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Sunday 7 September 2008

Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

On Tuesday night, Daniel Hannan MEP was expelled from the federalist European People’s Party — which includes the Tories as uneasy bedfellows — accused of wanting a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and of calling the Speaker of the European Parliament a Nazi. What Hannan actually said was that the Speaker was ‘a decent and democratic man’, but that his decision to ignore the Parliament’s own rules to prevent further protest against the failure to hold a referendum called to mind the Enabling Act in the Reichstag in 1933. Funnily enough, before Hannan had delivered his wicked remark, two group leaders made speeches comparing the pro-referendum protestors’ interventions to the tactics of Adolf Hitler and/or Nazi members of the Reichstag. Neither was disciplined, of course. Anyway, Hannan is now a happy man, since he has fulfilled his party’s promise to break with the EPP. That promise was made by David Cameron, and there are signs that he is belatedly moving towards fulfilling it. Within 18 months, one suspects, Hannan will not be sitting alone.

One of the melancholy things about being a journalist is the awareness that everything one does is forgotten. But there are one or two of our trade who are so distinctive that they are exempt from the rule. Auberon Waugh is top of this small class. Whenever something grotesque or horrible or pharisaical happens — i.e. every single day — I find myself wishing that Bron were here to comment on it. What would he have said, for example, about the latest shootings of fellow students in the United States (on this occasion, at Northern Illinois University)? Most of us (see previous Notes) drone on about ‘America’s love affair with the gun’. Bron, I feel, would have preferred to ask what it is about American higher education which drives people to homicide.

Not that the British version is better. When I was a student, one used to bump into American contemporaries who would say things like, ‘Oh yes, we have done Thomas Hardy [or whoever]’. This would turn out to mean that they had read short set passages from one or two of Hardy’s novels and then answered a few ‘multiple choice’ questions about them. They had never read the whole book. At the time, we looked down our noses at this form of study, but today it seems commonplace in Britain (except that Hardy is probably too long dead and too indisputably white and male even to merit extracts). The latest news is that oral examinations in foreign languages are to be dropped from GCSE because they are ‘too stressful’. Why is it that a society which fills its public rhetoric with the importance of education has developed such a hatred of actually learning anything? No — as Bron Waugh might have said — I am not suggesting we should shoot all those involved, but the thought is somehow consoling.

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