‘Up for Grabs’ shouted a notice at the ticket office at Sissinghurst. It was not easy to buy a ticket without signing the National Trust’s petition which the slogan advertised: ‘For decades our planning system has protected much loved places from harmful development. Now the government’s reforms turn this on its head, using it primarily as a tool to promote economic growth instead.’ Each signatory then declares: ‘I believe that the planning system should balance future prosperity with the needs of people and places — therefore I support the National Trust’s call on the government to stop and rethink its...
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Ever since the Franco/British-led intervention against Gaddafi in March, the Guardian and the Daily Mail — whose foreign policy in all matters relating to the Muslim world is oddly similar — have been droning on about the Libyan ‘quagmire’. Nor would you ever have known from the BBC, until last weekend, that the rebels had a chance. In the Guardian, my friend Simon Jenkins, clever and original though he is, has said (1 April) that Gaddafi would win a victory over the West like the one he claimed after the American bombing in 1986, that (19 April) ‘The great lie...
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If it is any consolation to David Cameron, the last really big nationwide outbreak of riots was even worse for the prime minister than this lot. This occurred in 1981, when Mrs Thatcher faced maximum danger from her Cabinet colleagues and from public opinion because of the toughness of her economic policies. The riots spread, over three months, from Brixton to Toxteth, Handsworth, Moss Side and other locations whose names are now becoming familiar again. Despite her fierce reputation, Mrs Thatcher did not quite know what to do, veering between a determination to pretend that everything was business as usual,...
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In the ‘peace camp’ in Parliament Square last week, a man sat with a placard which said ‘NORWAY Jew Mafia Job’. I wonder if police would have tolerated it if it had replaced the word ‘Jew’ with ‘black’, ‘gay’ or ‘Muslim’. But it would not surprise me if a large number of people have been persuaded that Jewish power somehow armed Anders Breivik and induced him to murder scores of Norwegian teenagers. True, there is nothing as old-fashioned as actual evidence of this, but so what? Just as Breivik seems to have picked up dreadful ideas from the internet, so...
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Why do those of us who support capitalism use that word? It was designed by our enemies. Capital, of course, is a vital component of an economy, and capitalism could be defined as the separation of the provision of capital from its management — a good idea in principle since it makes it possible to create and diffuse wealth much more widely. But it is a bad word because most people lack notable capital of their own, and therefore believe that the -ism advanced in its name can do nothing for them. As I argued in last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, the...
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Before we leave the subject of the News of the World, I must take issue with the idea that its closure is necessarily a loss to the cause of a free press (however sad it may be for its staff). For as long as I can remember — which is roughly since Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1969 — the News of the World has been one of the most lowering features of British life. The late Auberon Waugh used to insist that it was read only by people whose main leisure activity was self-abuse. This must be hard to...
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