Society

It is impossible, I would have thought, to have heard Debbie Hazledine’s account on the Today programme of her late mother’s mistreatment at Mid Staffs Hospital and not to have thought ill of the hospital in question. An institution in which such callousness thrived for so long must have few friends left, you might imagine. And yet the strangest thing about the Mid Staffs scandal is the defensive feeling it has inspired. The ‘Save Mid Staffs’ campaign has been vocal at points, while Julie Bailey, the Mid Staffs whistleblower, appears to have been persecuted. In front of this backdrop, a debate about what should happen to wards in failing hospitals has morphed into a full-on slanging

This week’s issue of Country Life magazine has been guest-edited by the Prince of Wales. As long term perspectives disappear from national debate, we should all be grateful for his presence in public life, says Ben Goldsmith. It is hard to name an area of modern life which has not been overcome by short-term considerations. Companies sacrifice long-term growth for their quarterly financial reports, politicians are blind beyond the next election, and the attention span of rolling news channels is shorter than ever. In cricket, the deep satisfaction of a five-day Test Match is threatened by one day or even shorter match formats. Long termism speaks with a quiet voice; a voice that has been all but obliterated. The Prince of

Doris Lessing died this morning, aged 94. The below is from the Spectator’s archives. Doris Lessing’s Nobel win came as a surprise to everyone, the author apparently included. Despite her enormous, decades-long international reputation, she was less fancied than dozens of patently smaller writers. That could only have been ascribed to a cynical estimate of the way the Swedish academy works. On literary merit, no one would have questioned her right to it. She is one of the greatest of novelists in English. Her career is a matter of savage breakthroughs into quite new territory, as if her searching, sceptical intelligence could never be satisfied with stasis for long. It

The global warming question is back on the political agenda with David Cameron likening cutting greenhouse gas emissions to house insurance. His argument is that if there’s a risk that they may be harmful, you want to guard against it. But given that ‘global warming’ is no respected of national boundaries, one thing that isn’t sensible is to simply send energy intensive industries and their jobs and profits overseas. But this is just what the EU is doing, according to Bjørn Lomborg. He reports that: ‘From 1990 to 2008, the EU cut its emissions by about 270 million metric tons of CO2. But it turns out that the increase in

Could creating a UK market for horsemeat be the solution to the increasing number of equine welfare cases? This was the question posed by Princess Anne yesterday at World Horse Welfare’s annual conference. The former Olympic eventer argued that creating a horsemeat market, and thereby adding a financial value to many horses, would most likely improve the level of care that they currently receive. Unsurprisingly, Princess Anne’s comments have upset certain groups such as the RSPCA and Peta, with the RSPCA saying in a statement that ‘the killing of horses for meat is an emotive subject, as many see them as companion animals rather than a food source, a sentiment

In Kurosawa’s samurai warrior classic Sanjuro, the hero, a wandering Ronin played by Toshiro Mifune, ends the film in a face-off with his mortal enemy Hanbei Muroto. For a long moment the two martial swordsmen face each other in total immobility. Then, in a flash, a movement known by Samurai as Debana-Waza, Mifune slices his opponent in two, creating a violent fountain of blood.   There is an analogy to be made with the world chess championship, currently in progress in Chennai. After two quiet draws, the players are in a Debana-Waza state of immobile preparation, while awaiting the sudden stroke that will break the deadlock and propel one of the two