World

Fascinating events in Hungary where Prime Minister Viktor Orban continues to come under fire from other EU member states for trying to maintain what we used to call ‘borders’. This has now led Orban into direct confrontation with Hungary’s richest export – billionaire financier George Soros.  Orban identifies Soros as being one among a number of ‘activists’ whose organisations share part of the blame for encouraging migrants to come to Europe and for lobbying Europeans to regard borders and sovereignty as things of the past. Soros has now responded in a most illuminating manner, confirming that the many groups he funds are indeed working for precisely the ends Prime Minister

It now seems fairly likely that an explosion brought down the Russian passenger airline over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula over the weekend. One Metrojet official has already suggested that the ‘only explainable cause is physical impact on the aircraft’ and they have ruled out technical failure or human error. If the ongoing investigation proves that to be the case, it will obviously have an immediate and catastrophic impact on Egypt’s already decimated tourism industry. A jihadist would have been able to infiltrate one of the country’s supposedly most secure airports to plant a sizeable explosive device on a specific airline. PR disasters do not come much worse than that – and just one

So, China’s Communist Party has radically modified its one-child policy in favour of a one-or-two-child policy. For most politically minded Brits, it was a useful reminder that the policy actually existed. It has, says the Communist party with characteristic opacity, prevented about 400 million births in the decades since its introduction in 1979.  Some 330 million of those births were prevented by abortion. It may be that I somehow missed all the moral outrage over here at this flagrant violation of human rights from feminists and human rights organisations in those three decades. Or possibly there wasn’t much. Maybe there were any number of women’s groups picketing the Chinese embassy

There is a row because the new edition of the ministerial code has removed explicit mention of the duty of ministers to conform to international law. Some will feel relief that the will of our own parliament is given greater prominence, and less deference is shown to those seeking to rule the world through universal and undemocratic legal doctrines, but one cannot blame ‘human rights’ lawyers for getting hot under their gowns. What did slightly shock me, however, was a letter in the Guardian from Sir Paul Jenkins, who was, until recently, the Treasury solicitor. ‘As the government’s most senior legal official,’ he wrote, ‘I saw at first hand …the intense

For many years, Australia has been turning away boats filled with migrants. From a remove, this looks cold–hearted — a nation built by immigrants showing no compassion for others who want a better life. But it is precisely because Australia is an immigrant nation that it understands the situation: if you let the boats land, more people come. People traffickers will be encouraged, migrants will be swindled, and their bodies will wash up on your shores. Any country serious about immigration needs a more effective and robust approach. Tony Abbott, the former Prime Minister of Australia, made that point clearly this week on a trip to London. Delivering the Margaret

During the past month, news about domestic Saudi Arabian politics has been dominated by frenzied speculation over an imminent coup within the world’s most opaque and important ruling family: the House of Saud. This rumour was started by a little-known website dedicated to Middle Eastern affairs. It was then quickly picked up by the Guardian and numerous other British newspapers, and a few days ago was given new impetus when splashed by the Independent. Remarkably, there is only a single source for all of these stories of senior, disgruntled, dagger-wielding royals lurking in the vast palaces of Riyadh and Jeddah: a Saudi prince who is one of the 12 surviving

Some unjustified assumptions inform the Spanish government’s anti-Catalonian rhetoric: that it will be in power long enough to prevent Catalonia leaving Spain; that it can disallow the region’s continued or renewed membership of the EU as an independent state; or, at the very least, that it can ban a referendum on the matter. On 20 December, Spaniards head to the polls in a general election that will see the country’s two main parties – the governing, conservative Popular Party and the socialist PSOE – challenged, for the first time in the country’s democratic history, by newcomers such as leftist Podemos (‘We Can’) and centre-right Ciudadanos (‘Citizens’). The makeup of the next Spanish government is at present an

Over the weekend an Israeli-Arab flew from his home in the Jewish state on a paraglider, evading Israel’s formidable air defences to land smack bang in the middle of the Golan Heights. Despite a search by the IDF so intense it provoked a flurry of tweets stating that an Israeli invasion of Syria was underway, he disappeared. No doubt he was hidden by one or other of the assorted jihadist groups based there, predominant among whom is the Al-Qaeda offshoot Al-Nusra Front. They long since booted out the UN peace-keeping mission in the No-Man’s Land part of the territory and, to the delight of binocular-wielding day-trippers, have for the past

One of the clever things that politicians try to do is to redefine words and concepts that everyone thought they knew the meaning of. Take today’s ‘press conference’ that David Cameron and Chinese President Xi held in Downing Street. That ‘press conference’ consisted of statements followed by two questions, though dozens of journalists had turned up. Fortunately, the question from the British media came from the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, who asked the Prime Minister how he thought a British steel worker would feel that the Chinese president was being ‘ferried down Whitehall in a golden carriage’ and whether there is ‘any price that’s worth paying in order to further our

Although President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Britain is supposed to herald the beginning of a golden era of partnership between China and the United Kingdom, the visit has already been marred in controversy with many questioning why the government is teaming up with a country with a history of human rights abuses. Still, readers of today’s broadsheets could be forgiven for believing that we are already in the full grip of China-mania. Today’s Financial Times has six full-page adverts from Chinese companies welcoming the Chinese president.   Meanwhile, in both today’s Times and Telegraph there is a full-page advert — half written in Chinese — offering ‘a warm welcome to President Xi Jinping of China on his

How worried should we be about China’s involvement in building the Hinkley Point nuclear power station? Even if concerns were raised at the National Security Council about the Chinese involvement, Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, doesn’t appear too concerned. At Defence Questions this afternoon, the shadow defence secretary Maria Eagle said it was ‘frankly astounding’ that the government is allowing China to back the Hinkley Point project — given the ongoing threat from cyberattacks. Fallon told Eagle there was no need to worry because China is only providing money for a French-led project: ‘I hope the honourable lady will join with me in welcoming the president of China on his visit to this

With the ardent zeal characteristic of the freshly converted, I found myself channelling waves of anger towards Stanley Kubrick. The closing bars of Also sprach Zarathustra had utterly turned my head, transforming what had been my passing interest in the music of Richard Strauss into an infectious bout of Strauss monomania. Kubrick’s exquisitely consummated marriage of music and image, however, dared to hoodwink our collective consciousness into believing that Strauss’s 1896 Nietzsche-inspired tone-poem is actually sci-fi space music – more Star Wars than Übermensch – a reality that felt unmerited and unjust. The opening sequence of Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey used the trumpet and timpani fanfares that launch

Later this year, or more probably in the spring of 2016, the following scene may play out on the steps of the High Court in London. An editor will appear before the cameras and say: ‘I am instructing my reporters stop investigative journalism until the law is changed.’ The naïve who have failed to educate themselves on the assault on press freedom in Britain will be more confused than outraged. How can this be, they will ask. They will be enlightened by the editor of – well, let’s say it’s my editor here at The Spectator, but it could just as easily be the editor of the Guardian, Observer, Private Eye