states outside any supranational governance bloc like the EU? How have they managed so far?
Barometer | 29 December 2016
From our UK edition
Supremely exciting The nation awaits with bated breath the decision of the Supreme Court on whether the government can exercise Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty without parliamentary approval. This is more exciting than the first day of the US Supreme Court in 1791, when six judges sat around all day waiting for a case. It was not until the following year that they finally got down to action: — A farmer, William West, had held a lottery to try to pay off his mortgage. The winner, David Leonard Barnes, was paid in bank notes but demanded gold or silver. The case was decided on a procedural issue, not exactly boosting the court’s reputation, and West lost his farm. Leader of the packs A number of wolves were reported to be living near Paris.
Keep the press free
From our UK edition
It is said that the case for freedom of expression needs to be restated in every generation, but things move faster in the digital era. Just three years after an attempt at state regulation of the press ended in ignominious failure, a fresh effort is being made. The government has begun a consultation on a plan to impose stiff financial penalties on newspapers who refuse to sign up to a state-approved regulator. Anyone wishing to give their opinion on such a regime has until 10 January. It is odd, for a start, that Theresa May’s government feels the need to consult on whether it has a duty to uphold fundamental British liberties.
Portrait of the Week – 29 December 2016
From our UK edition
Home The Queen was said by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg to have asked, at a private lunch before June’s referendum, about the European Union: ‘I don’t see why we can’t just get out. What’s the problem?’ Mervyn King, who was Governor of the Bank of England until 2013, said that Britain needed to be more ‘self-confident’ about its chances outside of the economically ‘pretty unsuccessful’ EU. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, issued a Christmas message: ‘As we leave the European Union we must seize an historic opportunity to forge a bold new role for ourselves in the world.’ George Michael, the singer, died aged 53. Rick Parfitt, who sang and played with Status Quo, died aged 68.
These little islands
From our UK edition
From ‘Engage the enemy more closely!’, The Spectator, 30 December 1916: Britain was never more vigorous than she is now: She has renewed her youth, and we may look forward to many years, possibly to many generations, of potent life. Still, we cannot conceal from ourselves that the destiny of these little islands in the Northern Sea must in the last resort be to lose their relative importance… To us the thought of our decline, inevitable, though it may be long postponed, brings no sense of hopelessness or misery as it did to the Roman.
Monday
Out – and into the world: Why The Spectator backed Brexit
From our UK edition
We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 6: Our leader article from June, in which the Spectator backed Brexit The Spectator has a long record of being isolated, but right. We supported the north against the slave-owning south in the American civil war at a time when news-papers (and politicians) could not see past corporate interests. We argued for the decriminalisation of homosexuality a decade before it happened, and were denounced as the ‘bugger’s bugle’ for our troubles. We alone supported Margaret Thatcher when she first stood for the Tory leadership. And when Britain last held a referendum on Europe, every newspaper in the land advocated a ‘yes’ vote.
Sunday
GCHQ’s code-crackers have some questions for you
From our UK edition
Solving serious puzzles — to catch criminals and thwart terrorist plots — is what the men and women who work at GCHQ do round the clock. It’s hardly surprising that many of them enjoy setting and solving them in their own time, too, pitting their wits against each other. This selection is from The GCHQ Puzzle Book (Penguin), put together by GCHQ’s spies, containing a Christmas puzzle challenge, too, and raising money for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s Heads Together mental health campaign. 1. A round of drinks What could follow Mojito, Eggnog, Riesling, Lemonade, Ouzo... ? 2. Composing a sequence What is the final entry in this sequence?
