Society Archives

Thursday

17 Oct 2013

Aidan Hartley: How Muslim militants and Western jihadis wrecked enchanting Somalia

Wizards inland from the little Somali port of Barawe bewitched a person to come to them by banging a nail into a tree and chanting his name. ‘He comes no matter how far away he may be,’ wrote Gerald Hanley in Warriors, his unrivalled classic about Somalia — for him a place of ‘swirling sandstorms, heat and billions and billions of flies’. But I need no nail in a tree to return to Barawe, which to me is a paradise I once aimed to make my home. I first saw Barawe from the high, red dunes of the hinterland. It glittered white against the azure Indian Ocean: beautiful houses and

Matt Ridley

Why climate change is good for the world

Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don’t know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth. At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised

Lucy Vickery

Buttoned up or open neck?

In Competition 2819 you were invited to write a poem either in free verse mocking rhymed, metrical verse or in conventional verse mocking free verse. Auden was no fan of vers libre: ‘If one plays a game, one needs rules, otherwise there is no fun.’ (D.H. Lawrence, he felt, was one of the few poets who could pull free verse off.) But there are those who question the designation ‘free’. The poet and critic Yvor Winters maintained that ‘the free verse that is really verse, the best, that is, of …Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound is the antithesis of free.’ And T.S. Eliot agreed with him. Last

Martin Vander Weyer

Notes on … Skiing in Switzerland

There’s a myth in the Spectator office, which I’ve never discouraged, that I’m Yorkshire’s answer to Franz Klammer — a veteran ski ace who likes nothing better than to have himself helicoptered to remote peaks in search of deep, virgin powder. But myth it is, I’m afraid: your business columnist is fat, 58 and was never fast on skis or any other form of self-propulsion, even in his youth. So you might think I’m the wrong man to be telling you about my favourite Swiss winter-sports station, which is the picture-book village of Wengen in the Bernese Oberland. This, after all, is the place where ski-racing was invented by British

Roger Alton

Adnan Januzaj should not pull on the Three Lions

The more you see of Jack Wilshere, the more admirable he becomes. He seems to have taken wholeheartedly to fatherhood, a path he embarked on when he was barely out of short trousers. And then there’s the agreeably relaxed way he was toking on a Marlboro Light outside a London nightclub the other day. It bought a nuclear storm on the poor lad’s head, of course — quite why is beyond me. There’s no suggestion he’s a chain-smoker, unlike the great Brazilian Socrates, who did about 40 a day and won the World Cup. He, of course, was a doctor. Young Jack did the smoking community no favours by initially

Douglas Murray

Tommy Robinson: Double standards, not fear of diversity, provoked the EDL

The first time I met Tommy Robinson I told him to fuck off. The English Defence League (EDL) had just formed and Robinson came up to me after a public interview I was doing in London. Without knowing anything much about them, I am afraid I assumed (white, working-class, Cross of St George at demos) that the EDL were a British National Party front. Which was why I ended up advising him of the procreative way in which to travel. He took it very politely, said he understood that I didn’t know their views and then said, ‘We’re not racists — we’re just working-class guys who are losing our country

Brendan O’Neill

The latest anti-Semitic cry: ban circumcision

There are lots of weird campaign groups around today, but none so weird as a band of unmerry men called ‘the intactivists’. If you’ve never heard of the intactivists and you’re a bit squeamish, or you are reading this while lunching on a sausage roll, then you might want to turn the page now. Intactivists are men who were circumcised at birth and who, as their name suggests, long to become ‘intact’ again. In a nutshell, they want to recover their foreskins. And they’ll do almost anything to achieve this, including undergoing skin grafts and even attaching weights to the little bits of foreskin that their possibly careless circumciser might

Leah McLaren

Alice Munro won’t let her Nobel go to her head — that’s why she’s a true Canadian writer

Canadians, like the English, are known for our tendency to apologise. The difference is, we actually mean it. Our modesty is not false. Our inferiority complex is not a polite, self-deprecating joke. We really do feel inferior. And we really are sorry. Sorry for taking up so much space for so few people. Sorry for being so dull and functional compared with our glitzy neighbour to the south. Sorry about Celine Dion. And above all, sorry for failing to produce much of anything great apart from Niagara Falls and the Rockies, which we can’t take credit for anyway. So when Alice Munro, our most quietly adored author, was awarded the

Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer: Cut it out, America. This is not Hollywood

Some say it’s natural optimism that makes the Americans so different from the British, and some say it’s a lack of cynicism. Either way, our cousins over there have long had difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction, and are forever finding ways to make their public life look like the action movie that always ends well for the hero, or the TV series in which some of the good guys turn out to be bad but the really good guy lives to fight another season. The ultimate expression of this national naivety — for that’s surely what it is — occurred on 1 May 2003 when President George W. Bush, apparently

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: If we don’t stigmatise fat people, there’ll be lots more of them

Trying to get good, healthy, nutritious food down the ungrateful throats of the lower orders, especially northerners, has become a serious national problem. At the moment these awful people eat nothing but fat coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried in engine oil, and so as a consequence they are gargantuan, slobbering masses of compacted lard, so vast that there would be room, if they so wished, for Hogarth to do their tattoos. Have you ever wandered about in the centre of Sheffield or Rotherham? It’s like being transported to a film set where Quentin Tarantino is shooting a version of Gulliver’s Travels with belching and farting, shellsuit-clad Brobdingnagians waddling and wheezing

Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris: Atheists deserve better opposition

I wish I were a religious conservative: the field’s wide open. It must be dispiriting for believers to encounter so little intelligent support for belief. It’s certainly infuriating for us non-believers, because there’s hardly anyone left who seems capable of giving us a good argument. In search of a stimulating conversation about religion, we are reduced to arguing with ourselves. Which, still seething at a Spectator article purporting to be a serious examination of the case for miracles, I shall now do. I cannot argue with Piers Paul Read because he never produces an argument to answer. The magazine tagged his piece ‘I believe in miracles’, which was accurate because

Wednesday

16 Oct 2013

Fraser Nelson

Why does the Guardian only get worked up about the press’s freedom to leak?

Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, has been busy tweeting comments from Jill Abramson, the new executive editor of the New York Times, basically in support of his newspaper’s Snowden disclosures. For some reason, he does not seem as interested in her comments about press freedom given on Newsnight last night. Perhaps this is became New York Times has given the reaction that the Guardian should have: that any involvement of politicians in the regulation of the press is appalling and should be rejected. As Abramson put i:- ‘I think that the press in Britain has more restrictions on it than we do. The framers of our country, in the

Isabel Hardman

Food bank use is up again: how can ministers respond?

Today’s figures from the Trussell Trust on food bank use were good fodder for Labour at PMQs. But the message from the charity, which I profiled for the Spectator a few months ago, is that there needs to be a proper parliamentary inquiry into food poverty, which sounds eminently more sensible than people shouting at each other about complacency. Chief executive Chris Mould said this morning: ‘We said in April that the increasing numbers of people turning to foodbanks should be a wake-up call to the nation, but there has been no policy response and the situation is getting worse. The level of food poverty in the UK is not

John Redwood

It’s time England asserted its modern national identity

Taking tea at four, strawberries and cream, Wimbledon on a hot summer’s day, Christmas carols round the tree, street parties for a Queen’s Jubilee: the images of England are often nostalgic and middle class. To some, England, our England, is summed up in the poems of Rupert Brooke, and turned into childhood mystery in the sympathetic portrait of the Shire in The Hobbit. England is The Wind in the Willows, kindness to animals, appreciation of nature’s rich and gentle abundance in a rain swept temperature island. It is Alice in Wonderland, tales that recognise children are on their own important journey in their own right. We are seafarers and stay at

Ed West

Intelligence is just another privilege you inherited from mummy and daddy

I’m starting to get the impression that the Guardian isn’t very keen on Michael Gove, and may not give him the benefit of the doubt in their reporting. The latest offering was this, ‘Genetics outweighs teaching, Gove adviser tells his boss’, which was presumably designed to infuriate teachers, about an essay written by Dominic Cummings. This was followed up by a Polly Toynbee piece denying the role of hereditary factors in intelligence and claiming that it was all part of some government plan to keep the poor in their place. Others have waded in, raising the spectre of eugenics, and I imagine someone is right now composing a comment piece

Isabel Hardman

The energy price freeze is becoming the new 50p tax

David Cameron clearly didn’t think he’d had a good PMQs by the time he’d finished with Ed Miliband. There was something irritable and tired about the Prime Minister as he took questions from backbenchers, and that weariness was compounded by the sight of Dennis Skinner limbering to his feet to deliver a long, angry and moving question about the work capability assessment. Dennis Skinner is the last thing you want floating to the top when your PMQs performance has been below par. And it was below par. I understand that Cameron was given a very detailed briefing indeed today on energy prices because it was highly likely that Ed Miliband

Tuesday

15 Oct 2013

Isabel Hardman

New Number 10 policy board announced

After last week’s reshuffle and the gap left by Jesse Norman’s departure from the policy board, Number 10 has announced a number of promotions which increase the board’s size – and its brainpower. Alun Cairns, Andrea Leadsom, Priti Patel, Chris Skidmore and Nadhim Zahawi have all been promoted, which is interesting as all of them bar Skidmore are rebels to a greater or lesser extent. So it’s a sign that the Tory leadership wants to forget past troubles and use all the best brains to forge 2015 policy. But it’s also useful to have independently-minded MPs joining the group anyway, as the last thing the board tasked with developing flagship

Steerpike

Help! | 15 October 2013

When did Sir Paul McCartney become so shifty? The ‘National Treasure’ has been on Sky News promoting his latest album. There were more than a few awkward, if not downright embarrassing, moments. Take when he was talking about young talent today. ‘I think these bands are great. I like One Direction,’ the former Beatle said. ‘They’re young beautiful boys and that’s the big attraction, but they can sing and they make good records.’ Leaning in, he added: ‘so that’s what I would see in common [with the Beatles], you know, that girls love them and you can fantasise that you’re going to marry them…or whatever.’ Macca’s trademark cheeky look worked when he was a

Carola Binney

Cheated by freshers’ week

My freshers’ pack (a yo-yo, two balloons, a sachet of instant hot chocolate and a condom) is barely visible beneath English Historical Documents, volume 1. Two nights of dancing knee-deep in foam has taken its toll on my shoes, and I feel slightly tricked – encouraged to partake in a week of university-approved partying, and then, two days in, given a 19-item reading list and an essay due in for next week. School friends’ Facebook pages are torturous: three weeks into term at other universities, yet to hand in their first piece of work and seemingly out every night. At dinner the conversation has morphed from ‘So where are you from?’ to ‘You haven’t started writing yet either,

Steerpike

A trio of woes

It started with the terrible news that the first tiger cub to be born at London Zoo in seventeen years had been found drowned in a pool in the enclosure. Then it emerged that Tian Tian, the panda at Edinburgh Zoo, is no longer expecting a cub. And just when you thought that the day could not get any sadder, it has emerged that Kenneth Branagh has missed out on his dream of emulating Sir Laurence Olivier as Director of the National Theatre. Such tragedies always come in threes.