World

Is bombing Isis having any effect on destroying it? In the latest View from 22 podcast, Andrew J. Bacevich and Con Coughlin discuss this week’s Spectator cover feature on the West’s war with Islamist extremists and the regional disorder it has led to. What lessons, if any, can be taken from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts? Should France, the U.S. and Britain consider deploying troops? And is Barack Obama proving to be a poor leader in the fight against Isis? James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and Fraser Nelson also discuss George Osborne’s latest Autumn Statement and the results of the 2015 Spending Review. How significant were the announcements on scrapping tax credit cuts and protecting police budgets for Osborne’s career prospect? Is the Chancellor making any progress on improving the public finances? We also

That was a funny way to say sorry. Osborne kicked off his autumn statement with a Niagara of self-congratulation. He does the same thing at the budget. He said his wisdom, foresight and courage had rescued the nation from bankruptcy and set us on a golden path towards wealth, security and happiness. His glorious achievements reach every part of the UK, he went on: the tumescent north is swelling more vigorously than the shrivelled south. Birmingham creates jobs three times faster than the Home Counties. And the perkiest employment rate is to be found in the west country. He then reversed this claim and vowed to combat the ‘geographical differences

The complications of acting in Syria have just become more apparent. The Russians are fighting in support of Assad – but Turkey, a Nato member, is backing anti-Assad rebels and has just shot down a Russian Su-24 jet. The Turkish foreign ministry says that the pilots were warned ‘ten times in five minutes’ that they were violating Turkish airspace. The pilots managed to eject and video footage has emerged:- The aircraft came down near the Antakya mountains, where Turkmen rebels (backed by Turkey) are fighting Isil and Assad’s forces (blue areas, below). The Su-24s, owned by both Assad’s regime and Russia itself, have been bombing rebel positions for some time. Turkey has been warning

I promised to provide, in this space, a forum for thinking about ‘what we believe’. We the West. There are two articles worth noting in the last few days. Toby Young, right here in The Spectator, wondered how liberal values can be sexed up. Should we hope that potential Islamists will be won over by ‘a crash course in the virtues of limited government and the rule of law, drawing on the writings of John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson’? He goes on: ‘Liberalism offers its adherents peace and prosperity – it appeals to man’s desire for comfortable self-preservation, as Nietzsche pointed out. That’s fairly tepid and uninspiring compared to the

Hours before the Paris atrocities, Al Arabiya news reported a speech by David Anderson QC, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation. In it, he said that because some mainstream media were ‘grossly irresponsible’ in their coverage of Muslim issues, Ipso, the press standards body, ought to consider making it possible for an entire religious group to bring a complaint about coverage. Mr Anderson is an able and distinguished lawyer. Surely he knows that the entire history of this subject is that mainstream Muslim bodies are constantly trying to criminalise hostile remarks about their religion. And surely he knows that if this were conceded, the chilling of free speech would be

The UN Security Council this evening unanimously approved a resolution calling on all countries that can do so to fight Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. David Cameron welcomed it as a sign that ‘the world has united against Isil’. It will likely form a key part of his case for British involvement in military action against Islamic State in Syria, and in his statement, the Prime Minister said: ‘Today’s vote shows beyond doubt the breadth of international support for doing more in Syria and for decisive action to eradicate ISIL. Britain will continue to support our allies who are fighting ISIL in Syria. I will continue to make the

Various readers have been asking if I am doing Question Time, This Week or Any Questions this week. It’s not the BBC’s fault but I’m not able to be in the country at the moment. I am particularly sorry not to be able to do Question Time now that I learn that the line-up includes Mehdi Hasan and Anna Soubry. So could someone else on the panel or in the audience please point out that Mehdi Hasan has expressed similar contempt for us infidels as Isis have? Here is a reminder of a sermon he gave in 2009: ‘The kuffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of

So, farewell then, FHM. As Adrian Mole, 13 3/4 (years, not inches) and perhaps their target market, might have put it. Finally cowed, not by feminist protest, but by the big beast of the teen consumer market: internet pornography. Yesterday, the soft-core ‘lifestyle’ magazine announced that it was shutting up shop, along with fellow wank-bank supplier, Zoo. According to some sections of the internet, as a woman, I’m supposed to regret this. The argument goes something as follows. Teenage boys are now watching online porn (true). Online porn is ever-more hardcore, and as an industry, hardly gentle to women (true). By comparison, the days of FHM were a feminist idyll

Ain’t it rum? Last week sport was morally bankrupt, finished, no longer worthy of taking up an intelligent person’s time for a single minute. This week it’s shining out as one of the glories of the human spirit. And yet sport can cope with the contradiction quite effortlessly. It’s hard to know the worst thing in athletics right now, but it’s either the fact that Russia has been implicated in a state-run doping programme or the possibility that the former president of the sport’s world governing body is accused of taking bribes to cover it up. In football the acronym of Fifa, football’s world governing body, means corruption: nothing more,

Yesterday, Francois Hollande promised “merciless” retribution against the Islamic State. This evening, armed with American intelligence, the French Air Force dropped 20 bombs on two Isil positions in Raqqa – in what tomorrow’s newspapers will almost certainly portray as a swift and dramatic act of vengeance. But in fact, it won’t be much different to what the French have been doing in the last few weeks as one of the United States’ partners in what has been a year-long bombing campaign (along with the Saudis, Turks and Aussies). It’s a campaign that doesn’t seem to have been too effective in holding back the Islamic State. The French targeted an Isil command centre, an