The Spectator

Friday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Watching the Home Front

From our UK edition

From The Spectator, 7 November 1914: We say without hesitation that if every town and urban district and village in England had a Guard formed on the lines of the Mitcham Town Guard, something would have been accomplished that might prove most valuable in the event of invasion. We shall no doubt be asked by many military critics whether we really believe that these Village and Town Guards, composed of boys under nineteen and middle-aged men from thirty-eight to sixty-five, would be of any sort of use from the military point of view.

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Mindfulness, addiction, and dinner with Richard Nixon

From our UK edition

Mind games Sir: I hope that people are not unduly put off by Melanie McDonagh’s misrepresentation of mindfulness as a cop-out for navel-gazers who lack the moral fibre to engage in ‘proper’ religion (‘The cult of mindfulness’, 1 November). She describes it as a ‘practice of self-obsession’, but it is the opposite: it creates a space in which the self can be seen for what it is as it hops around, generating superfluous judgments. You begin to obsess less about what your ‘self’ compulsively comes up with, and to approach life from a more anchored perspective. May I invite those who think that sounds bogus and flaky to engage in a short experiment?

The Spectator

You can still book your flight to Mars

From our UK edition

Space to dream Richard Branson’s dream of commercial space flights has suffered a setback after a prototype craft crashed. But others are still offering opportunities for adventure… — Golden Spike is an American company planning to send a couple of passengers to the Moon from 2020 onwards. Each will pay an estimated return fare of $700 million. — Inspiration Mars Foundation plan to take advantage of a rare alignment of planets in 2018 to send a male/female couple on a ‘quick’ 501-day flypast of Mars. As yet, it hasn’t announced whether or not they will have to pay for the privilege. — Mars One, a Dutch company, plans to start a colony of four humans on Mars by 2023.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 6 November 2014

From our UK edition

Home Fiona Woolf, the Lord Mayor of London, resigned as the head of an inquiry into historical child sex abuse three months after Baroness Butler-Sloss, the former president of the family division of the High Court, resigned from the same appointment. Both had been criticised for having establishment links. ‘It is really going to be hard to find someone with no connections,’ Mrs Woolf said. ‘A hermit?’ Exploitation of vulnerable children has become the social norm in some parts of Greater Manchester, according to a report by Ann Coffey, the Labour MP for Stockport. The Serious Fraud Office opened a criminal investigation into accounting irregularities at Tesco.

The Spectator

Say no to devolution without democracy

From our UK edition

Imagine if, in one of her first acts as First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon announced that, in spite of the result of September’s independence vote, Scotland was to declare independence anyway, on the basis that opinion polls now showed a majority of people in favour of independence and therefore there was no need for the decision to be approved in a referendum. David Cameron and his government would surely treat it as an outrage. Why, then, has the Chancellor this week seen fit to announce that the people of Greater Manchester are to have a directly elected mayor? Two years ago the very same question was put to the people of the City of Manchester in a referendum and the answer was a resounding ‘no’.