Convenience Big Store: It takes an immigrant to see Britain’s greatness

2 October, 2023

In the headlines

Jeremy Hunt has rejected calls from Tory backbenchers for pre-election tax cuts, insisting there are "no shortcuts" while inflation remains high. The Chancellor, who was speaking on day two of the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, also pushed back on Home Secretary Suella Braverman's remarks on multiculturalism last week, saying he "wouldn't use her words". NHS bosses have warned patients to expect "extreme disruption" at hospitals in England, as junior doctors and consultants begin an unprecedented three-day joint walkout. NHS England says that with medics providing only "Christmas Day" cover, non-emergency care will be at a "near standstill". Participants at the World Conker Championships may be allowed to harden their nuts by baking them, says the Daily Star. According to organisers of the event, which takes place in Northamptonshire on Sunday, unseasonable weather has left this year's crop of horse chestnuts "soft and mushy".

Comment

Children in Brixton waving union jacks during a visit by Queen Mary in 1938. Reg Speller/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty

It takes an immigrant to see Britain's greatness

When I was a schoolboy, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, a woodwork teacher said to me: "Hey, P***, get some paint from the storeroom." He was quite strict, but my friend still challenged him: "You shouldn't use that word. It isn't fair to Matthew." At a takeaway in Shropshire, an older boy with a cigarette came over and said: "Get the f*** out Gandhi". But the young girl behind the counter insisted I order, and told the boy if he didn't like it, she'd call the police. "I wish I could let that girl know how much her courage meant to me."

Over my life, I have witnessed Britain becoming "more inclusive, more accepting, more whole". It is why almost every authoritative report shows the UK is the "most tolerant nation in Europe, if not the world". Yet this is perceived most clearly not by indigenous Brits, but by immigrants like my father. He came here from Pakistan and struggled with racism during a career in the civil service, but he "always loved" his adopted home because he saw the wider context. He'd lived through vicious ethnic violence in India, and knew of Jim Crow segregation in America, apartheid in South Africa and tribal brutality across the Middle East. Britain may have been home to the odd racist idiot, but it was still "one of the most meritocratic and least sectarian places on Earth" – something that is "even more true today". So here's an unfashionable thought: "The UK is a great nation and, just now and again (and with a suitable sense of irony), we should celebrate it."

Noted

The Las Vegas Sphere – a $2.3bn concert arena shaped like a giant ball – opened on Friday with an "avalanche of buzz", says CNN. The interior of the cavernous venue is lined with the world's largest and highest-resolution LED screen. The grand opening – the first night of a 25-show run by U2 – had a few teething problems: the band started half an hour late due to "technical problems", and at one point the giant screen appeared to freeze on a single image "over multiple songs". But when the new tech worked, its effect was, in the words of more than one social media user, "insane".

Film

Hollywood studios pulled their films out of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, says Will McCurdy in The Guardian, but that hasn't stopped Russians from watching the latest blockbusters. In big cities such as Moscow and St Petersburg there is a "vibrant illegal market" for screenings of movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer. The cinemas sell tickets for Russian films and then show the Hollywood one beforehand as a "free preview screening". Something similar happened during the Soviet era, when small "video salons" played pirated VHS tapes with amateur voice dubbing, "often with a single actor performing almost every character in the movie".

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Photography

The winners and runners up in this year's Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition include images of the red-and-orange Running Chicken Nebula; a 700,000km-long solar flare erupting on the sun; firework-like purple "sprites" in the Himalayas; and a close-up of Jupiter. See more winners here, and get tickets for the exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich here.

Comment

Brown and Mandelson in 2010. Luke MacGregor/Getty

The 10-minute chat that landed us with HS2

Like most things that cost "enormous sums of money", says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph, the saga of HS2 "all began with politics". As chancellor, Gordon Brown accepted a 2006 report rejecting Britain's need for a new high-speed rail system. But after becoming PM, Brown got "jittery" that the Tories would steal a march on Labour at the next election by promising one. So after a discussion "which took fewer than 10 minutes", he and his Cabinet "waved through one of the most expensive infrastructure projects ever devised". Even Peter Mandelson admitted, in 2013, that it was a mistake. Perhaps the "most glaring gap in our analysis", he wrote, was whether the £30bn cost – which may now top £100bn – could be better spent elsewhere.

In Westminster and Whitehall, that "Brownian incuriousness about price" prevails. For some reason, the aim is for HS2 trains to hit 400km/h, "a third above continental equivalents". That means the tracks must run straight and level, which entails a vast amount of expensive cutting and tunnelling – between London and Birmingham, "passengers will see the sky for only seven minutes of the entire journey". As for whether the money could have been spent better elsewhere, that's a no-brainer. In the year to April 2022, Britain spent £5.8bn on its roads, compared to £5.6bn on HS2. Yet rail is used for just 2% of journeys by volume, and 9% by distance. "Road accounts for well over 80%." Thank goodness Rishi Sunak looks set to change course. It's time someone "burst the consensus that floated HS2 like some great blimp in the political sky".

Life

Peggy Coffman; Reed Saxon/AP

Around 1985, people started telling Maryland resident Brian Coffman he looked like Sting. The Police were topping the charts, and Coffman bore an uncanny resemblance to the band's frontman, says The Washington Post. "Waitresses asked if Brian was Sting. People on the street." A group of teenagers once stopped him in a mall and demanded his autograph. Then, in 1987, Coffman ran into the real Sting at a fancy restaurant in Brooklyn. "I went up," he recalled, "and said I've been told by people that I resemble you." Sting looked at Brian and said: "No. You are much better looking."

Inside politics

Last week's Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth didn't arouse much corporate interest, says Kevin Maguire in The New Statesman. The event had a "tiny" exhibition area, with Dignity in Dying and Wessex Water among the few outsiders buying space. Instead, the patch was dominated by party factions. "Buffer stalls kept apart the Lib Dem Christians and the Lib Dem secularists, avoiding an ungodly row."

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It's the view from the newly opened Horizon 22, the highest free viewing platform in Europe. The 58th-floor public gallery of 22 Bishopsgate, in the City of London, is 254 metres up, 10 metres higher than the platform on the Shard. But it isn't easy snaffling a ticket, says The Times. "The trick is to be ready and waiting at 10am, two months ahead of the day you want to visit." Try your luck here.

Quoted

"I was raised a socialist. I'm trying to earn enough to become a socialist again."