There is an irony about the arrest of Tibetan freedom protesters in Beijing yesterday. The mother of Lucy Fairbrother – one of those detained – was quoted as saying:
"If my daughter’s going to be put in prison for anything I’m glad it’s for a human rights protest."
Except, of course, that she wasn't put in prison. In addition to attracting great attention, the timing of the protest also means that those arrested (two Brits and two Americans) have already been deported and arrived home safely.
Whatever the rights or wrongs of the protest – I’ll leave those to CoffeeHousers to decide – we should consider for a moment how differently they would have been treated were they Chinese nationals. Lucy has been reunited with her proud parents – she should count herself lucky.
Daniel Kawczynski has written a web exclusive article for The Spectator, apologising for his recent online quarrel with Melanie Phillips. You can read it here.
The worst place to try to put Beijing’s Olympic Games into context is perhaps actually Beijing. Arrive in the city at present and the overwhelming impression is of a modern, successful, prosperous, happy and western-looking population, greeting the forthcoming sporting festival with a greater pride and joy than it has ever previously been received with.
The Games of the XXIX Olympiad will superficially be the grandest in history, staged in venues that are already being seen as architectural landmarks, with every ticket for every event in Beijing sold out in advance. Even the small bore shooting. And yet the International Olympic Committee seems constantly ill at ease and takes immense care with the diplomatic wording of every public statement from its temporary base at the Raffles Beijing Hotel.
Rarely has there been such a disparity between what visitors know and what the local population believes. There was a genuine, spontaneous protest close to Tiananmen Square this week, with mostly respectable middle-aged and elder ladies complaining forcibly about the loss of traditional housing to the rapid development taking place in the centre of Beijing, but it was almost nationalistic in bringing attention to the disappearance of something inherently Chinese, and otherwise entirely apolitical.
There was no feeling of the ruling government being opposed and security personnel observed the events without clamping down on the local residents making their demands. But any suggestion that the authority of the Chinese regime was being challenged and the response would have been quite different. It has been made clear that foreign involvement or the raising of uncomfortable subjects like Tibet will not be allowed to blemish Beijing’s big moment.
While the rest of the world has been debating about politics and sport, and assessing Beijing, nothing similar has been going on in Beijing itself. Only positive images related to the Olympics have been permitted. The city is filled at every turn with official flags, banners and posters, covering lamp posts, walkways, roadsides, public buses and trains, and even whole buildings, all in the Olympic colours with the Beijing 2008 logo and motto of “One world One dream” in multiple languages.
Television screens have been set up in public locations and transport systems, even in Beijing Subway carriages, to get the “feelgood” Olympic message across. And of course it has been helped by many of the big Chinese and multinational corporations, which sponsor the Olympics and want to maximise their exposure from it by paying for enthusiastic advertising in every remaining space. No wonder the city’s population has responded to the Games with such delight when faced with such a barrage.
The term ‘Beijingoism’ has emerged this week to describe the locals’ passion for their hosting of the Olympics. But it is actually the outcome of a sustained propaganda campaign, something that the Chinese government are of course very good at. Indeed, the fact of a huge propaganda operation has not changed from the old communist times, it is just the subject that has been adjusted, from supporting the ruling party to pushing Beijing 2008.
The results have been so successful that there is no room left in Beijing now for the old party symbolism. It is exceedingly hard to find any remaining communist emblems in most of the Chinese capital, though rare leftover ones have seemingly been missed and do crop up unexpectedly, such as on an ancient cleaning trolley on the otherwise completely new Beijing Subway, which is actually kept spotless by at times appearing to have a cleaner assigned to every passenger, following them with dustpans and brushes to ensure no footprint will mar the pristine floors. Only the Chinese have a population to achieve that ratio of labour.
The next effort could try to persuade Beijing residents to modify their beloved habit of spitting, from aiming on the ground to using the numerous new bins. But with the authorities now placing a public relations emphasis on environmental awareness – something that seems perverse in the continuing smog enveloping the city – would the locals be able to decide whether to deposit their spit in the ‘Recyclable’ or ‘Other Waste’ sections of the newly-compartmentalised bins?
And so the Labour leadership struggle rumbles on, with claims by Team Miliband that the Milburn for Chancellor story was "fictional" - an effort by the Brownites to smear their man as an uber-Blairite, and thereby alienate him from the left of the party. But Rosa Prince of the Telegraph has since claimed, in no uncertain terms, that the Milburn story came from "friends of Miliband". And a new article on the Telegraph website suggests that the Team Miliband denials are an attempt, on their part, to quell criticism from other Labour MPs.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with all the speculation. And I can currently see only one winner emerging from it all: The Conservatives. After all, the more the struggle between Teams Brown and Miliband appears on the front pages, the more Labour will seem like a party in decline. And that's hardly going to endear them to the voting public.
In this week’s magazine, Rod Liddle provides a brilliantly acerbic take on the Government’s green agenda. Here’s the bottom line:
“The truth is, I suspect, that you can ‘prove’ almost any old rubbish to be environmentally sound or otherwise — the science is so inexact and so open to manipulation. This isn’t an excuse for doing nothing, but it is a good reason for suspecting the motives of any and all politicians when they use the word ‘green’. It is beginning to be seen as a gigantic con perpetrated against the very people who can least afford it.”.
You can read, and comment on, the full article here.
Amid all the earnest discussion of Rowan Williams’s position on homosexuality and Christianity, can I recommend the classic Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch on the subject? Still essential viewing:
Nothing on God's Earth would persuade me to wish al Qaeda a "Happy Anniversary", ten years to the day since its simultaneous attacks on US Embassies in the East African capital cities of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, at the cost of more than 200 lives, most of them African civilians.
Are they winning? Sadly, I think they are. The operational strength of AQ and its affiliates ebbs and flows - that is in the nature of a global franchise that has moved beyond the old-fashioned IRA cellular structure to something much looser and more organic. But the West has undoubtedly marched into the elephant trap dug by Osama bin Laden.
There was an item on this morning's Today programme about the ten year anniversary, and then a sombre discussion of the conviction of bin Laden's former driver by a military court at Guantanamo Bay and the damage done to America's international image by such spectacles (true enough). There is daily speculation about the fate of the Government's 42-day measure. We agonise about "hearts and minds", about the threat to Magna Carta, about the military consequences of 9/11 and the appropriate timetable for withdrawing from Iraq.
AQ is winning because there is more introspection and hand-wringing in the West than there is united determination to defeat the enemy. It is as simple as that. For a corrective, the first indispensable book of this conflict, and a manual for our times, read Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent, which I reviewed earlier this year.
Is there a more pathetically ineffectual phrase in current misuse than 'international condemnation'?
"Oooh, how awful, listen up everyone. Our violent and bloody military coup is attracting international condemnation. We must desist immediately, apologize profusely to all concerned and give ourselves over to international justice."
You may have seen the summer reading list that Tory MPs have been issued with. But here’s an alternative set of book recommendations for you, this time from Spectator staff. Not all the books will be newly-published. But they’re generally books that we’ve read – and enjoyed – recently. Hopefully, we’ll unearth a few gems for you. If so, please do return the favour by making your own recommendations in the comments section.
Right, I’ll get the ball rolling with my suggestions…
Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone is up there with Michael Herr’s Dispatches as the best piece of reportage to come out of the Vietnam War. O’Brien – who took part in the conflict as an infantry man – is keenly introspective, and writes openly about toll waged on his psyche by every firefight, every landmine, and every death of a friend. The end result is as lyrical as it is horrifying.
First published in 1935, BUtterfield 8, by John O’Hara, is a sordid tale of Depression-era New York. A girl ends up dead, but why? For O’Hara, a master of social observation, the devil is in the details. Everything – from the way the characters prepare their cocktails, to the clothes they wear – drives the narrative to its ambiguous conclusion.
Charmingly naïve readers sometimes think that the literary editor (me) has read all the books that have been reviewed, not to mention the ones that are coming soon. This is not so. There is one, however, that I read the whole of because it was so beguiling: Bits of Me are Falling Apart by William Leith. Only just a novel, in that it really has only one character and scarcely any plot, it concerns the hell of being 47 and in not very good shape. The Spare Room by Helen Garner, just out, is grimmer yet, another novel that feels close to autobiography. This time there are effectively two characters, one nursing the other through cancer - subtle, profound and I am still not sure whose side I was on. Neither book is depressing.
Matthew d’Ancona
Books on happiness, general well-being and nudging are fine, but books about getting out of an almighty financial mess will be more topical for this generation of Tories. Nigel Lawson’s The View from Number Eleven is still the key text, but Geoffrey Howe’s Conflict of Loyalty is under-rated and full of laconic wisdom. Most Tories still don’t have a clue about wider culture and society, so I would recommend our own Alex James’s Bit of a Blur, now in paperback, a beautifully-written primer on everything that they have missed out on. Fiction: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, which is as close to the perfect novel as I can imagine.
Liz Anderson
Ferdinand Mount’s Cold Cream. A delightful memoir, chronicling Mount’s childhood in Wiltshire, his travels around Europe with his mother, his time at school, Oxford and Downing Street, surrounded by his charmingly eccentric ‘Hobohemian’ family and friends. Altogether a wonderfully witty and elegant recalling of his ‘early life and other mistakes’.
Tom Rob Smith’s first novel Child 44, a thriller set in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, when Stalin’s powerful grip terrorised the nation. Long-listed for the Booker, it’s a real page-turner.
And for a lighter (in lbs) read, try Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, set on an isolated island in the Pacific. A beautifully crafted novel.
Henrietta Bredin
Little Dorrit. Read it before it arrives on our screens in the BBC autumn drama schedule, when I'm sure it will be gripping stuff as scripted by Andrew Davies, although it would be terrific if another writer could get a chance at adapting these big chunky Dickens novels once in a while. It's as stuffed with juicy characters as currants in a mincepie - Little Dorrit, born in the Marshalsea Prison, where the debtors and credit crunch victims of the day, including Dickens' own father, were banged up; Arthur Clennam, returned from years in China to a London both drearily familiar and alarmingly strange; Mrs Merdle glittering complacently at the top of the social tree with her parrot 'watching her with his head on one side, as if he took her for another splendid parrot of a larger species'. Glorious.
James Forsyth
Dead Certain by Robert Draper. This is the best biography of George W. Bush written to date. Reading it, one is left with a sense of how much Bush's strengths are his weaknesses, and vice-versa.
Descent into Chaos – recently published, the only book you need read to understand the Afghanistan/Pakistan conflagration which may well provide our next war. One of the best books I’ve read in my life, from a genuine expert who knows the area and its main players. Reads like a thriller.
Typhoon by Charles Cumming – a gripping tale of spies and terrorists up to no good in China in the run-up to the Olympics.
Mary Wakefield
Moscow Circles is a sad, satirical, funny, fantastical, violent, political, vodka-sodden account of a train journey from Moscow to nearby Pietushki in the early 70s. The author, Benedict Erofeev, wrote it in a fortnight for a bet because he needed the cash for booze. Once you’ve read it, hunt down Pawel Pawlikowski’s heart-breaking documentary, Moscow — Pietushki, based on the book and made just before Erofeev’s inevitable, drink-induced death.
Brothers Karamazov. Ok, it’s a bit obvious, but re-read it! Why not? I did, earlier this week, and now I’m goofing around in a state of dumbstruck awe. Anyone who frets over Britain’s ‘broken society’ must first have an answer to Ivan K’s contention that in a Godless world, ‘everything is permitted’.
Previous
There is an irony about the arrest of Tibetan freedom protesters in 
The worst place to try to put Beijing’s Olympic Games into context is perhaps actually Beijing. Arrive in the city at present and the overwhelming impression is of a modern, successful, prosperous, happy and western-looking population, greeting the forthcoming sporting festival with a greater pride and joy than it has ever previously been received with.
And so the Labour leadership struggle rumbles on, with 
In this week’s magazine, Rod Liddle provides a brilliantly acerbic take on the Government’s green agenda. Here’s the bottom line:
Nothing on God's Earth would persuade me to wish al Qaeda a "Happy Anniversary", 
