The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 18 August 2016

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, who was supposed to be on a walking holiday in Switzerland, wrote to Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, saying that she wanted to strengthen Britain’s trading relationship with China despite uncertainty over the construction of the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point. During her absence and that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer from Britain, Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, was the ‘senior minister on duty’, Downing Street conceded. Regulated rail fares in England and Wales and regulated peak-time fares in Scotland will rise by 1.9 per cent in January, that being the annual rate of inflation in July, as measured by the Retail Prices Index (up from 1.6 per cent the month before).

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Barometer | 18 August 2016

Four-letter surveys A judge at Chelmsford Crown Court who was sworn at by a man she was sentencing to jail swore back at him from the bench. How common is swearing? — A study in 1980 by Timothy Jay of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts analysed 11,609 words of everyday conversation and found 70 taboo words — a rate of 0.7%. — A similar study in Britain in 2006 suggested that between 0.3% and 0.5% of words we utter are swearing, and a 2007 US study suggested a rate of between 0.5% and 0.7%. According to the latter, Americans utter between 15,000 and 16,000 words a day, 80–90 of them taboo.

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Iron birds

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 19 August 1916: The Parliamentary Air Committee having recently inhaled much ozone at giddy heights, during their visits to a R.F.C. park, have breathed some of it forth in a brilliant idea. They propose that the present clumsy and ugly system of designating aircraft by numbers and letters should be replaced by the names of birds. The machines would be grouped in classes, and each class would have a distinctive name. The names of seabirds would be given to seaplanes and the names of land birds to Army aeroplanes.

Thursday

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Letters | 11 August 2016

The hate is real Sir: It is clearly an exaggeration to call Britain a bigoted country (‘We are not a hateful nation’, 6 August), but downplaying the recent wave of xenophobic and racist incidents across the UK as ‘somebody shouting something nasty on a bus’ is equally wrong. Verbal abuse in itself is worthy of condemnation, yet the character of recorded harassment is actually much more serious. In the past few weeks, Poles in this country were shocked by vulgar graffiti (West London; Hertfordshire; Portsmouth) and hurtful leaflets (Cambridgeshire) urging them to ‘go home’ in most offensive ways possible, while a family in Plymouth fell victim to an arson attack.

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Barometer | 11 August 2016

The end of an emperor — 82-year-old Emperor Akihito of Japan has announced that he wants to abdicate, partly, he said, because he doesn’t want Japan to come to a standstill in the event of him falling ill, as with previous emperors. — When Emperor Hirohito was diagnosed with duodenal cancer in 1987, the news was not reported; nor, it is said, was the emperor told. But within a year it became clear that he was seriously ill, because he had to cancel appearances. TV reporters camped outside the palace; weddings and autumn festivals were cancelled. When Hirohito died on 7 January 1989, aged 87, there were 48 days of mourning, though people seem to have grown weary by the funeral in February: only 200,000 turned up for the procession, when police expected 800,000.

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China syndrome

The Chinese government is unlikely to give Theresa May a panda in the near future. This week the country’s ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, left no one in any doubt that President Xi Jinping takes a dim view of Mrs May’s decision to review the deal for a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset — a deal through which China General Nuclear, the state nuclear-energy company, would have a one-third share. The Prime Minister was told that Anglo-Chinese relations are at a-‘critical historical juncture’. So she’d better play-nicely and approve that power station — or risk the wrath of Beijing.

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Portrait of the week | 11 August 2016

Home The government floated the idea that individuals might receive payments in areas where fracking was approved, or where housing developments gained permission. Grammar schools might also be revived, it was suggested. Failing to go ahead with the Hinkley Point nuclear power station could damage China’s relationship with Britain, its ambassador Liu Xiaoming wrote in the Financial Times. A 19-year-old Norwegian of Somali origin was arrested after the fatal stabbing of an American woman in Russell Square, London. Tanveer Ahmed, 32, from Bradford, was jailed for life or a minimum of 27 years, after admitting the murder of Asad Shah, an Ahmadi Muslim by religion, outside his shop in Glasgow, because he had ‘disrespected’ Islam.

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Holding on

From ‘Restless politicians’, The Spectator, 12 August 1916: Even those journals which a few months ago were most zealous for a general election without delay now admit that there is no issue which could be presented to the country on which to take a vote… We have got to accept the continuance of the present government, with some slight modifications from time to time, because we have no means of getting a better. People who are disgusted at this admission may be again reminded that a great war is in progress, and that this fact overrides all ordinary constitutional considerations.

Thursday

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Letters | 4 August 2016

Remain calm Sir: I am sorry that the redoubtable Martha Lane Fox is still angry at the exaggerations made by the Leave campaign (Letters, 30 July). I expect that the 17 million people who voted to leave are also still pretty angry at the exaggerated claims of Remainers. House price crashes, everyone £4,500 a year worse off, a revenge budget and even a third world war. And of course, the threats from elite corporatists. Vested interests, perhaps? It’s interesting to see how many of the big corporations that  threatened Armageddon prior to the vote are now voting with their money to stay.

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Barometer | 4 August 2016

Knight falls There were calls for Sir Philip Green to be stripped of his knighthood. Who is stripped of such an honour? Some past cases: ROGER CASEMENT, diplomat. Lost knighthood shortly before being executed for treason in 1916, having attempted to negotiate a supply of weapons from the Germans for the Easter Rising JOSEPH KAGAN, manufacturer of Gannex raincoats and one of Harold Wilson’s favourite businessmen. Stripped of knighthood after a conviction for theft in 1980. He retained his peerage. ALBERT HENRY, premier of the Cook Islands. Convicted of electoral fraud in 1980. JACK LYONS, one of ‘Guinness Four’ convicted of share-trading fraud in 1987.

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Saving refugee lives

How should a country deal with refugees? This week the British government received an important legal vindication of its approach: the Court of Appeal overturned a High Court ruling in January that four Syrian refugees resident in the jungle camp in Calais could travel to Britain to have their asylum applications heard here. The Spectator’s leader, read by Lara Prendergast Under the Dublin Regulation, which governs the handling of refugees within the EU, it ought not to be possible for migrants in Calais to travel to Britain to make asylum claims. The rules are clear: refugees must make their asylum claims in the first safe country in which they arrive.

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Portrait of the week | 4 August 2016

Home The Court of Appeal overturned a ruling that four Syrian refugees living in Calais’ jungle camp could come to Britain because they had relatives here. The Appeal Court judges said that they should have claimed asylum in the first country they came to; the judgment will not affect the refugees, who are already in Britain. The High Court ruled that the NHS was wrong to say it lacked the ‘legal power to commission Prep’, or ‘pre-exposure prophylaxis’ drug, which is effective in 86 per cent of cases in preventing HIV viruses from multiplying; the drug costs £400 a month and is taken by men who practise anal intercourse but do not use condoms. The number of armed police in London was to increase by 600 to 2,800.

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Entrenched wisdom

From ‘Armour of offence’, The Spectator, 5 August 1916: The soldier must never forget that it is his business to stand upon the offensive, not upon the defensive, and that for the offensive the power of rapid movement is essential. That is why, as the Germans are finding, and as the Austrians certainly found in Poland, you may make your trenches too defensible, too deep, too narrow, and generally too good. Deeply dug and laboriously protected trenches are splendid if judged only by their power to save people’s lives, so long as there is no in-fighting, but they may become veritable death-traps. In order to drive your enemy back you have got to get out of your trenches very quickly and counter-attack him, or, if need be, fall back a little for that purpose.

Friday

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Business confidence is returning to Brexit Britain

For all Gordon Brown’s economic mistakes, he at least tried to build confidence in the British economy. In the build-up to the European Union referendum, David Cameron and George Osborne did the opposite. Osborne, as Chancellor, ignored the good news, accentuated the bad and tried to portray Britain as an economic weakling propped up by EU membership. He was joined by a great many investment banks who produced analyses saying that Britain’s life outside the EU would be catastrophic. Since the referendum, these anticipations of doom have continued. It is rather strange to watch. Encouraging economic news — the increase in high-street spending, the buoyant demand for jobs through recruitment agencies — is brushed aside.

Thursday

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Barometer | 28 July 2016

Capitalist faces A report by the Business and Pensions select committees described Philip Green as the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’. That was a description first coined by Edward Heath as Prime Minister in 1973 and applied to Tiny Rowland. — Rowland at the time was engaged in a boardroom battle with fellow directors of Lonrho, the mining conglomerate of which Rowland was managing director. They accused Rowland of making decisions without consulting them. Rowland, for his part, dismissed non-executive directors as ‘Christmas tree decorations’. — Rowland had also offended Heath’s government by breaching sanctions against Rhodesia, then under unofficial independence declared by Ian Smith.

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Hope vs gloom

For all Gordon Brown’s economic mistakes, he at least tried to build confidence in the British economy. In the build-up to the European Union referendum, David Cameron and George Osborne did the opposite. Osborne, as Chancellor, ignored the good news, accentuated the bad and tried to portray Britain as an economic weakling propped up by EU membership. He was joined by a great many investment banks who produced analyses saying that Britain’s life outside the EU would be catastrophic. Since the referendum, these anticipations of doom have continued. It is rather strange to watch. Encouraging economic news — the increase in high-street spending, the buoyant demand for jobs through recruitment agencies — is brushed aside.

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Portrait of the week | 28 July 2016

Home The collapse of BHS after Sir Philip Green had extracted large sums and left the business on ‘life support’, with a £571 million pension deficit, was ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism,’ said a report by the Business and the Work and Pensions select committees of the House of Commons. The British economy grew by 0.6 per cent in the quarter ending in June. A man was shot dead at a commercial pool party in Headley, Surrey, organised by Summerlyn Farquharson, known as the Female Boss Krissy, and the Jamaican reggae artist Jason White, known as Braintear Spookie. HMS Ambush, a Royal Navy Astute-class nuclear-powered submarine, was in a ‘glancing collision’ with a merchant vessel while submerged off Gibraltar.

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Letters | 28 July 2016

Better Europeans Sir: There are many reasons why a majority of people in the UK voted to leave the European Union. Among them was certainly not a wish to be inhospitable and uncooperative with our fellow Europeans (Leading article, 23 July). Now it is even more important that EU nationals in Britain should have their status respected and not be used as a bargaining point in future relations with Brussels. Nor should we forget the considerable contribution that so many of them make to our national wellbeing. Furthermore, what about the two million or so UK nationals living and settled in many parts of Europe? Are they to be ignored and their security put at risk for no valid purpose?

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The new Secretary for War

From ‘The military situation’, The Spectator, 29 July 1916: We have a new Secretary for War. Mr Lloyd George, as we all know, is a man of great personal power, with the faculty of stimulating and inspiring, and securing that what he desires shall be accomplished. With him good is not enough. He knows that more and better things can always be done, and he has a voice and a will to compel others to share his opinions. His mind is receptive to new ideas. He never stands still.

Thursday

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Barometer | 21 July 2016

How Britannia got her trident Parliament voted to renew Trident as Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. But what about Britannia and her trident? — Unnoticed by some, our coinage was unilaterally disarmed in 2008 when a new 50p was issued, with a crest, not Britannia. — But then Britannia didn’t always bear a trident. When she was first put on coins by the Romans she carried a spear in one hand and an olive branch in the other. — She retained her spear until 1797 when, to celebrate Britain’s naval power, the weapon was replaced by a trident. The inspiration came from Poseidon and Neptune, Greek and Roman deities of the sea. They carried a trident because it was used in the ancient world for fishing.