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Hamilton Spectator
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
Paul McCartney fans ‘gobsmacked' by ticket prices. Hamilton general admission seats sell out in about 15 minutes
In 1993, Suzette Beaugrand paid $39.50 for decent seats to see Paul McCartney in Toronto. She was 'gobsmacked' to learn the cheapest presale ticket for the former Beatle's Hamilton show in November she could find was a $650 'nosebleeds' seat. On Tuesday, available presale tickets ranged in price from about $1,800 to $3,500, with reseller prices as high as $17,000. McCartney is opening the renovated TD Coliseum on Nov. 21. 'I was deflated,' said Beaugrand, 70. 'I am a senior citizen on a fixed income and no way can I afford those prices.' Some Hamiltonians say they're frustrated by what one Redditor called 'overpriced' seats for the Nov. 21 concert at the renovated TD Coliseum . Hamilton, one of just two Canadian cities getting a performance, will be the second-last stop on the Got Back tour after shows in places ranging from Palm Desert, Calif., to New Orleans, Atlanta, Pittsburgh and finally Chicago. General public tickets for the Nov. 21 show, which went on sale Friday at 10 a.m., were priced between $52.50 and $4,135.90, not including VIP or hotel packages, Ticketmaster said online. Tickets appeared to be sold out by about 10:15 a.m. The Spectator joined the queue for tickets to the Nov. 21 show, and at 10:02 a.m. there were more than 3,200 people ahead waiting for tickets. Wait times, according to the seller, 'may exceed one hour.' Suzette Beaugrand recently found a ticket stub from a 1993 Paul McCartney concert in Toronto, priced at $39.50. On reseller StubHub , tickets were being resold for $685 for a single seat with a 'limited or obstructed view' and up to $14,754 for VIP seating on Friday afternoon. To celebrate his 69th birthday on Nov. 21, longtime fans Marvin Mauer and his wife had planned to go to the show with friends. But by the time they made it to the front of the virtual line, the only seats left together cost thousands of dollars — more than the agreed upon $350 to $400 ceiling, he said. Tickets for the Nov. 21 show go on sale next week. Less expensive seats were singles, in the upper sections or had obstructed views and were still above budget. 'The tickets were just ridiculous,' he said. The couple, whose Dundas home is filled with Beatles memorabilia, records and art works, including a four-by-six-foot painting of John Lennon, have seen the star perform a handful of times, including in Hamilton in 2016 as part of his One on One tour, his only other show in the city. Mauer said they paid between $200 and $250 the for 100-level seats with a view the last time they saw him play. As a kid, Beaugrand would tuck a transistor radio under her pillow at night to listen to the Beatles. Then she started buying 45s and, later, albums. Of the generation that grew up on the Beatles, Beaugrand idolized McCartney, who co-wrote songs like 'Hey Jude,' 'Yesterday' and 'All My Loving.' 'It was a magical time,' she said. She's since seen McCartney live twice, and George Harrison once in 1974. A self-described groupie, she chased down McCartney's bus at his last Hamilton show and got a wave. She'd seen him play in Toronto the year before and couldn't justify the expense. This fall, he'll be performing mere kilometres from her Westdale home, but she won't get to see him perform. (Though she may try her shot at getting her 1993 stub autographed.) 'I would so love to see him one last time,' she said. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
Hamilton Spectator
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
Top Hamilton headlines this week: Massively weedy Cootes a good news story + Empty residence and long-empty Jamesville in housing crisis
The weekend is here, but plenty happened in the Hamilton area this week. Don't miss these top stories from Spectator reporters. Hamilton Fringe Festival is underway and Hamilton Cardinals host the IBL All-Star game and home-run derby this weekend. There are plenty more activities to keep busy . Expect fog patches Saturday and a chance of showers Sunday on an otherwise mostly sunny weekend. The forecast calls for a high of 28 C Saturday and 26 C Sunday. It's no cliché, Stan Eastman was trying to net a big fish and he fell overboard. His boat kept going. The 74-year-old spent the next 10 hours floating in the middle of Lake Erie. A mentally ill man who stabbed his roommate 320 times, dismembered him and tried to remove his heart has lived in a Hamilton apartment for four years. The man, found not criminally responsible for the 2016 homicide in Scarborough, asked the Ontario Review Board to remove restrictions he has been living under. Excessive plant growth in Cootes Paradise is good news for the west-end Hamilton marsh, said the senior ecological stewardship director at the Royal Botanical Gardens. This year, water lilies have taken over. Wild rice and bur-reeds are making a comeback in pockets. The now highly visible 'pond weed' is blanketing much of the rest of the otherwise open marsh. The presale began on Tuesday at 10 a.m., and by about 11:30 a.m., on Wednesday, about 40 seats were still available on Ticketmaster, many of them singles. On Wednesday, ticket reseller StubHub listed seats for the show between $657 and — for front-row seating — $17,500. Spectator readers wrote in about their troubles getting tickets . Just a year after it opened, a new Mohawk College student residence downtown has closed due to enrolment woes. The nine-storey Catharine Street South building opened in April 2024 with 150 double units to accommodate a then-growing student population. Ontario's housing minister will consider an order to allow the disputed redevelopment of the long-empty Jamesville social housing complex to finally go ahead. Mayor Andrea Horwath made what she called a request 'of last resort' and asked the province to break an impasse with CN Rail, the owners of the nearby shunting yard. Subscribe to our newsletters for the latest local content . Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
Spectator
4 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Where are the resettled Afghans living in Britain?
This week, we learned that three years ago a Ministry of Defence official accidentally released details of 18,714 Afghans who had applied for relocation to the UK. The Afghans, who had worked with British armed forces, feared retribution from the Taliban, so the Conservative government introduced a new scheme, alongside existing programmes, to resettle some of these people. The Spectator's leading article this week argues that Britain had a moral responsibility to help them. But how many have arrived so far? And where are they living in Britain? As of May, 35,245 people had been relocated to the UK through the Afghan resettlement programme made up of several schemes such as the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP), the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS), and the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR). The latter is the recently-revealed scheme for those deemed at risk but not eligible for ARAP or ACRS. Half of those resettled – some 16,156 – were affected by the data leak. All of the schemes were closed to new applicants on 1 July. ARAP focussed on Afghans who worked with the UK government and classified applicants into four categories. Category one covered UK government employees at immediate risk; category two was for Afghans who mostly worked as translators or cultural advisers; categories three and four covered those considered at lower risk. ACRS had a slightly wider criteria than ARAP (only 5 per cent of those who applied for ARAP in August 2021 were deemed eligible). It aimed to resettle around 20,000 Afghans – those who helped Britain but did not necessarily work with the armed forces, stood up for democracy or are members of minority religions or groups at risk. Like ARAP it had three categories, or 'pathways' which granted indefinite leave to remain, work rights, and eligibility for welfare benefits. Pathway one covered those evacuated during Operation Pitting in 2021; pathway two included referrals by the UNHCR; and pathway three targeted the 'at-risk individuals' who supported British efforts. ACRS also covers spouses, partners, and dependent children under the age of 18. The Afghan resettlement programme also assisted some British nationals (960) and other foreign nationals (120), though the vast majority were Afghans. Around two-thirds of the 34,308 resettled Afghans live in England, ranging from 5,541 in the south-east to 1,163 in the East Midlands. Scotland has 1,735; Wales, 772; and Northern Ireland, 305. No location data is available for the remaining 7,716. Among local authorities, Crawley (including Gatwick Airport) hosts the largest group (1,026), followed by Leeds (616), Birmingham (605), and Edinburgh (563). Fifteen local authorities, including Torridge in Devon, South Derbyshire, and the Isles of Scilly, have no resettled Afghans. Besides the resettlement schemes, many Afghans migrate to the UK for better economic prospects, as the UK's per capita GDP is 25 times higher than Afghanistan's. In 2024 alone, more than 5,700 Afghans arrived by small boat across the English Channel, making them the most common nationality using this route. Since 2018, 27,285 Afghans have arrived via small boats or other forms of irregular migration. As the scandal over the government's leak and cover-up continues, it's worth noting that some 5,400 more Afghans who have received invitation letters under ARR will be arriving in the UK over the next few months. The rest will be left in Afghanistan.
Spectator
5 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
How I got under Macron's skin
The journalist Jonathan Miller, a cherished Spectator contributor, died last week at his home in Occitanie, France. Below is an extract from the memoir he had only just completed, Shock of the News: Confessions of a Troublemaker. Here he explains how he came to write about French politics and culture for the magazine. I t was Andrew Neil who prodded me from my lethargy. Andrew lives on the posh Provençal side of the Rhône while we're on the plouc side nearer Spain. I'm more likely to run into him in England or New York than France. But we keep in touch by email. When Emmanuel Macron began his manoeuvres for the presidency, I sent a gossipy email to Andrew explaining why I thought he might win, and how peculiar he was. Andrew was then chairman of The Spectator, in addition to presenting for the BBC, and his response was to suggest to Fraser Nelson, The Spectator's editor, that he take me on as the French political correspondent, writing for the magazine and website. A very grand appointment paying peanuts. Fraser agreed. I have now covered Macron through two presidential elections and non-stop interstitial magouilles (fishy moves) that make his reign a golden one for a freelancer. Many rum coves have ruled France and Macron is among the rummiest. I had a feel from the start that there was something pathological about him. The narcissistic personality disorder was in plain sight. There are reasons I'm not invited to Macron's Elysée Palace for cosy chats, like Sophie Pedder, the Economist's correspondent in Paris, after her magazine depicted Macron walking on water and declared him Europe's saviour. My line is less charitable. A few headlines from my author page at The Spectator offer a flavour of my coverage. 'Emmanuel Macron looks shiftier and less likeable by the minute,' I wrote in November 2017. 'Macron is the author of his own despair' in December 2024, after he plunged the country into new chaos with yet another tantrum. I have never met Macron. Living in the Languedoc I'm far from included in the charmed circle of political journalists in France, who in their groupthink bubble are identical to their homologues in London and Washington. It's a club of which I don't wish to be a member, and given how rude I have been about them, they wouldn't want me. But I know people who know Macron and reckon I have better understood him than most, or at least have been willing to go farther than many of my colleagues in Paris, who have covered up his peculiarities much as the White House press covered up the mental decline of Joe Biden. Deference is a defect in a republican system where the de facto head of government is also head of state. A number of my articles were translated into French and republished in Courrier International magazine. I don't know if Macron has seen them. But someone at the Elysée probably has, so I'm persona non grata there. I'm not bothered by my lack of access to the presidential palace. I see Macron much more through the filter of the people in my village. When the Gilets Jaunes movement started in France in late 2018 as a grassroots protest against fuel tax hikes and the rising cost of living, I understood it immediately because the demonstrators in their high visibility gilets were my neighbours. While journalists in Paris were demonising the demonstrators as thugs and trouble-makers, I was spending time with them on the roundabouts where they'd set up their camps. My labrador, Ringo, was as ever an icebreaker. I have a soft spot for troublemakers. Macron has united France against him. But he's been good for me. The Spectator can't get enough of him. In July 2024, after he had lost his parliamentary majority after throwing a hissy fit calling unnecessary elections, I opined that he can be very charming in a small group, where it's clear he is the sovereign. But in public he is clumsy and sometimes outrageous. Also, bizarrely, I have noted how he loves to dress up. At the very start of his presidency, he had himself photographed in a beautifully cut suit, the Légion d'Honneur on his lapel luminous as if lit by a laser, solemnly proceeding through a hall at Versailles, flanked by the Republican Guard in their extravagant dress uniforms, with drawn swords. It was beautifully photographed, and an extraordinary, boastful image. The French had elected a king, an absolute monarch. Soon, after brutally sacking the chief of the military to show he was in charge, he moved to establish his authority as commander in chief by visiting a French nuclear submarine and dressing up like a naval officer in a military tunic. A grand spectacle. He arrived in a military helicopter. More recently he wore a black hoodie to channel Volodymyr Zelensky. Macron the warrior. Then it was his Sylvester Stallone tribute, Emmanuel 'Rocky' Balboa Macron, working out with a punch bag in a gym in Paris. The photograph was taken by the official Elysée photographer and the bulgy biceps are rumoured to have been photoshopped in post-production. The stunt is thought to have been Brigitte's idea. Boxing fans were nevertheless unimpressed by his jab. In the most provocative gesture of them all, he dressed up like Tom Cruise. The very day after the first round of the 2024 National Assembly election, which he had lost, he was parading before the paps in a stylish leather jacket and baseball cap. The Top Gun. Lieutenant Emmanuel 'Maverick' Macron. Brigitte wore Yves Saint Laurent. Macron imagines himself to be Jupiter, king of the gods. I see him as an actor manqué, a rampant narcissist. I doubt that attending Elysée press conferences is necessarily an effective way of covering this presidency. Keeping your eyes open to what you see, and not what politicians say, is better. This is a Miller Rule of Journalism. There's no substitute for observation, whether you're covering a presidency or a village fête. I'm now probably getting a little weary of Macron. And I am not thrilled at the prospect of writing about another presidential election. But just like a politician, I'm not ruling it out. Maybe one more rodeo. More and more, my writing for The Spectator has become a potpourri of other subjects about life in modern France. The French are frequently caricatured by British journalists, mocked for a lengthy list of supposed defects including even, pace Kelvin MacKenzie, dodgy food. It is true that they eat at McDonald's a million times a day, the national dish is pizza, which is sometimes sold in vending machines, and that they often make it with the wrong kind of cheese, Emmental not mozzarella. There is even a journalistic sub-genre for this. It's called froggie bashing. I have frequently been accused of such bashing and angrily plead not guilty. I adore France and the French. When I am rude to them, it is because I love them. Also, unlike my experience in Surrey, few people in my village can read my articles, so I'm not widely hated here. Where I do bash the French, it is mainly on the point of what I have come to believe has been their grossest geopolitical miscalculation. The French elite is consumed with suspicion of Britain and America while obsessed with cosying up to the Germans. Anglophobia is embedded in France for obvious reasons, given the history, even after the Entente Cordiale and Britain rescuing France twice from the 'boches' (Germans). After the war, this hatred of the Anglo Saxons was baked in by the hyper-Anglophobic General de Gaulle. He hated the British despite or perhaps because we saved his bacon. But the British ought to be the best friends of France, not the Germans. The refusal of the French to follow my wise advice has been a catastrophic, historic sequence of events. Refusal to reset when the Wall came down was the cause of Brexit and much else, in my amateur opinion. And now look at the mess. The country is broken. Nearly half the population fears civil war. But from chaos comes wonderful stories. And France is but one area kind enough to provide plenty chaos for stories in my book.
Spectator
5 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
The crimes of Cecil Rhodes were every bit as sinister as those of the Nazis
This is a brave and learned book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of Africa; who has taken sides in the recent quarrel about 'Rhodes Must Fall', in Oxford or other parts of the world; or who wants to entrench themselves in contrary positions in our apparent 'culture wars'. It is the biography of a vicar's son, born in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire in 1853, who went as a teenager to Africa to join his elder brother who'd bought a plot of land in Natal. One day, walking past a stream by the side of a field, he noticed some pebbles gleaming especially brightly. They were diamonds. By the time Cecil Rhodes enrolled as an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford, aged 20, he had an annual income of £23,000 – the equivalent of about £1.5 million today. Money is power, and the diamond and gold mines of South Africa made Rhodes and his pals prodigiously rich. Today's billionaires, such as Elon Musk, may make half-hearted attempts to involve themselves in government, but compared with Rhodes they are lightweights. Here was a man whose fantastic wealth and power mania awoke greed in others – among them Alfred Beit and Natty Rothschild – and who eventually encouraged the Liberal imperialists and Colonial Office in London to embrace the dream of taking over an entire continent. We are still living with the consequences. I know that some Spectator readers think it amusing to see Rhodes as a bit of a hero – or at least scorn those who protested outside the building on the High Street in Oxford adorned by his statue. He was certainly one of the greatest benefactors the university ever had. In his will endowing the Rhodes scholarships he specified that 'no student shall be disqualified for election on account of his race or religion'. William Kelleher Storey explains that, although these are the words, Rhodes probably meant by 'race' simply American, British or German (he set aside three scholarships for Germans) and that he did not necessarily envisage giving money to Africans to study at Oxford. He was entirely deaf to Gladstone's words at the beginning of the First Boer War: 'Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him.' Rhodes was unapologetically racist. Oxford was where his imperialist aspirations flowered. He heard John Ruskin lecture and it made him want England to 'found colonies as fast and as far as she is able'. Reading William Winwood Reade's The Martyrdom of Man when an undergraduate was crucial. Rhodes kept a copy beside him till his death. 'That book – which asserted the superiority of Europeans to Asians and Africans as a matter of scientific fact derived from the evolutionists – has made me what I am,' he wrote. Europeans, he sincerely believed, had the most highly developed intellects: 'Let me ask those who admit the development of all civilised people from a savage state… how it is that Europeans have advanced, while others have remained in a savage state.' The 'Hindoos' and Chinese were cited as being obvious examples. The Colonialist is primarily a work of history, which places Rhodes's actions and achievements in the story of Africa. It is not really a personal book, and I wanted much more about the man himself. For example, he and Leander Starr Jameson (of the celebrated raid) probably had some kind of relationship, but because Storey can find no evidence for Rhodes's homosexuality he does not reflect on it. Rhodes's desire to connect the whole of Africa from the Cape to Cairo and to make it all British is described in meticulous detail. And it was to this cause that he devoted his time and money – from his first discovery of diamonds in his brother's streams to his last days, when he was richer than almost anyone else in the British Empire. By then he was the director of several gold and mining companies and in a position to bribe tribal elders, kings and chieftains with arms and cash to allow him to create a whole new country: Rhodesia. Women play almost no part, and you can't help feeling that the whole story is essentially gay (though I still can't explain why this is so obvious on every page). Open-pit mining for diamonds was catastrophically dangerous, as well as being hideously hard work. But when African labourers fell to their deaths in landslides they were deemed stupid for not understanding the warnings bellowed at them in a language they did not speak. The book astutely reminds us that neither Rhodes nor his American mining engineer and sidekick Gardner Fred Williams had any idea of what life was like in the mines from which they made their millions. Workers would be strip-searched before returning home in case they had stolen a single gemstone, or kept totally naked in corrals for four or five days and then subjected to enemas. Rhodes pressed on from what is now South Africa to take possession of the territories of modern Zambia and Zimbabwe which for decades bore his name – north and south Rhodesia. And it was he who egged on Jameson to launch his raid on the Transvaal in 1895. The attempt to topple Paul Kruger, the Boer leader, was responsible for the Second Boer War, in which Lord Kitchener behaved with unforgettable brutality towards the Boers, exposing them to scorching heat in concentration camps – that British invention – and killing thousands of civilians. Storey's difficulty is that of any historian of European or American background approaching this subject. The Colonial Office and Queen Victoria were initially doubtful about the Rudd Concession of 1888, whereby King Lobengula of Matabeleland supposedly agreed to concede Bulawayo to the British in exchange for guns and money. But even if they doubted the legitimacy of these arrangements, and were prepared to prosecute Jameson for his undoubtedly illegal raid, the British government and their monarch were in the end willing to fight a war to defend the principle which ruled the piratical Rhodes's life. This was that Africa should not be in the hands of the Dutch, the Portuguese or the Germans – and certainly not the Africans. The continent was far better off being administered by British boys who had been to boarding schools and read Rider Haggard. Rhodes's influence, based on gold and diamonds, turned the morally nuanced British nation and Empire, which like most institutions was a mixture of good and evil, into a brigand state. And so the British persuaded themselves that they were entitled to own and plunder Africa, and that such greedy dishonesty was a sign of their moral superiority to the inhabitants. This insanity can largely be attributed to the propensity of suddenly acquired wealth to drive the possessor mad. Rudyard Kipling was a great writer, but his enthusiasm for Rhodes's vision for Africa was deluded. This cannot be a matter of opinion, like taking sides when dis-cussing Charles I vs Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War. Those who scream with rage against Rhodes and his legacy are simply right and those who try to defend him and what he did are simply wrong. Being a wishy-washy white man of a certain age, I want to add, of course, that this is not a reason why Rhodes Must Fall – if by that is meant not just removing his effigies but seeking to erase his memory. We need to know the history – which is so punctiliously told in this book. It has never been related before in such detail, or with such impartiality, or awareness of the rage which the very name of Rhodes inspires in African hearts. I am glad I'm not a Fellow of Oriel, or Warden of Rhodes House in Oxford, having to work out what to say to the Rhodes Must Fall contingent. Much of Oriel's wealth and the very existence of Rhodes House derive from crimes every bit as sinister as those perpetrated by the Third Reich.
