Society

Thursday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

How could carcinogenic drugs have got into the food chain? Ask Defra

Shadow Defra minister Mary Creagh told MPs today about her fears that a carcinogenic drug commonly used as an anti-inflammatory in horses could have entered the human food chain. Speaking in the Commons, she said: ‘I am in receipt of evidence showing that several horses slaughtered in UK abattoirs last year tested positive for phenylbutazone, or bute, a drug which causes cancer in humans and is banned from the human food chain. It is possible that those animals entered the human food chain.’ As I wrote on Coffee House on Tuesday, it was Defra’s decision last autumn to abolish the National Equine Database which has got us into this mess. Previously, the

Shiraz Maher

Jordan risks unrest with subsidy cuts

Keep an eye on Jordan next week where King Abdullah is set to announce further subsidy cuts to water and electricity to ease the country’s economic crisis. The last time he was forced to cut subsidies was in November, prompting widespread protests across the country. It is likely similar unrest will follow if he now announces cuts on water and electricity subsidies. For the region’s monarchies, this is particularly unsettling. So far they’ve managed to avoid much of the turbulence that swept away regimes in North Africa. If unrest against Abdullah intensifies, don’t expect the Gulf’s monarchs to be shielded from popular protest for much longer.

Steerpike Steerpike

Shardenfreude: More news from the Shard

Since revealing that the Shard’s ‘loos with a view’ give punters more than they bargained for, I’ve been inundated with even saucier tales emanating from western Europe’s tallest building. I hear that a new exclusive club has been formed at the top of the 1,016ft glass spire: the almost mile high club. Staff became aware that the tower had been ‘christened’ when an errant pair of skimpy knickers were found in the gents…

Chris Miller

Playing tag

The frustrating thing about tagging, or electronic monitoring (EM) is that it could so easily be effective — if only we did it properly. As a former police officer, I can vouch that Theodore Dalrymple is right when he says that it’s a relatively small number of prolific offenders who commit the majority of recorded crime. So if we used the right technology — if these criminals knew that any repeat offence would be almost certain to result in detection and punishment — then reoffending rates would fall. But although there’s a lot of potential in EM, I’m afraid the potential has been unrealised in this country. Ever since 1989, when

Theodore Dalrymple

The rehabilitation game

‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,’ said the Soviet worker in the good old days; the British criminal could nowadays say with equal reason, ‘They pretend to punish us and we pretend to reform.’ Recent statistics show that two thirds of young criminals ordered to wear electronic tags break their court orders almost with impunity. Nothing could better reveal the hall of mirrors that the British criminal justice system long ago became than the response of Keith Vaz, the chairman of the House of Commons all-party Home Affairs Committee, to very similar news last year. ‘The public,’ he said, ‘must be convinced that community sentences are

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The football manager as management guru

The football writers laid on a tribute do for Steven Gerrard the other night, not as you might suppose at Nando’s — but at the Savoy and very jolly it was too. As someone said, it’s about the only honour he’s likely to get now, what with playing just for Liverpool and England and all that. Anyway, there were jolly speeches from Gérard Houllier, Gary McAllister and especially Jamie Carragher, who may be tricky to understand but is clearly going to be a considerable force in English football when he locks away his shinpads. Gerrard didn’t make a speech, but did a perfectly inoffensive Q&A with Henry Winter. Hell will

Emma Hughes

Celebrity flatmate

A few years ago, I answered an advertisement on a flat-sharing website and ended up living with a fledgling pop star — I’ll call him Sam. He was not long out of adolescence, and was gnawed at by his need for recognition. For years, he and his bandmates had been plastering the internet with tracks, hoping to attract attention, but without much luck. When I moved in, I was dimly aware that my new flatmate sang, but I didn’t own a TV, so what little coverage they’d received had passed me by. I imagined them performing in dismal, carpeted pubs on the North Circular and getting the bus home. Then, one

Lucy Vickery

Return to sender

In Competition No. 2781 you were invited to devise a riposte to a nauseating Christmas round-robin letter that would deter the author from ever sending another. My favourite of Lynne Truss’s half-dozen responses to persistent round-robiners, broadcast on Radio 4, was take six: ‘I’ve decided, finally, to try a more direct approach. Here it comes. PLEASE STOP SENDING ME THESE NEWSLETTERS.’ But perhaps the whole exercise is ill judged. After all, these compendiums of boasts, bad jokes, inappropriate intimacies and inconsequential information contribute enormously to festive cheer, providing much merriment at their authors’ expense. We may mock, but how we would miss them. This week’s extra fiver goes to Adrian

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Israel Notebook

Friday night in Jaffa, and it’s a party. Jaffa, to the south of Tel Aviv, is where the cool kids hang, apparently — think Dalston or the meatpacking district, and add radical chic. An Israeli-Russian dude in big ironic spectacles tells me that, not far from here, they filmed scenes for the second season of Homeland. ‘So you can see how edgy it is,’ he says. He’s being sarcastic. We’re in a nice big two-floor apartment. The crowd is a mix of British foreign correspondents grumbling about their salaries, good-looking Israelis, and anguished Yanks competing to be more pro-Palestinian than each other. (‘Off the record — OK? — but Israel

Aidan Hartley

Will I survive my mid-life marathon?

Rift Valley ‘I’ve got a brilliant idea,’ said Jools on the phone, his voice characteristically rising like a commentator on the Grand National as Red Rum comes in for the finish. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘We buy land in Kenya — and then sell it.’ ‘Genius,’ I said. Exclaimed Jools, ‘I know! And I’ll give you ten per cent!’ I have been telling Jools to buy land in Kenya for ages. Property prices are rising faster here than anywhere else in the world. I know a great deal about buying houses in these parts. It seemed natural that he would want me to advise him on such a business even

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Greek tax-dodgers, Irish horse dealers and Chinese art cheats: please skip this column

It’s only fair to warn you — especially if you’re Greek, Irish or Chinese — that this week’s column contains negative stereotyping. I’ll leave the transsexuals to Rod Liddle, but I’m still bracing for the  Twitter storm. My propensity to commit this category of thought crime was first pointed out to me by Giorgos Papaconstantinou, the socialist former finance minister of Greece. A graduate of the LSE, George to his friends, he was his country’s most fluent spokesman during earlier stages of its financial crisis — and last May I came up against him in a debate about the pros and cons of ‘austerity’. I argued that the word itself

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

How Graham Greene spoilt my tropical rapture

On the patio of my hotel in Havana… No, begin again. It isn’t really a hotel, it’s a Casa Particular — someone’s home. Delia’s home: a modest ground-floor apartment in an externally shabby old stone tenement on a neglected side street near the waterfront of Old Havana. Casas Particulares are a tropical adaptation of the B&B: a result of the partial liberalisation of the island’s economy, allowing ordinary Cuban families with a spare room to take a paying tourist or two into their homes. You enter Casa Delia by way of the massive, shabby wooden door that’s the common entrance to the block, but once you’re through her internal steel-gated front

Wednesday

Philip Booth

Why meddling with A-levels won’t work

Conservatives will, no doubt, welcome the government’s announcement about A-levels today. Modules will be abolished. We will return to one tough exam at the end of the two years of study. Life will go back to the golden era of the 1970s when the top people got As and Bs and everybody else got a random selection of C-F because they struggled to understand the questions. It is true that the old system had some merits. It was especially good for selecting the brilliant from the very good. However, in its latter days, for the vast majority of people taking A-levels, the system did not work. The current modular system

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

If Barack Obama is an isolationist then isolationism no longer has any meaning – Spectator Blogs

Con Coughlin suggests Barack Obama has “given up” fighting al-Qaeda which, frankly, is a curious assessment given the ongoing drone war (and other operations) in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Roger Kimball, however, makes Coughlin look like a piker since, according to Kimball, Obama’s inauguration speech yesterday contained shades of Neville Chamberlain. Yes, really. These may be extreme reactions but there is evidently a widespread sense that Obama is some form of “neo-isolationist” hellbent on retreating from a big, bad and dangerous world so he may instead concentrate upon our old chum “nation-building at home”. If by this you mean Obama is unlikely, as matters presently stand, to send 250,000 American troops

Stephen Twigg

Schools can teach good character and the 3 Rs

Education debates are riddled with false choices, as Michael Barber notes in his recently published essay Oceans of Innovation. It’s academic or vocational; it’s best practice or innovation; it’s the three Rs or character development. These are the choices, we are told, that must be made. It plays well for those in pursuit of the politics of dividing lines but it is detrimental in policy terms. I want to see rigorous academic and vocational routes for young people in 14- 19 education. That is why Labour will bring forward a Technical Baccalaureate, with a strong focus on technical education and with Maths and English to 18 for all. If we

Steerpike Steerpike

Shard toilets: trouble on high

Terrible news reaches me from the top of the Shard. The viewing platforms at the top of the 1,016ft glass wonder, which is the tallest building in western Europe, are set to open to the public in the coming weeks; but preview guests and party goers have reported a rather shaming interior design flaw. My mole says that complaints have been submitted about the reflective glass in the loos, which is causing havoc, discomfort and embarassment to users. It seems that the trendy designers did not appreciate that the reflections bounce off the ceiling and walls, and into and out of the cubicles. How very, very modern. The Shard team has, as of yet,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Talk of a leadership challenge to David Cameron is reckless self-indulgence – Spectator Blogs

For reasons I do not wholly understand, Labour partisans appear reasonably pleased with Ed Miliband. Liberal Democrats may not be especially gruntled with Nicholas Clegg but they do appear to appreciate that there’s little point in changing leader now. Which brings us to the Conservative party. And there we discover madness aplenty. Again. For it seems as though more than 50 Tory MPs are sufficiently dissatisfied with David Cameron’s leadership that they think a change of leader something worth considering before the next election. This, for all the reasons Robert Colvile suggests and many more he doesn’t, would be folly. Madness. Lunacy. Proof that the party is unfit for office.

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Horse meat in burgers might not be as harmless as you think

This week’s discovery that some burgers sold in UK supermarkets contain up to 29 per cent horse meat was met with a combination of concerns about the labelling and sourcing of food, and jokes about the burgers’ ‘Shergar content’. But the fact that people are inadvertently eating horse meat isn’t the only worrying part of the finding; an additional concern is the provenance of the meat. In many equine-consuming countries, horses are bred specifically for their meat, in the same way that livestock are in the UK. If you go to Auchan in Calais and pick up a horse steak from the ‘boucherie’ section, then your meat should be perfectly

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

In 2013, Obama sees peace. Cameron sees war.

Barack Obama has just delivered an upbeat inauguration address, proclaiming that a “a decade of war is ending”. Just a few moments earlier David Cameron gave MPs a blood-sweat-toil-and-tears speech, preparing us all for a “generational” struggle against African jihadis. So what’s up? Freddy Gray spells it out in a brilliant and timely analysis: Britain and America’s global interest are diverging. Obama is now, in effect, a Pacific president rather than an Atlantic president (as almost all of his others have been). Hawaii-born, Indonesia-schooled, he has always grown up seeing the world in a slightly different way. And he just doesn’t see these African tribes as so big a deal, certainly

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Barack Obama’s inauguration speech makes the case for Bigger Government – Spectator Blogs

I never quite know what to think about the whole Presidential inauguration thing. One the one hand there is always something stirring about being reminded of the sheer scale of the American experiment and something ennobling, even in tawdry times, about any refresher course in its greater hopes or expectations. On the other, well, there’s the sheer scale of the pomp and flummery that makes one nostalgic for the theme park simplicity of monarchy. The Cult of the Presidency needs no encouragement of the type it enjoyed today. And so to Barack Obama’s speech. The best thing about it was that it was short. Alas, much of the rest of