Convenience Big Store: Biden and Macron are trashing the liberal West

23 September, 2021

In the headlines

Boris Johnson has urged the UN general assembly to get to grips with the climate crisis. After his speech, he admitted to reporters he had sometimes downplayed the severity of the crisis. "If you were to excavate some of my articles from 20 years ago, you might find comments I made ... that weren't entirely supportive of the current struggle." Labour leader Keir Starmer has finally published his 14,000-word vision for the Labour Party, The Road Ahead. "There is substance and significance in it," tweeted one Labour heavyweight, but The Guardian's Rafael Behr dismissed it as "a necklace of platitudes strung together with banalities, fastened with cliché". Tyrannosaurus rex moved at only 3mph, says a new study by scientists. T-rex was a "a dino-slower", says The Sun.

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Biden and Macron are trashing the liberal West

The left is hopeless at choosing heroes, says Allister Heath in The Daily Telegraph. Joe Biden was meant to be the anti-Trump, "saviour of western multilateralism", while Emmanuel Macron was the poster boy for European centrism who would rescue the continent from the descent into populist turmoil. Both have turned out to be "calamitously bad" – "accidental presidents" who fancy themselves as technocratic administrators but are really "shockingly incompetent". Both are "hypocritical semi-nationalists" who believe in their own nations' sovereignty but nobody else's, and both are presiding over the accelerating economic, social and moral declines of their countries.

Most unfortunately, both are also staunchly anti-British. Since Brexit, Macron has treated the UK as an "enemy to be contained", while Biden is making a trade deal "impossible". It's no surprise the world has stopped following the US blindly. Every foreign policy decision it has made since the Cold War has "failed disastrously", while France loves nothing more than making "deals with despots". The dream of a European defence no longer reliant on America will be ruinous. It will finish off Nato and tear the EU apart. The left hailed Macron and Biden as defenders of the liberal international order. Both men have already done more to trash it than anything Trump concocted.

Want to get ahead? Speak clearly and correctly

Last week linguistics professor Willem Hollmann argued that snobby British examiners mustn't penalise those who say "I were" rather than "I was". But the way we speak matters, says Clare Foges in The Times. If young people from across Britain are to conquer disadvantage and low expectations, they must first "conquer diction and grammar, smashing the invisible sound barriers that have held them back".

Linguists such as Hollmann would dismiss this as hopelessly old-fashioned. They think there's no such thing as speaking "correctly" and that language is a living thing. But the sad truth is employers don't agree. Subconsciously, we label the speaker who says "pacifically" instead of "specifically" as not up to the job. Before "enviously mellifluous" Brummies, Geordies or Scots think I'm attacking them, I'm not. "Properly" isn't shorthand for "speaking like the Dowager Countess of Grantham". Huw Edwards and Sir Lenny Henry have burrs bred in Bridgend and Dudley respectively but "speak clearly and correctly". To truly "level up" society, better elocution is economically vital – and satisfying. As Professor Henry Higgins puts it to Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion: "Think what you're dealing with. The majesty and grandeur of the English language, it's the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds. That's what you've set yourself out to conquer ... And conquer it you will."

Tomorrow's world

A group of Cambodian students have designed a prototype drone that can fly 1km while carrying a pilot weighing up to 60kg. They hope future models will be able to ferry people around Phnom Penh, thus reducing the city's appalling traffic, and help fight fires.

On the way out

Beethoven and Wagner. More and more academics consider the works of 19th-century composers the tainted product of an imperial society, says Paul Harper-Scott, until recently a professor of music at Royal Holloway. So he's quit. If no one takes a stand against cancel culture, he says, Beethoven and Wagner will be axed from Britain's "decolonised" curriculum "in the frankly insane belief that doing so will somehow materially improve current living conditions for the economically, socially, sexually, religiously or racially underprivileged".

The great escape

The tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat has accepted just 21 people from seven families to stay in the country since opening its "digital nomad visa" scheme in April. Applicants must have an income of $70,000 and stay a minimum of two months if accepted. There has been one Covid death and only 33 positive tests among the population of almost 5,000, and few on the island wear masks. "There's nothing that can kill you here except the volcano," Krystal Bajkor, a former financial analyst from North Carolina, tells The New York Times.

Snapshot

David M Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Richard Quinn

Quirks of history

The biblical city of Sodom, destroyed by God because of its inhabitants' wickedness according to the Old Testament, was likely obliterated by a meteor in 1650 BC, say archaeologists. Charred skeletons and melted buildings uncovered at a site in the Jordan Valley thought to have been the location of the city indicate it was roasted by temperatures of 2,000C. Spherical iron particles suggestive of a large meteor explosion have also been found. Researchers from the University of California are silent on whether the disaster was divine in origin.

Snapshot answer

It's Lila Grace Moss Hack, Kate Moss's child. The 18-year-old was making her IRL debut as a catwalk model at the Richard Quinn show during London Fashion Week while her 47-year-old mother watched from the front row. Kate, who made her own catwalk debut in 1992, also popped backstage before showtime and was seen proudly adjusting Lila's neckpiece. Lila lives with her mother in London – her father, Jefferson Hack, co-founder of Dazed Media, had a relationship with Kate in the early 2000s.