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The Spectator - America has seen sense on aid. When will we?

(personal underlines) 

America has seen sense on aid. When will we?

Douglas Murray

The new administration in Washington has somewhat startled its critics by issuing a blizzard of executive orders during its opening weeks in office. So far the reaction from the American left might be summed up by the sentiment: ‘That’s not fair – it’s only us that are allowed to do things when we are in power.’

The American left are in a particular funk about the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) – as though railing against the proposed reduction of federal spending and reduction of the American deficit is a natural vote-winner. But good news does just keep on coming. On Monday, Elon Musk said that President Donald Trump had agreed to shutter USAID – the US government money spigot that sprays money around the world, much of it to people who hate America.

Like our own Department for International Development, the British Council and others, it is one of those entities which might just justify itself if it actually promoted the values of the donor country. But all these organisations were long ago taken over by insane people who hate the taxpayers that give them their money and think the best way for a nation to act in the 21st century is as a sort of large NGO.

This week, various White House spokesmen had fun pointing out some recent projects which might not have been the best use of US taxpayer dollars: $1.5 million to ‘advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities’; $47,000 to fund a ‘transgender opera’ in Colombia; $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala. And hundreds of millions of dollars to provide better irrigation systems for Afghan poppy-growing projects as well as hundreds of thousands of meals for al Qaeda-related terrorists in Syria. It is one thing to actually feed your enemies, or fund their illegal drugs trade, but it might be even worse to go around the world paying people to display the worst woke excesses which took over America and most of the rest of the West in the past decade.

It reminds me of that classic from some years ago, when American ‘educators’ were paid to introduce Afghan women to conceptual art, including Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal. The Afghan women in the class (caught on video) giggled as this poor western chump tried to get them up to speed on the 20th century. You could see on their faces what they were thinking: if this is the crap the West is going to push on us, maybe our husbands were right about the western infidel after all. It was, as many a wag said at the time, literally money down the toilet.

Of course, it is fast becoming a point of pride among the British left that we aren’t as idiotic as our American cousins. Yet if there is a serious person left in the British government, maybe they could consider learning from the American administration rather than scorning them.

After all, DfiD (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) is a department which has been flattered and funded by Conservative and Labour politicians alike. As Jonathan Foreman and others have exposed in these pages before, its budget was ring-fenced by recent Conservative governments because the wets believed that if they were seen to be splurging money abroad – a set amount of money, remember (something everyone knows never leads to waste) – then the left would love them. As would people abroad. How well that all worked out.

Still, if there is an adult around in Whitehall, perhaps they could ask whether the British taxpayer is currently in such a fine financial place that we should be engaging in projects akin to those highlighted by the White House this week. The UK currently doles out £13.3 billion a year in foreign aid. Among the projects that the British taxpayer has spent money on in recent years is a £60 million ‘prosperity fund’ in Mexico whose endeavours include creating a bicycle lane in Mexico City and ‘writing a business case for gender parity in the public transportation workforce’. There has also been a £200,000 grant to ‘engage new urban audiences’ with all-female traditional Chinese opera in Shanghai, and £162,000 for a ‘space’ for people in Shenzhen to be more involved in their ‘traditional crafts’.

If UK taxpayers were funding projects that sought to get British people into opera then I would say an argument could be made for that. Hell, if the British taxpayer is so full of generosity and innocence that they want to fund a traditional British arts and culture fair in south-eastern China, with plenty of Vaughan Williams and Shakespeare, I might even say ‘go for it’. But why should British taxpayers be paying for other countries to learn their traditional crafts, or their traditional crafts plus a bit of western gender woo-woo sprinkled on top?

I can hear the Andrew Mitchells of the world reaching for their letterheads. Does a know-nothing dolt like me not realise the inestimable advantages to Britain of funding a £33 million research programme on the use of electric cookers vs traditional fires for people in Laos and Uganda? Am I so immune to the obvious advantages of the British taxpayer giving £110,000 to a theatre company in Bolivia to mount an artistic response to the wildfires there, or to the £476,000 we recently gave for a study into the role that the arts can play in ‘challenging racism in Brazil, Colombia and Argentina’?

Alas, I suppose I must confess to being just such a barbarian. The idea behind the Doge saving on USAID isn’t that USAID isn’t spending its money in America – the problem is that it is spending its money against America. By contrast, I suspect that the British government has no problem splashing our cash down the urinal. And all over the floor, too.

The Spectator - The cruellest thing about Trump vs Zelensky? Trump’s right

 (personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-cruellest-thing-about-trump-vs-zelensky-trumps-right/?most-popular=1

The cruellest thing about Trump vs Zelensky? Trump’s right

20 February 2025, 3:32pm

Credit: Getty Images

And just like that, we are back in 2017. Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is posting ridiculous hyperbole on his socials and mouthing off from Mar-a-Lago, as he always has.

In the last 24 hours, however, the global political and media classes have gone back to gnashing their teeth and wailing in the way they did in Trump’s first term. It’s disgraceful! It’s sub-literate! He’s Vladimir Putin’s puppet! He’s reckless and utterly out of control! And that, of course, is the point.

Trump’s re-election proved that he is no aberration, so in 2025 the liberal, western world order has tried to come to terms with him. Western statesmen took turns to recognise his achievements, or his mandate, and to distance themselves from their past condemnations. But this was all insincere politesse and it was never going to work. Trump doesn’t care. His mandate is to cripple their authority. And on the international stage, Ukraine was always going to be the breaking point. 

The West has invested a huge amount of capital – political, economic and strategic – in the fight against Russia, and it has failed. Trump knows that and so he’s ending the war: if that means insulting Volodymyr Zelensky, parroting Russian talking points and playing nice with Putin, so be it.

Fact-checkers have been queueing up to rebut Trump’s incoherent Truth Social post last night, which is worth reposting here in full:

Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle. The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us – We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation. On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is “MISSING.” He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle.” A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP,” and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues…

And so it does.

To westerners who have spent years grandstanding against Putin, such words are anathema. To the many Ukrainians who have fought and died fighting Russian forces in their country, such rhetoric is beyond reprehensible. But if you can somehow look through the insensitivity, the febrile exaggerations, the score-settling with Zelensky, the half-lies and the cruel braggadocio, you have to admit that he is right – or at least not wrong.

Only offensive, odious Donald could end the war in Ukraine, which he is now doing. Europe has failed to bring peace. In a press conference on Tuesday, Trump said that Ukrainians shouldn’t complain about not being involved in his dialogue with Russia: ‘Well, you’ve been there for three years… you should have ended it three years… You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.’ That’s been widely interpreted as him saying that Ukraine started the war, and while his choice of words was poor, in context he is clearly referring to the thwarted efforts to achieve peace in the conflict’s early days in 2022. Trump is also right to say that vast amounts of western funding to Ukraine have gone missing, because the country is – and always has been – deeply corrupt.

For European leaders who have spent years advocating on behalf of Ukraine, the most painful part will be Trump’s reckoning on Zelensky. In the days and months that followed Russia’s invasion, when Ukraine’s President bravely stayed in Kyiv and led Ukraine’s impressive resistance, Zelensky became a western hero. People called him a 21st-century Churchill. He was fêted in European capitals, Hollywood and on the cover of Vogue magazine as young men killed each other on the front line.

There’s no doubt that, in our eagerness to champion the man in the military fatigues, we overlooked the more sordid aspects of his leadership. The Pandora papers showing his links to shady offshore bank accounts were forgotten about. His ties to deeply corrupt and double-dealing oligarchs, such as Ihor Kolomoisky, were brushed over. His ruthless suppression of Moscow-affiliated religious groups was dismissed as Kremlin ‘disinformation’.

Western politicians, and military-industrial types who have made a lot of money from the war effort, have always known, deep down, that in supporting Ukraine against Putin they have covered up awkward truths. What really frightens them now is not necessarily Trump’s recklessness. It’s that the murkier realities of the Ukraine-Russia relationship and the West’s involvement in the conflict going back to 2014 and before, may soon come to light.

The Spectator - The sad demise of the scathing school report

 (personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-sad-demise-of-the-scathing-school-report/?status=Non-subs&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BLND%20%2020241211%20%20HOUSE%20ADS%20%20IH+CID_58fc1c2d49b8275ce7167bffc1b69b1f

The sad demise of the scathing school report

AI versions leave no room for wit or withering put-downs

Tanith Carey11 December 2024, 5:01am

[Alamy]

As the first term of the school year draws to a close, pupils’ reports will soon be landing, encrypted and password-protected, on parents’ smartphones. But once they’ve finally managed to open them to find how little Amelia or Noah has been performing, there will be another code for them to crack: what on earth the teachers are actually trying to say about their child.

These days, reports tend to be written with the help of AI software or templates, which makes it impossible to work out how your child is really doing. In our super-sensitive age, many schools now play it safe by couching all comments as positives, and only using approved adjectives from word banks and drop-down menus. The result is that the real meaning gets obscured by a thick fog of bland generalisations, in case it offends a parent or pupil.

Even that time-honoured put-down, ‘Could do better’, has slipped out of use, replaced by gentle hints that it would help if Felix ‘took a more self-directed approach to learning in order to reach his full potential’.

As a parent of two children, now out the other side of the school system, I have noticed this homogenisation getting worse over the years. I’ve been so frustrated by reports that are nothing more than factual descriptions of what my daughters have covered that term in the curriculum – leaving me none the wiser about how they’ve actually coped with it. It’s made me nostalgic for the days when they still had the scope to be character assassinations.

True, the reports of our childhoods could be cruel and despotic, and often said more about the teacher than the pupil. But thanks to the distance of a few decades, I now have a sneaking admiration for the wit that went into some of the withering put-downs, delivered so elegantly in a blue fountain pen.

This nostalgia is also easier because we only hear of the students who either took notice or who were determined to prove these negative judgments wrong and who later became successes – not the pupils whose self-worth never recovered. (I will own up to the fact that 40 years later, I’m still smarting about my house mistress’s description of me as ‘antisocial’ in my first report at Malvern Girls’ College – as if I were busy plotting how to burn the school down from the edge of the hockey pitch.)

But when some of those teachers’ scathing remarks did do the trick of getting pupils to achieve more, it’s hard not to admire their gloriously high-handed prose. Take this pen portrait of the late Shakespearian and Good Life actor Richard Briers. In the 1940s, his headmaster at Rokeby School wrote: ‘It would seem that Briers thinks he is running the school and not me. If this attitude persists, one of us will have to leave.’

Writer and actor Stephen Fry also did very well despite – or perhaps because of – one Uppingham teacher’s judgment that ‘He has glaring faults, and they have certainly glared at us this term. I have nothing more to say’.

My husband Anthony recently found a box of his school reports in the cellar and brought them up for me to read. Still preserved in crisp white envelopes, they covered the time from when he went to prep school, age seven, until he left Ampleforth at 18 – and they were as entertaining as they were eviscerating.

When Anthony was not performing in geography in 1975, for example, his teacher did not spare his parents some home truths, writing that: ‘The genius with which Anthony accredits himself has not been manifest this term, and if he spent more time working and less basking in his imagined success, he might achieve a satisfactory result.’

If his parents were wondering whether their nine-year-old was artistic or not, that idea was brutally kicked into touch by this comment from his art teacher: ‘Anthony rather waits for inspiration to come to him rather than going out to look for it.’

As for his behaviour, that warranted this deft turn of phrase from another master, who wrote: ‘Most staff find in Anthony a deliberate obstinacy not to do as he is told – with a “Je m’en fiche” attitude.’ It’s a phrase I can’t imagine popping up in the school report word banks of 2024.

For Anthony, the good news is that by the time he reached secondary school, these scorchings had the desired effect – mainly because his father summoned him to explain them every time he came home for the holidays.

Extra marks should also go to the masters and mistresses who foresaw the people their pupils would become. In his report home to his father Stanley in 1982, Boris Johnson’s Eton housemaster Martin Hammond already described the qualities which would become familiar to the nation. He wrote of the future PM, then 17: ‘I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.’

Over at Malvern College, one master who taught Jeremy Paxman in the 1960s also picked up early on the brusque TV presenter’s need to ‘learn tact while not losing his outspokenness’, adding that ‘stubbornness is in his nature’ and ‘could be an asset when directed to sound ends’.

There was also some excellent foresight from Michael Palin’s headmaster at Shrewsbury, who said of the future Python while he was there between 1957 and 1961: ‘He is just a teeny bit pleased with himself. I have noticed a slightly put-on manner of affectation, perhaps a sort of aftermath of his fine performance in the school play. We’re all for a bit of jollity and mild eye-flashing, but he must not try to get away altogether with this slightly facile manner.’

So while you may be bored to tears by your child’s school report when it drops into your inbox this week, there’s one consolation: at least you – or they – are unlikely to be offended. If their teachers really do think they are hopeless cases, never destined to amount to much, you’ll be spared the pain of knowing.

Livro - Confidências no Exílio

Ler livros escritos por pessoas que sabem, não só pensar, como escrever, é um gozo único, cada vez mais sentido. As cartas de ambos, dos professores Marcello Caetano e Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão são um verdadeiro deleite para quem gosta do português. E, claro, para quem acredita no que lê...

Reflexão - Nuno Garoupa

Os Portugueses que estão, e continuarão (...), lá fora, a dar o exemplo...Nuno Garoupa, Maurício Brás, etc.

Um programa esquecido, secundarizado, apenas possível de ver no YouTube. À semelhança de outros.

Enquanto isso, impingem-nos, nos canais de televisão habituais, programas da treta com comendadeiros encomendados.

Reflexão - LBC

 Rough weather. But there's still the will to face the elements.

The Spectator - Of course my dog sleeps with me

 (personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/of-course-my-dog-sleeps-with-me/?status=Active&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BLND%20%2020250218%20%20HOUSE%20ADS%20%20IH+CID_0bbecb73a2a598248a4765e9070faa06

Of course my dog sleeps with me

What’s wrong with letting him share my bed?

Arabella Byrne18 February 2025, 5:00am

(iStock)

It’s 4 a.m. and my German shorthaired pointer, Percy, is lying on top of me. This isn’t a giant infraction on his part. Percy and I have long shared a bed. We start the early evening as we always do – me reading and he beside me at my invitation, the light on his side of the bed is on too, in case he wants to read as well; something German perhaps, like Thomas Mann. Later, when I decide to go to sleep, I turn out both of our lights and we glide off – his paw often in my hand – into the great unconscious. 

At some point during the night, he leaves his designated strip and inches towards me, which is probably why my dreams always seem to orbit around being strangled with a velvet ribbon. I should point out here that neither of my children has ever been allowed to co-sleep next to me, something I consider deeply unnatural and a bad habit. Sharing a bed with Percy, though, is entirely as I would like it.

The market, it seems, has different ideas. Mattress maker Silentnight has released a pod for dogs to share with their owners. Neither dog basket nor beanbag, it is designed for humans to spend quality time with their dogs and is aimed at Gen Zers and their pandemic-bought canines. Since Percy and I already share a basket called my bed, I can’t see how I will have need of such an item. But I’m still curious. In the promotional pictures, the Silentnight is marketed as multi-use: a young woman in her pyjamas lies in the pod, looking at her iPhone or notionally asleep. A dog appears in just one image, captioned as ‘cosy cuddles’, its face faintly stressed and panting. 

Silentnight Snuggle Pod

As in Wallace and Gromit, the dog acts as prophet, warning the human of imminent danger or alarm. Like Wallace, too busy eating Wensleydale cheese, we do not heed him. Reviews of the Silentnight pod on Amazon are mixed. Most applaud the size – big enough for three German shepherds and their owner – some decry the confusion: ‘my dog didn’t know where to sit’. To me, the panting dog says it all: what on earth is wrong with the old arrangement?

Typically, when the question of dogs on beds is raised, it brings back the following response: absolute filth. ‘Your dog can’t wipe its arse,’ says one friend, matter-of-factly, while another points out, darkly, that ‘you don’t know where he’s been’. It’s hard for me to respond to the logic of these points: no, he can’t wipe his arse and no, I don’t know exactly where he’s been because he runs at great speed across farmland. What I can and do point out is that I don’t care. Correction: I do care about hygiene, but I believe my dog to be entirely fastidious and immaculate. Other dogs may have turd hanging out of their backsides or stink of fox shit, but not mine. To me, he is perfect. My dog-on-bed policy operates at a level of self-delusion and denial that I think other people call love.

Denial aside, dogs on beds is – like so much else in this country – about class. Look at Annie Tempest’s Tottering by Gently cartoons in Country Life, featuring Daffy and Dicky at Tottering Hall, whose four-poster bed is so laden down with dogs that they can hardly see each other. Or interior designer Sibyl Colefax’s belief that damask cushions and brocade sofas in a drawing room look better with a light dusting of dog hair. Allowing dogs to trash your furniture and eat your brown furniture is a very Mitford U flex; or as Gen Z might say now, ‘if you know, you know’. 

Growing up in an impoverished aristocratic and bohemian household, I was always told that it was extremely petit bourgeois and naff to care about dogs lying on the furniture – on a par with being asked to take your shoes off at the front door, forbidding dogs upstairs or covering things with clingfilm. All very well, of course, until the dining room sideboard collapses from dogs chewing one leg or you step, as Charles Mosley, editor of Debrett’s, famously did, on a dog poo as you get out of bed. No matter; in our famously contrarian class system, slumming it in your pile with your dogs is quite simply the grandest thing of all.

Percy and I won’t be investing in a Silentnight pod to spend ‘quality’ time together. Our time à deux will continue to be spent with him leaving paw prints on the pillows and pellets of dog food in between the cushions on the drawing room sofa. The arrangement works – like all the best things do – by invitation, not by engineered mutual consensus. Now, if you don’t mind, we’re off to bed.

Livro - A porta de marfim (Maria Helena Prieto)

Que belo testemunho de amor e de uma realidade partilhada a dois! Tanto da profª Maria Helena, como do Professor Marcello Caetano. Mais um documento do antigo regime, ainda que editado após a revolução de 74, completamente desconhecido. E acontecem obras como esta e outras, do desconhecimento total da populaça. 

Thanks Lord, wherever you are, for giving me such pretty things as wisdom 

The Spectator - The changing smell of Britain’s streets

 

(personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-changing-smell-of-britains-streets/?status=Active&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BLND%20%2020250226%20%20HOUSE%20ADS%20%20IH+CID_eafd0d2815db7a88f56c45bb95168325

The changing smell of Britain’s streets

When did the weed smokers take over?

26 February 2025, 5:01am

(iStock)

The other day, while on my lunchtime walk, I passed a woman on a mobility scooter holding an impressive-looking doobie. Later, on my bus home, a bloke got on having just extinguished a joint, bringing the overpowering stench with him. Some commuters don’t even bother to put them out. All you can do is sit and tut passive-aggressively, hoping they’re only going a few stops.

While cannabis use has slowly declined over the past 25 years, it seems that you can’t escape it in public. Perhaps part of the reason is that so few people now smoke at all, even tobacco. It makes weed far more noticeable. The other reason is that the police don’t bother punishing those caught. Most are either let off with a verbal warning or a fine. In many parts of the UK, smoking weed in public is no different from parking on a double yellow.

The other day, I saw a delivery driver in his stationary van rolling a joint on top of his clipboard. Quite apart from the fact that it’s illegal to drive under the influence of drugs, I couldn’t help wondering what effect his impending befuddlement would have on the parcel drops. I’ve even seen someone outside the local Wetherspoons enjoying a spliff with their coffee, while the schoolkids in my nearest park in Bristol smoke weed quite openly.

For dog walkers, drug paraphernalia is a hazard. Willow once had to be rushed to the vet after ingesting something left at the park by a careless reveller. Our new puppy could barely stand, and we feared the worst. Fortunately, the vet cheerfully announced that she was merely stoned. Ours wasn’t the first dog he’d seen that day in the same condition.

Despite my current aversion to cannabis, I was once a partaker. I was introduced to wacky baccy by a boy at school nicknamed Maroo. We’d slip off to Clifton Downs for a crafty joint when we were supposed to be at games (unlike today’s kids, we did at least go and hide ourselves in some bushes). It was the 1980s, and the world’s most famous toker, Bob Marley, had recently died. Smiley Culture sang about being busted in ‘Police Officer’, and Musical Youth encouraged us to ‘Pass the Dutchie ’pon the left-hand side’.

At university in London, my next-door neighbour, a huge cockney called Noggins, was already a prolific dope smoker. It was Noggins who first showed me how to construct a reefer and with whom I spent many happy hours getting off my box when I was supposed to be at lectures. Plainclothes police would circulate our college digs hoping to bust us while we flailed around, spliff in one hand, pint in the other. Fortunately, a fellow student was the girlfriend of one of the officers and would alert us to their presence.

Having graduated, I attempted to leave my dissolute ways behind and took up yoga. But then I joined Noggins on a pilgrimage to India. High up in the Kullu Valley lies a town called Manali, which back then was full of stoned backpackers. Cannabis grows in abundance there. We’d spend our days drinking bhang lassi (a yoghurt drink blended with marijuana) and smoking chillums packed with charas (a cannabis resin concentrate).

In the evenings, we’d sit on the verandah of our guest house enjoying the view and smoking while the manager ran up and down the stairs with our orders. Eventually, Noggins’s behaviour became so erratic – standing outside in subtropical storms, laughing manically, eyes wide as saucers – that we parted company.

I don’t think I smoked more than a dozen times after returning from India, and I haven’t used recreational drugs in decades. However, I could still roll a joint if needed. One could see it as a life skill – like riding a bike. Once learned, never forgotten.

But now, old and square, I find the prevalence of dope smoking setting off my inner Victor Meldrew. Cannabis is a Class B controlled drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, yet overstretched police forces have taken a more tolerant approach to possession for personal use. This has been a green light to some, who behave as if smoking it in public is no different from sipping a takeaway cappuccino.

I fume as I watch drug dealers arrive on my road and pass over the goods in what’s known locally as the ‘stoner handshake’. And if I see anyone smoking dope in front of their kids, I’m almost apoplectic. It was reported the other day that a foreign drug dealer – who fought a deportation order on the basis that it would negatively impact his family – was allowed to stay in the UK after promising only to smoke cannabis and not sell it.

Maybe I shouldn’t get quite so uptight. After all, there’s nothing more tiresome than a reformed smoker. But I’d like to suggest that, out of politeness, people consider the effect on others before sparking up in public. In an interview, Emily Post, author of Higher Etiquette, said: ‘Smoke is not a comfortable thing for everyone. I’d venture that you really want to pay attention to where your smoke is drifting.’ I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Série - O caso do Rio Sambre

 

The Spectator - Private schools were ruined long ago

 

(personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/private-schools-were-ruined-long-ago/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020250109%20%20AL+CID_82b26b6db140851ca6ddf14b8d21709a

Private schools were ruined long ago

They have become places of indulgence

8 January 2025, 5:00am

Schoolchildren in 1955 watching The Tempest in Regent’s Park (Getty)

There is a story in private education circles of an apoplectic father who raged to the bursar that he was unable to find a prep school for his son ‘without central-heating’. It is probably apocryphal, but it reminds us of the mad heights to which some private schools have stretched: rowing lakes, glitzy IT centres, West End-style theatres and Olympic-sized swimming pools, no doubt necessary for storing the ever-growing associated fees. 

It wasn’t always this way. My entire 1950s schooling was an exercise in back-to-basics privation, fostering a now-fashionable ‘resilience’ and ‘green’ ethos, unnoticed by us pupils of those distant days. My small Dorset school, where it was not uncommon in winter for the inkwells to freeze over, produced two Dames of the British Empire.

I visited it a few years ago, to find it still surprisingly unbeholden to the current expectations of the entitled, continuing to use the freezing bathrooms with huge rusting enamelled iron bathtubs. I doubt the washing regime continues, however. We small girls were plunged into these baths three at a time, twice a week, as the tepid water became increasingly soup-like.

The crumbling Jacobean country house had its own kitchen garden, not fashionably uprooted for tennis courts, whose potatoes, beetroots, cabbage and worm-ridden carrots filled us up at a time when postwar rationing had barely been abandoned. We swam, naked as Diana and her insouciant nymphs, in a weed-strewn duck pond overseen by the tweed-suited maths master in holy orders. Amazing, unheeded by us, but true.

You could have either margarine or runny strawberry jam on your toast at breakfast, but not both, and we were expected to drink the water in which rice or potatoes had been cooked at the end of the domestic science lesson. Only later did I learn that doing this had rescued many a wartime prisoner from beri beri in the camps of Japan. Our instructors knew this first-hand.

Clothes – no uniforms – were woolly jumpers from home, and you lined up for a bewhiskered matron to check if you could swap to anything clean. The answer was usually negative, and there was none of the frenetic American-style clothes washing expected today. If you were deemed ‘peaky’ you queued again for a spoon of Radio Malt. No one had a nut allergy. Hands were inspected before lunch, and you were dispatched to a chilly sink with a pumice stone if yours were inky. Once, my father, posted in the Middle East, sent the school a box of Jaffa oranges. We were transfixed as they were handed out, rather like Evelyn Waugh’s children seeing their first bananas, though brutally devoured in front of them by their father.

We slept in iron beds, ranked together in chilly historic chambers named after the poets of the house’s founding era – Marvell, Donne, and Dryden – and sang daily the lovely metaphysical school hymn of George Herbert, ‘Teach me My God and King, In all things Thee to see’. We had no purpose-built theatre, but a nearby ruined castle came in handy for producing Milton’s Comus, and in the gardens Midsummer Night’s Dream and, at Christmas, Eliot’s Journey of the Magi in the Jacobean hall. All this is to say that, against a background of unwitting frugality, we had what every parent is surely seeking: a rigorous, traditional education. 

We were fortunate, of course, in that we were holed up for months at a time in ancient buildings of beauty. Latin was taught by the doughty Oxford-educated daughter of the manse, and we jumped up and down on one leg in front of the class if we committed howlers of declension or conjugation. This redoubtable pedagogue, recognised on her eventual retirement in her nineties with the accolade of ‘Teacher of the Century’, presented herself in moth-eaten cashmere, with straw in her hair from where she slept in the gallery above the stabled horses. Her fey sister, charmingly one Bramley short of a picnic, taught us painting in a cold outhouse. These were unwaged family members, and their venerable old foundress mother, beaky-nosed in a vintage cardi, played us Beethoven on her gramophone of a Sunday evening. I can still hear the fizzing grate of the needle hitting the 78 record as I struggled vainly with the ‘handwork’ we were expected to do the while.

We knew, too, our Divinity, with careful unpicking of the Scriptures, as was the norm before multiculturalism prevailed. When our own daughter went up years later to read English Lit at Cambridge, most of the undergraduates had not been exposed to enough history or Bible knowledge to grasp the terms of reference of Milton, Shakespeare, and Dickens. Samson Agonistes’ fate through the guile of Delilah would now come with a ‘trigger warning’ on gendering.

These homely country schools also functioned as a sort of charitable repository for the lame dogs of the era’s depredations: a geography master so damaged by Japanese prisoner-of-war camps that he could barely stand, a gifted German master who had fled Austria’s Nazis in poverty, a couple of ancient ex-public school housemasters eking out a pension while still retaining their Lucretius and their Edmund Spenser, and the wife of a dissident Orthodox priest hounded from St Petersburg, who taught Russian. Orphaned lambs lay on old towels by the massive Aga, to be bottle-fed by us girls, and in an outhouse hound puppies were sheltered from the chill. Such were the orphans of the storm, human and animal, sheltered but still deployed for our benefit, at minimal outlay.

Perhaps the VAT hike should invite a reconsideration of our independent schools. An opportunity to look again at what we’ve lost: schools that rate frugality, restraint, and resilience, still packing the intellectual punch but trimmed of expensive indulgence?

The Spectator - What Europe gets wrong about the far right

 (personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-europe-gets-wrong-about-the-far-right/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020250227%20%20GK+CID_14b31d3a6d1fa1ff98849dcf4c7db1cc

What Europe gets wrong about the far right

Douglas Murray

The head of America’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (Doge) has written to all federal workers in the US asking them to explain in a brief email what they did last week. The exercise is intended to take no more than five minutes but has already lead to howls from many employees. How could anyone expect them to perform such a task? How can one explain the intricacies of supporting transgender opera among the Inuit in such short order?

Happily, the new editor is not putting those of us on The Spectator’s payroll through any similar exercise. Nevertheless, something in the global vibe-shift perhaps impels me to mention a little of what I have been doing with my time. And the first thing that comes to mind is that while everyone else is swimming in a sea of acronyms, I might have something useful to say about the recent elections in Germany.

It has been my view for a very long time that most mainstream press coverage of politics on the European continent is pretty much bunk. I arrived at that realisation after a period of some years when I was in a different European country most weeks, meeting with politicians and trying to work out who was who. There was a time when a lot of the media did that: within living memory British tabloids had correspondents in all the major European capitals. But today even the broadsheets have gone over to impossibly wide-ranging roles like ‘Europe correspondent’, which is only marginally more useful than the BBC’s ‘Africa correspondent’.

Another problem is that the few outlets that aspire to actually cover politics in Europe are prone to a law of British journalism which must someday be analysed. This is the presumption that all left-wing parties (such as the charming government of Spain) should be assumed to be doing a jolly good job and be allowed to get on with it. By contrast, any centrist political party is to be deemed under caution unless it backs all the major left-wing causes of the day. And any right-wing party – including any that might dare just to be ‘conservative’ – should be treated as though it is about to usher in the second coming of Adolf Hitler.

Personally, I have always found this a charming foible of the left-wing media. They are all for internationalism, fraternity, unity and so on, but seem to believe that most foreigners – certainly in Europe – are fascists in barely concealed disguise. And this interpretation of Europe seems to have lain behind most of the coverage of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, both before and after Sunday’s federal election in Germany.

Some prominent non-Germans have taken the side of the AfD of late, on the apparent presumption that anyone who has been anathematised to such an extent must be good. But as I tried to explain to some of the American media this past week, the truth is that the AfD is a curate’s egg (a phrase that led to some of my American readers frantically googling).

However you phrase it, the idea that the AfD might be good in parts remains too subtle a point for much of the media in Germany and beyond. On one side are people rightly fed-up with cancel culture and name-calling and mainstream politicians ignoring the views of the public. They then react further to the large number of commentators desperate to write pieces with headlines like ‘Far-right rises in Germany’.

Yet many of the AfD’s policies are perfectly commonsensical. It is not as though the centrist parties have managed to get control of mass migration, to name just one form of political rocket-fuel. So if a party comes along that says it would really like to tackle immigration and stop the emerging new traditions of car-rammings and knife attacks then ordinarily they’d be credited with something. But modern European politics doesn’t work like that.

Several things make this even more complicated. Geert Wilders now heads the largest political party in the Netherlands. But some 20 years ago, when I first interviewed him in his office in the Dutch parliament, he was the only member of his party as well as its sole MP. He was the only member because, as he admitted, if any right-of-centre party starts up in continental Europe it will be called far-right by the media and its opponents. The small number of actual far-right types who still exist will then be the first to join – so destroying the party from the get-go. There is no reason why politics should be dictated or destroyed by such extremes. But that is how it goes. And this is how much of the political mainstream and activist left are actually happy for things to go.

Which brings me back to the AfD. As the election came closer there was much excited talk about how the party would storm the polls. The party encouraged some of this, as did its political opponents. And the problem upon a problem is that, as the party has grown some very unsavoury types have indeed muscled into the AfD. The wiser party leaders spend a large amount of their time making sure to sideline or expel such people. That is a full-time job. But it is also a piece of political brain surgery at which many people would like to see the AfD fail.

If they do fail, to say that would be a catastrophe would be an understatement. A right-wing party in Germany of all places actually turning far-right would spell a nightmare for everyone.

The AfD did not manage to ‘march to power’ this week. But it did double its share of the vote from the last election. A wise mainstream would notice this and decide (as the Danish centre and left have) that sometimes you should listen to the public and adapt your policies accordingly. But most countries do not seem to have a wise mainstream. And so the problem will be put off until everything is worse.

Livro - A revolução antes da revolução

 

The Spectator - In defence of forgiveness

 

(personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/in-defence-of-forgiveness/

In defence of forgiveness

Douglas Murray

It is often the small constants in the culture that give the game away. Much of the news today is not about anything significant, but rather a sort of lower gossip. Every day, some new scandal bubbles along. Someone is found to have said something once, often a long time ago. The culprit is shamed and condemned.

Take the case of Frank Hester, a donor who has given an estimated £10 million to the Conservative party. Few had heard of him until recently. Then it was reported that at a meeting at his company headquarters in 2019, Hester said that Diane Abbott MP made him ‘just want to hate all black women because she’s there, and I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot’. Cack-handed, and unfunny, this comment was an easy one to condemn. Hester was widely criticised and he swiftly apologised, adding that his remarks ‘had nothing to do with [Abbott’s] gender nor colour of her skin’.

You only have to put one step wrong to be wrong for ever

But the story wouldn’t go away. Kemi Badenoch accurately said that it was ‘pure media bubble speculation’. She went on to say that ‘we need to get to a place where we stop chasing people around and looking everywhere for the racism’. That memo didn’t reach the media or the many people who want to make life as difficult as possible for the present government. Having first refused to censure the comments, the Prime Minister was soon forced to do so, insisting they were ‘racist and wrong’.

There it might have stopped. But some people don’t want to let such things stop. Abbott claimed that the remarks were ‘scary’ and last week she reported Hester to the police. West Yorkshire officers say that they’ve now set up an investigation into the alleged comments. Which I’m sure everyone agrees is another superb use of police time.

You might say that this is merely an inevitable part of the political game. If Hester had donated to the Labour party and the words been said about, say, Badenoch, I suspect that Abbott’s ire might have been lesser. Labour MPs of course have a track record of making inflammatory comments themselves, whether it’s green-lighting anti-Semitism (Abbott) or denouncing their political opponents as ‘scum’ (Angela Rayner). In these cases, they had semi-apologies dragged out of them and insisted that every-body move on. It’s a standard they expect for themselves, but not one they apply to others.

Small fry though the Hester story might be, it points to something deep going on in our culture – because we live in a time when people’s private and public thoughts can be spread around the world as never before. In-group behaviour no longer stays with the in-group. Thanks to social media, anything can also be discovered by an out-group, which may comprise almost everybody in the world.

We have never had to deal with anything like this before. Any mistake can rear up in front of you again – whether five years later (as with Hester) or decades on (as it was for my colleague Toby Young a while back).

People gleefully rake over the outrage. For many, it gives life a meaning of a sort. And as we know, in the social-media era it has not only managed to bring down the odd famous person; it has done for those who were previously private individuals. It has destroyed everyone from supermarket workers to schoolteachers to a lady-in-waiting.

Clearly people enjoy the thrill. Because it is thrilling. But what they have failed to consider is that they are abandoning one of the most important ethical beliefs in our whole Judaeo-Christian civilisation: forgiveness. And not just forgiveness for people you like and eternal damnation for anyone you don’t. But forgiveness available to all.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt addressed this issue 60 years ago in a remarkable lecture delivered at the University of Chicago titled ‘Labour, Work, Action’ as part of a conference on ‘Christianity and Economic Man: Moral Decisions in an Affluent Society’. The main subject of Arendt’s lecture was what an ‘active’ life consists of. Towards the end she reflected on one of the unavoidable consequences of being active in the world: that we cannot know what the consequences of our actions are. The ‘frailty and unreliability of human affairs’ means that we are constantly acting in a ‘web of relationships’ in which ‘every action touches off not only a reaction but a chain reaction’. As a result ‘we can never really know what we are doing’. What we do know is that our actions are ‘irreversible’. They cannot be undone even if the consequences ‘prove disastrous’. If that was the case before the dawn of the internet, how much more is it today?

What Arendt said next is even more important: ‘Only one tool exists to ameliorate the irreversibility of our actions. That is the faculty of forgiving. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victim of its consequences for ever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell.’ It is a crucial insight, but it also seems to me that there has never been a time when it has been more necessary to ponder. In a religious society – as ours used to be and still is in parts – the mechanisms of forgiveness were relatively clear. People could seek it from God. And even those who were not especially devout respected someone who had visibly atoned. Not for nothing was the old PR advice to ‘apologise and move on’.

But the world today can watch someone apologise and yet it can doggedly refuse to move on. In fact, the apology tends to make things worse. Most people who have gone through the process of being hounded relate that the effects on their life are catastrophic. Many say they have ended up contemplating suicide.

It’s no wonder they do, because we live in a society that spends a great deal of energy working out how to bring people down. While our mechanisms for condemning have never been more readily to hand, is anyone thinking about the only tools to counter that? The mechanisms of forgiveness.

If there is, I have yet to hear about it. Our church leaders spend much of their time talking about current shibboleths instead of preaching the actual gospel, let alone presenting perhaps the most extraordinary and truly revolutionary aspect of the Christian message – the commandment to not just forgive but also to love your enemies.

That great release valve that the world once had has been stopped up for years now, if not decades. In its place is a culture which can destroy but not create, tear down but not build up. We cannot seem to find a way out of this trap.

I sympathise with the generation coming up. Of course they are hypersensitive and – as Jonathan Haidt’s work has shown – hyper-cautious. The cost of acting in the world has never been higher. You only have to put one step wrong to be wrong for ever.

Forgiving people only when they happen to agree with you or when it is politically advantageous cannot be the answer. Nor, in practical terms, is the answer immediately obvious. The only thing that is clear is if our culture wants to escape the situation of the apprentice without the spell, we might spend this Easter thinking of the story and the teachings that gave our culture its breath. And wonder whether that breath mightn’t find a way to breathe through us once again.