Society

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Meet Vladimir Putin’s real challengers (they’re even worse than he is)

Strange times throw up strange heroes — and in Russia’s proxy war with Ukraine, none is more enigmatic than the Donetsk rebel leader Igor Girkin, better known by his nom de guerre of Igor Strelkov. In a few short months, Strelkov has gone from being an obscure military re-enactor to the highest-profile rebel leader in eastern Ukraine. But at the same time Strelkov’s fame and outspoken criticism of Vladimir Putin for failing to sufficiently support the rebels has earned him the enmity of the Kremlin. Moreover, Strelkov’s brand of sentimental ultra-nationalism, extreme Orthodoxy and Russian Imperial nostalgia offer a frightening glimpse into one of Russia’s possible futures. In the West,

The Spectator

From the archives | 28 August 2014

From ‘Left behind’, The Spectator, 29 August 1914: In the poorer streets a kind of holiday atmosphere prevails, and a sort of excitement which is in a measure pleasurable fills the air… All the children are intensely excited. Many fathers have ‘gone to the war’, but not quite so many as are said to have gone by little boys and girls who cannot bear to be behind their friends and neighbours in importance. It is a tremendous step up in the world to have relations ‘at the front’, and ‘the front’ has a very wide meaning to children. Indeed, it seems to include the whole of England, except London.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why don’t more non-smokers try e-cigarettes?

I was waiting on an office forecourt recently puffing on an e-cigarette when a security guard came out. ‘You can’t smoke here,’ he shouted. ‘I’m not, actually,’ I replied. He went to consult his superior. A few minutes later he reappeared. ‘You can’t use e-cigarettes here either.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you are projecting the image of smoking.’ ‘What, insouciance?’ ‘Go away.’ I did. This phrase ‘projecting the image of smoking’ — along with ‘renormalisation’, ‘gateway effect’ and the usual ‘think of the children’ — appears frequently in arguments for restricting the use of e-cigs in public places. While new evidence may yet emerge to support restrictions, these reasons don’t convince

Radek Sikorski

Radek Sikorski’s notebook: Goose-steppers in Oxford, and a drone in my garden

As the BA flight from Warsaw landed at Heathrow, I felt a little tremor of anxiety, though it wasn’t anything to do with fear of flying. I was here for the Pembroke College gaudy. I had never attended a reunion before, and I had doubts about it. What if the people I really liked didn’t show up? What if I didn’t remember somebody’s name, while they remembered me? Above all, did I really want to see a bunch of old people claiming to be my contemporaries? It turned out to be a delight. It was lovely to be woken again by the sound of the bell from Tom Tower, which

Jane Kelly

The nun who took down an Isis flag – and stands up for east London’s Muslims

Not so long ago disaffected youngsters would take to a life of crime and hard drugs, a trajectory which would often kill them. These days, some young men from our Muslim community sign up instead to the so-called Islamic State, and the dream of a distant Caliphate. Why? Well, forget theology or even the prestige which comes from being a warrior — if Sister Christine Frost is right, it all comes down to housing. Sister Christine has worked on the Will Crooks Estate in Poplar, east London, for over 40 years. She accidentally got into the news in early August when she removed the black flag of radical Islam which

Michael Lind

The wars that really are about the oil

Is international conflict really just a fight over oil? It sometimes seems that way. In Syria and Iraq, the militants of the so-called ‘Islamic State’ sell captured oil while battling to establish a puritanical Sunni theo-cracy. From Central Asia to Ukraine, Russia is contesting attempts (backed by the US) to minimise Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and natural gas. Meanwhile, Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ allows the US to threaten the choke points through which most of China’s oil imports must pass. Conspiracy-mongering petrodeterminists who try to reduce world politics to nothing but a clash for oil are too crude (pun intended). No shadowy cabal of oil company executives pulls the

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Frankie Boyle is a cowardly bully, and I’m ashamed I ever stood up for him

‘Outspoken comic Frankie Boyle has called on the BBC to sack “cultural tumour” Jeremy Clarkson.’ Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this opening sentence from a recent news report? Clue: it’s that first word. In order to qualify as ‘outspoken’, surely, you need to be the kind of person who fearlessly, frequently and vociferously sets himself in opposition to the clamour of the times. Does demanding that a public figure lose his job for some mildly sexist/racist/homophobic/ableist remark fit into that category? Hardly. In the current climate it’s about as heroically contentious as, say, a private school prospectus that promises ‘We believe in educating the whole person’; or a

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The wonderful and unpredictable Candida Lycett Green

With Candida, you learned to expect the unexpected. She said she might make the charity sale at my house on Thursday, but not to rely on her. I didn’t. But on Friday, a bright red pick-up truck turned into the yard and out got Candida with a bagful of contributions. But she also brought a birthday present of a beautiful Alice Temperley skirt for my younger daughter. The red pick-up was a present for Candida’s own birthday, thrilling her as much as any red bike for a six-year-old. ‘I’m an old hippy,’ she once said. Perhaps. She was certainly a child of the Sixties, when half the aristocracy’s offspring were

Lucy Vickery

Dark thoughts | 28 August 2014

In Competition No. 2862 you were invited to submit a poetic preview of when the lights go out. Submissions were impressively varied this week, and kept me thoroughly entertained. Honourable mentions go to Katie Mallett, who had Betjeman in mind (‘Fetch out the candles, Norman…’), and to Sylvia Fairley, who was in double-dactylic mood: ‘Jittery-tickery/ Grid electricity/ won’t last for ever, you’d/ better beware…’ The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each. Alan Millard takes £30.   And will the lights fade one by one, Fade one by one, As each man’s dwindling day is done And dark descends, A world where every waning light Brings others, waxing, into

Mark Mason

Switching on to a new generation gap

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_28_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Mark Mason and Alex Owen discuss the cultural generation gap” startat=1603] Listen [/audioplayer]I was recently talking to an intelligent 24-year-old Cambridge graduate. The conversation turned to TV comedy, and I mentioned Vic Reeves. The graduate had never heard of him. Nor had she heard of Bob Mortimer. This would have surprised me, but it’s happening a lot. Not Vic’n’Bob specifically — anyone who was on TV more than five minutes ago. We now have the first generation to be culturally cut off from its elders. Over the past couple of years I have met twenty-somethings who have never heard of The Two Ronnies, of Only Fools and Horses,

Wednesday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Why are there so few female jockeys?

In this week’s ‘The Turf’ column, Robin Oakley bemoans the lack of female jockeys in horse racing. This, he claims, is a result of the sport’s lack of opportunities for women: ‘I have banged on for years about the lack of opportunities for women jockeys in Britain. Some horses go even better for a girl and the good women jockeys like Hayley [Turner] … are as good as the boys. The problem is that few get the chance to become that good because they are denied enough rides by owners and trainers. You have to go 67 places down the championship list to find Hayley as the leading woman rider.

Douglas Murray

Modern Britain’s apathetic, inadequate response to child sexual abuse

The customs developing around how modern British officialdom reacts to the gang-rape of children is very interesting. I’ve just watched an interview (above) with Shaun Wright, the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for South Yorkshire, a man who has to struggle along on a tax-payer funded salary of £85,000. The interview was in reaction to the revelation that Mr Wright was PCC during much of the period in which at least 1400 children in his area were raped and gang-raped by groups of men.  I’m not quite sure what we’re currently allowed to say by way of identifying these men.  We might once have said that they were ‘diverse’ or ‘vibrant’.  Except that nearly

The Spectator

Rotherham’s child abuse was ignored in order to protect careers and retirements

This is an extract from this week’s Spectator, available tomorrow. Subscribe from just £12 for 12 issues here.  If Rotherham council were a family, its children would have been removed by social services long ago, and Ma and Pa Rotherham would be safely behind bars. Professor Alexis Jay’s report, which was published this week, reveals depravity on an industrial scale in the South Yorkshire town. At least 1,400 children, Prof. Jay estimates, were subjected to sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013. Many were raped multiple times by members of gangs whose activities either were or should have been known about. Children were trafficked around the country to be abused. Those who

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

To understand the causes of child abuse we need to look at its perpetrators’ backgrounds

Day two of the Rotherham scandal—or rather the fallout from the latest report on it—and there’s a marked, obvious change in the coverage of it from the last time the subject surfaced. It may be the sheer scale of the thing —1,400 girls, and counting—and the horror of the cruelties perpetrated on the victims, but I don’t think that anyone is now trying to evade the reality of the thing: that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly men of Pakistani Muslim background and the victims white. But that, I think, is squarely down Alexis Jay’s report, which made the point not only that the rapists and abusers were from one ethnic and religious group and the

Colin Brewer

The real scandal of Rotherham is that social work doesn’t work

This is an extract from this week’s Spectator. To subscribe, click here. In 1980, June Lait and I published Can Social Work Survive?, the first critique of British social work aimed at the general public. She was a lecturer in social policy and a former social worker; I was a psychiatrist who had regular and friendly contact with social workers. But we both felt that social work had become vague and grandiose, and we compiled quite a lot of evidence to make our case. We even reported studies showing that well-intended social work interventions could be not just unhelpful but harmful. Our work was published in The Spectator, and it

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Rotherham: Fear of all the wrong things failed 1,400 children

‘By 2005 few members or senior officers could say “we didn’t know”.’ It was ‘extraordinary’ that no-one on the lead Labour group on the council could remember discussing these matters. ‘The scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers’. ‘The police gave no priority to child sexual exploitation, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime’. In Rotherham, no-one seemed to care. And when they did care, it was more about what others would think of them than about children as young as 11 being raped. Professor Alexis Jay’s report says ‘several staff’ at Rotherham Council ‘described their nervousness

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: The work of a Sheriff in wartime

The Spectator, 29 August 1914. A SHERIFF may be compared to the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, which faded away till nothing but its smile remained. The ancient office has gradually faded away till nothing but the ceremonial smile remains, a smile only now useful for the entertainment of Judges at the Assizes or for a public meeting. In war time, however, even Sheriffs may find work to do. As High Sheriff for the county of —, I felt that the most appropriate work for one whose historic duty it is to call upon his county to attend him to repel the King’s enemies was to do everything he

Tuesday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why the World Health Organisation’s fears about e-cigarettes are based on prejudice, not science

This is an extract from this week’s Spectator, available from Thursday. To subscribe, click here. I was waiting on an office forecourt recently puffing on an e-cigarette when a security guard came out. ‘You can’t smoke here,’ he shouted. ‘I’m not, actually,’ I replied. He went to consult his superior. A few minutes later he reappeared. ‘You can’t use e-cigarettes here either.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you are projecting the image of smoking.’ ‘What, insouciance?’ ‘Go away.’ I did. This phrase ‘projecting the image of smoking’ — along with ‘renormalisation’, ‘gateway effect’ and the usual ‘think of the children’ — appears frequently in arguments for restricting the use of e-cigs in

Ed West Ed West

‘I didn’t want to appear racist’ is the ‘I was only obeying orders’ of our age

Up to 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham. Children as young as 11 were trafficked, beaten, and raped by large numbers of men between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, a review into child protection has revealed. How could this have happened? A clue is given by the report’s authors, who state that ‘several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist’. ‘I didn’t want to appear racist’ is truly the ‘I was only obeying orders’ of our time. Racism has become so hysterical a subject that it has crowded out all other moral concerns, including in this case the

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Leader of Rotherham Council resigns over child abuse scandal

The leader of Rotherham Council has resigned following the results of a report which found that at least 1,400 children were victims of ‘appalling’ sexual exploitation in the town during a sixteen year period. The report details the ‘blatant’ collective failures during most of Roger Stone’s leadership. Professor Alexis Jay, a former senior social worker who wrote the latest report, described how children had been ‘set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone’. The report suggests that Rotherman Council and the police knew about the level of exploitation but did not act. Jay suggested senior managers had ‘underplayed’