World

James Kirkup

Misogynists can’t decide: are Weinstein’s accusers weak subhumans or devious slags?

The volley of accusations against Harvey Weinstein has been extraordinary – and, to some, suspicious. Why keep silent after so many years? If an actress says that he raped her, why did she agree to go for lunch afterwards? The Spectator, in keeping with its tradition of saying things you’re unlikely to read elsewhere, has published some of these more controversial points. Gwyneth Paltrow says she was sexually harassed by Weinstein when she was 22, says Toby Young. He continues: Why, then, did she thank him three years later when she won an Oscar for her performance in Shakespeare in Love?” The same goes for Angelina Jolie and all the other

James Delingpole

Steinbeck’s Eden

 Amalfi Coast ‘Nearly always when you find a place as beautiful as Positano, your impulse is to conceal it. You think: “If I tell, it will be crowded with tourists and they will ruin it, turn it into a honky-tonk and then the local people will get touristy and there’s your lovely place gone to hell.” There isn’t the slightest chance of this in Positano.’ John Steinbeck, 1953 This is quite possibly the most delectable view you’ll ever see anywhere in the world Yeah, right. The sad truth is that like so many classic destinations, Positano, on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, has long since been overtouristed almost to the point of

Catalonia deserves independence as much as any other state

Few, if any, commentators have seen fit to discuss the wider issue and the underlying morality from first principles. The instant reaction in all quarters has been to back Spain over the plucky little Catalans. The principle of national self-determination was laid down by Woodrow Wilson after the First World War and accepted by the colonial powers who unwound their empires, if somewhat reluctantly, over the next half-century. Both the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded partly to advocate for this principal. In the case of Kosovo we actually attacked Serbia for refusing the Kosovans this basic human right. What is so different about Catalonia and the

Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Tech vs Trump

On this week’s episode, we discuss Trump versus technology, the ‘new normal’ with Calamity May, and whether jargon is polluting the English language. First up, in this week’s magazine cover piece, Niall Ferguson writes on the battle between networks and hierarchies for supremacy in a digital world. The biggest fight is between the American President and the social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, who still exist in the unregulated frontier of the Wild Wild World Wide Web. Niall joined Freddy Gray, host of the Spectator’s Americano podcast, to discuss. As Niall writes: “It may be too big a stretch to claim that Russian Facebook ads swung the election in Trump’s

Rod Liddle

Blame the grown-ups for the safe-space tribe

A car driver ploughs into a bunch of people outside the Natural History Museum in London and lefties are furious mostly because the right-wing columnist Katie Hopkins thought it was another jihadi attack. For thinking this she is a racist bigot and consummately evil — despite the fact that I suspect most Londoners thought precisely the same as Hopkins when they heard the news. We are in the bizarre situation where horrible incidents not perpetrated by Muslims are gleefully welcomed by the lefties because they believe it adds grist to their idiotic mill: other people are capable of driving cars into pedestrians, you see, so it is racist to suggest

Russia damaged Turkey’s economy in the name of diplomacy. Is the US about to do the same?

Istanbul President Erdogan has spent much of this year slinging muck at Europe’s heads of state, and he has damaged a number of already precarious relationships. Now it looks as if he is about to come up against the force of US diplomacy and Turkey may find itself in trouble. Turkey and the US have been Nato allies since 1952. During that time, Turkey has played up its strategic position for military bases close to the Middle East. In turn, the US has downplayed a number of disputes between the two countries, particularly in recent years as the conflict in Syria has raged on. Even as they seemed to be

Tom Goodenough

Brussels is warming to the British government’s approach to Brexit

Ministers had been holding out some faint hope (at least publicly) that Brexit trade talks could start this month. It was an unlikely prospect. Jean-Claude Juncker warned only a few weeks ago that it would take a ‘miracle’ for that to happen. Now, it’s official that a Brexit miracle hasn’t take place: Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, has said Brussels’ new timetable is based on the ‘hope for sufficient progress’ to be made by the end of this year, rather than in October. This makes it clear the EU is determined to milk its trump card – stalling on talking trade – for all its worth: hardly

The conservative case against Catalonia’s separatist narrative

Daniel Hannan has written, compellingly and eloquently as usual, about the constitutional crisis taking place in my country, Spain. In his piece, he invokes the celebrated Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno who, as Spain plunged into civil war in 1936, admonished the anti-intellectual, anti-liberal nationalist rebels that they would ‘vanquish, but not convince’. Unamuno was of course right: after three years of bloodshed, Spain endured nearly four decades of dictatorship, punctured by the deprivations from autarky and international isolation well into the 1950s. But today’s Spain is a much different place. Following Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, the country underwent a peaceful democratic transition which elicited admiration the world over.

Nick Cohen

Does the rule of law cover the poor?

Belatedly, the disastrous rollout of Universal Credit has become a media ‘talking point’.  I could do with less praise for Iain Duncan Smith in the debate. He is the man the Tories decided was unfit to lead them, but still fit to manage and, as we are seeing, wreck the lives of the poorest people in the country. He deserves no special indulgence. ‘His intentions were good,’ everyone feels obliged to say. As if motives mattered more than deeds, and what politicians hoped for matters more than what they achieved. Duncan Smith’s achievement was to preside over disastrous and expensive experiments with IT systems that did not work, and then

Charles Moore

The media is paying too much homage to Catalonia

However much we try — and lots of us don’t — we fall for the power of the photo-image. So the news, as reported in Britain, was simple: Spanish police brutal; Catalan democracy assailed. I am not in a position to know the real facts about the violence, so I simply note that the estimates for those injured in Catalonia on Sunday vary from 844 to two in hospital. But so much was left out by the dominant account. First, the referendum was illegal under the constitutional law of Spain (reinforced by the Catalan Supreme Court). Serious votes normally need legal form, for good reason. Otherwise, they are more open

Gavin Mortimer

How one grieving French mother is fighting back against the Islamist ideology

The paths of two French mothers, Madame Ibn Ziaten and Madame Merah, converged in a Paris court this week, at the start of the trial of one of their sons, Abdelkader Merah. In March 2012, another of Madame Merah’s sons, Mohammed, shot dead seven people in southern France in the first of the Islamist attacks that are now a routine feature of European life. Even in France, which has suffered more than most countries from this wave of terror, Merah’s rampage continues to haunt people. It wasn’t just that he singled out three Jewish children for cold-blooded execution in their school playground but that he also filmed his murders before he

‘Taking the knee’ is a flawed form of protest

Kneeling, fundamentally an act of humility or deference, doesn’t seem the obvious protest against injustice when the National Anthem plays before a major American sporting event. The quarterback Colin Kaepernick made the gesture famous—and personal, since only he (and sometimes a couple of teammates) did it before his San Francisco 49ers took to the field for games in 2016. But two weeks ago, inflamed by President Trump, dozens of players (mainly black players, who make up around 75 per cent of the National Football League) did it, across the NFL. Their kneeling took different forms, and some contortions seemed to suggest ambivalence, with players kneeling then rising once the music

Rex Tillerson is the captain of a ghost ship

The US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s press conference yesterday was moronic. Earlier this week, NBC News broke the story that Tillerson, exasperated by Donald Trump’s shenanigans, called him a `moron’ during a meeting in July at the Pentagon. It took the intervention of vice-president Mike Pence, in the role of Trump administration life coach, to counsel Tillerson to remain in his post. Now, months later, Tillerson appeared at the State Department, which he has been steadily working to denude of any remaining diplomats or civil servants, to engage in a self-rectification session, pledging his fealty to Trump as well as his devotion to making America great again. Even Tillerson, however,

Freddy Gray

Donald Trump avoids gun debate in explicitly religious speech about Las Vegas shooting

Donald Trump’s statement to the nation about Las Vegas was platitudinous. Speeches by leaders in the wake of such horrors tend to be. But it wasn’t bad. He did the necessary: he called the slaughter ‘pure evil’, he thanked the Las Vegas police and protection services for their professionalism, he offered comfort and condolences to the families of the victims, and he called for America to unite in grief. ‘In moments of tragedy and horror America comes together as one, and it always has,’ he said. ‘It is our love that defines us today, and always will, forever.’ Schmaltzy stuff, but exactly what America wanted to hear. His speech was

Catalonia’s president refuses to back down after referendum violence

The violence which marred Catalonia’s independence referendum has dominated the coverage, but the region’s president is confident about what the result means: Catalonia has won the ‘right to an independent state in the form of a Republic,’ he said last night. The outcome of the vote certainly seems convincing at first glance: 90 per cent of Catalans voted to split from Spain on a 42 per cent turnout. But Puigdemont’s many opponents say that the chaotic nature of yesterday’s voting renders the overall result meaningless. According to Catalan authorities, 319 of around 2,300 polling stations across Catalonia were closed by police. In the run-up to the vote, Rajoy’s government seized some 10 million

Freddy Gray

How will Trump react to the Las Vegas attack?

President Donald J Trump, the man who never sleeps, hasn’t woken up to the awful news from Las Vegas. Or at least he hasn’t yet gone on to Twitter to rave at the world, as he normally does after any terrorist attack or incident of mass violence. No doubt he will any moment. Until he does, the media will have to content itself with publishing distressing images and videos of the shooting and reporting what few facts we know. There isn’t anything else to say. It is worth noting, however, that Trump supporters have taken to pointing out that, while there have been around 40 terrorist attacks in Europe in

Notebook | 28 September 2017

I’m currently dwelling on past times. I have a film coming out based on the crazy events that took place in 1953 when Stalin died. (He lay having a stroke on his rug and in his urine for hours since everyone was too scared to knock and see if he was all right.) We shot the film last summer. Then Trump happened. Now, journalists grill me as if the movie was an intentional response to that bloated troll’s election victory. Films take years to finance and write, and another year to shoot and edit; in that time, there’s no way anyone could have predicted the election of America’s first balloon-animal-inflated-by-potato-gas

Nick Cohen

‘Fake news’: the far left’s favourite new excuse

Admirers of violence and lies must go carefully. As true cowards they must leave themselves an escape hatch in case they are forced to retreat. They never quite commit to the suppression of rights, the rigged elections, the secret policemen and the torture chambers. Instead they tell us we are not hearing the full story, and switch the argument. The real problem is not the oppressive state and its suffering citizens, they say. The problem is the fake media. Not media faked by government propagandists and controlled by censors, not countries where every TV station and mass circulation newspaper must follow the party line, but the free media in their

Alternative für Deutschland’s success tells the tale of Germany’s forgotten East

Back in the early 1990s, a few years after the Berlin Wall came down, I went back to the house in Dresden where my father was born. The house was on the outskirts so my father and grandmother survived the bombing – they got the last train out of Dresden before the Red Army arrived. The family I found there had been there since 1945. They’d been expelled from Silesia when Stalin handed the region over to Poland, and had ended up in Dresden along with so many other displaced Germans. They’d been living there for half a century, three generations under the same roof. They didn’t own this house