Society Archives

Wednesday

19 Sep 2012

Poisonous passions

Fifty years on since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, this is indeed an excellent time to assess its cumulative historical impact. After all, it is still cited as one of the most important environmental books of the 20th century, and seen by many as the publishing phenomenon that launched the modern environment movement. Many of today’s environmental leaders have enthusiastically acknowledged Carson’s attack on the indiscriminate use of man-made chemicals to control pests as a critical influence on their own intellectual development. All of which makes it an irresistible target for one of the most virulently anti-environmental ‘think tanks’ in the USA today — the Cato Institute, the

Roger Alton

All this – and golf too!

Right now it feels like being eight years old again, having just had the best Christmas Day ever, with the best presents ever, then wandering down on Boxing Day to find what could be an even better present lying still wrapped under the tree. We’ve had the Olympics, and the Paralympics; a Briton won the Tour de France; a Belfast boy won the PGA; and now a Scotsman has won Olympic gold at Wimbledon and then the US Open at Flushing Meadow. And meanwhile the Test cricket side was battling it out with the best team in the world for the No. 1 position. All extraordinary; taken together pretty mind-blowing.

Lucy Vickery

2081: Four of each

In Competition No. 2764 you were invited to provide an example of a Spectator columnist stepping into a fellow columnist’s shoes. It was a smallish entry by comparison with recent weeks and the standard was somewhat uneven. Deborah Ross proved a popular if elusive target. You struggled valiantly to capture her voice but no one completely pulled it off though Brian Murdoch came closest. The bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty, who played a blinder. His fellow winners take £25 each. I have recently discovered a most ingenious and useful device. Since I am reluctant to deface the old rectory where I live with aerials, ‘dishes’ and the like, my

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 19 September 2012

He was under a tiny patch of shade under a tree in one of the earth’s remotest spots. At Nadapal, the Kenya–South Sudan border, you might expect to meet the ghost of Chatwin, but not a dead ringer for Peter Sellers dying of thirst. ‘You English? Ach great,’ he croaked as he loaded his Samsonite suitcase into our Land Rover. ‘I love the English.’ ‘Scottish, actually,’ said Ken, at the wheel next to me. I stayed quiet, immediately disliking him. ‘The name’s Eddie.’ He extended a trembling hand. We could see he was very ill. He drank pints and pints of water but wouldn’t eat though he was so clearly

Olivia Glazebrook

Acid reign

You won’t believe me when I tell you this but I swear it’s the truth: until this week, I had never watched Downton Abbey(Sunday, ITV). Some old-fashioned notion about not respecting myself the morning after? A curious primness preventing me from just gritting my teeth and getting it over with? Yes to both — and yes to a touch of anti-bandwagon mulishness (which has, no doubt, kept me from so many of life’s little treats). My lack of experience might have counted against my enjoyment of Sunday night’s episode — the first of a third series — were it not for the skill of Julian Fellowes who, like the perfect

Con Coughlin

Black flags in Timbuktu

The drawback to waging a global counter-terrorism campaign is that, just when you think you have one bunch of Islamist militants on the run, another one pops up to take its place. For all the breakthroughs chalked up by those prosecuting the war against al-Qa’eda, the movement has re-emerged in new guises in Somalia and Yemen. The murderous riots in Libya last week, ostensibly triggered by a homemade American video, were being quickly traced back to what may be the latest and safest home for al-Qa’eda: northern Mali. Those who hoped the war on terror was about to end in Afghanistan have not wanted to think about Mali. But it

James Forsyth

In this together

Jeremy Browne looks more like a young subaltern preparing to go to India in 1860 than a typical Lib Dem. He stands ramrod straight, his reddish hair has an officer-class cut. He is always impeccably dressed. Whitehall gossip has it that when he was first appointed to the Foreign Office, the officials couldn’t believe that he was the Lib Dem. He is also, unlike many in his party, comfortable with being in power. ‘I don’t want Liberal Democrats to think we are having to endure these five years of government before we can breathe a sigh of relief, let our hair down and return to the relative comfort of opposition,’

Anonymous

Dumped by Dave

Divorce is something I have yet to experience personally but Dave’s reshuffle has set me up nicely for any future threat to my own nuptial bliss. Out of the blue comes the call. It’s Dave’s office. ‘We need to talk — can you come over?’ And better I come round the back way to 10 Downing St, apparently, because there’s workmen all over the place at the front. And thus the bell tolls: on reshuffle day, winners are invited through the front door to smile for the cameras. The victims are roughed up around the back. Tentatively, I turn up at Dave’s office. His flunkies, who usually don’t give you

Douglas Murray

Free speech betrayed

In Benghazi the ‘spontaneous protestors’ arrived with rocket-propelled grenades and killed the US ambassador. In Kabul the crowds chanted ‘Death to America’. American flags were torched from London to Sydney. But in Washington the Obama administration showed that they weren’t taking any of this personally. It wasn’t about them, but about an excerpt from an amateur film on Youtube called Innocence of Muslims. As they say, keep telling yourself that. If there is one thing people ought to have learnt from a decade of groundhog jihad, it is that there is always a film, novel or cartoon — always an excuse to riot and loot and burn. The odd thing

Molly Guinness

Applying myself

The harvest is in, the smell of dried leaves is in the air, Parliament’s back in session, and pretty soon the 17-year-olds will start ringing: the university admissions deadline is approaching and someone will need to write their personal statements for them. Everyone who wants to go to university is required to fill in a Ucas form. It’s an administrative task until you get to the dreaded personal statement section, and then you have to call for back-up. The Ucas website encourages students to commit their personality to paper. In no more than 4,000 characters, they should outline key skills and hobbies and explain what’s drawn them to their chosen

Martin Vander Weyer

Reasons to think positive about throwing in our lot with Europe’s aerospace champion

When BAE Systems sold its one-fifth stake in the European Airbus project to EADS in 2006, declaring its intention to focus instead on defence sales in the US, I predicted that ‘the best bits of BAE’ would end up under American ownership while the rest would ‘go the way of the Comet’, the 1950s British airliner that was knocked out of the competitive skies by the Boeing 707. Since then, BAE has worked assiduously to reinforce its position as one of the few foreign-owned suppliers to the Pentagon: it has 40,000 employees over there under a feisty female American boss, generates 40 per cent of revenues from US sales, and

James Delingpole

How a fountain pen and a chiropractor restored my lost youth

God, it’s a bore getting older: all those things you used to be able to do but can’t any more and will never be able to do again. Grow hair, for example (except in all the wrong places); recover quickly from hangovers; vault fences; climb high up trees without getting vertigo; be looked at with anything more than indifference or disgust by attractive young females; and so on. But it’s not all bad. Sometimes you can buck the trend. A few months ago, my friend David Hearsey — who flew Halifax bombers in the war — emailed to tell me that he’d recently taken up flying again. How amazingly impressive

Andrew Watts

The new Establishment

The Establishment Club reopens in Soho this week, and it is easy to see why. Peter Cook started the original club in 1961, when there was an unpopular Conservative government, led by a cabal of Old Etonians, presiding over a recession; and the Establishment Club’s Soho premises were at the centre of the satire boom that mocked the Tories and led to their losing the 1964 election. Aside from the satire on the stage, Private Eye briefly had its offices in the club; upstairs there was the studio where Lewis Morley took the photograph of Christine Keeler naked astride a chair which illustrates every article about the Profumo affair. This

John Julius-Norwich

The stranger on the train

What a pleasure it was to be reminded in a ‘Life and Letters’ column by Allan Massie (28 July) of Desmond MacCarthy. He was an old friend of my parents’ and, in the immediate postwar years, a fairly frequent visitor to their house in Chantilly, outside Paris. One Friday afternoon — it must I think have been 1950 or 1951 — we were sitting opposite each other as the train rattled through Normandy. I was at that time reading Russian at Oxford and was struggling through War and Peace in the original. Not surprisingly, the book caught Desmond’s eye. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ he murmured in that wonderful velvety

Tuesday

18 Sep 2012

Shiraz Maher

We need to hear more from Tony Blair on Syria

Conventional wisdom suggests that Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime will crumble from within if given enough time. That’s the reasoning which has, in part at least, prevented Western governments from intervening in the conflict so far. Tony Blair challenged proponents of that view yesterday. ‘People say inevitably he will go. I don’t think it is inevitable, actually, unless we are prepared to make clear our support and solidarity for those people who are struggling against what is a very, very brutal repression now,’ he told Radio 4’s Today programme. Although Blair isn’t necessarily advocating military intervention, he does think we should be exploring military options more thoroughly. This is the conundrum

Jamie Thunder

The government will not snoop on your every move

Nick Cohen (‘Nowhere to hide’, 15 September) raises some interesting points about the double-edged nature of the internet. I agree with this sentiment, although not for the same reasons. Yes, the World Wide Web has brought about massive benefits, allowing people to communicate and connect in ways never before imagined. However it also has a down side. And this is that it affords criminals and those who wish to do us harm the same new ways to communicate and connect. It is this that concerns me, rather than Mr Cohen’s claim that it will allow, through our Communications Data Bill, the government to monitor your every move. This argument is

Fraser Nelson

Mitt Romney attacks ‘victim’ Obama voters

A secret recording of Mitt Romney talking to donors has been released by Mother Jones, a left-wing American magazine, and even to his wellwishers (myself included) it sounds dreadful. He declares that 47 per cent of Americans are ‘dependent’ on government and regard themselves as ‘victims’. ‘There are 47 per cent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement.

Monday

17 Sep 2012

Isabel Hardman

‘Denuded’ Work and Pensions committee sheds little light on Universal Credit

The Work and Pensions Select Committee was much denuded this evening, chair Anne Begg told the guests: its membership had either been promoted in the reshuffle or had personal crises to attend to. In the end Begg was joined by Andrew Bingham, Stephen Lloyd, Teresa Pearce and Glenda Jackson to interrogate Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Freud about the implementation of universal credit. Their questions seemed rather denuded, too: not of detail, for these MPs do truly know their stuff when it comes to welfare reform, but of a sense of the bigger picture. During the hearing, which lasted nearly three hours, the Work and Pensions Secretary and his Welfare

Alex Massie

Mitt Romney’s campaign begins to leak; in 2012 post-mortems don’t even require a corpse – Spectator Blogs

One of the truths about campaign reporting is that results determine everything. That is, winners are treated as superstars, losers as dimwits. Winning campaigns are always focused, disciplined, well-organised, in-control, cool; losing campaigns are invariably dysfunctional, confused, prone to internecine warfare and staffed by borderline psychopaths. That’s how the insta-historians in the press and blogosphere score these events. If Hillary Clinton had defeated Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary her campaign staff would have been treated more kindly (even Mark Penn!) while the Obama campaign would have been written-up as, at best, a heroic, noble effort in the face of impossible odds. More probably, he’d have been castigated for

Jonathan Jones

Increased support for more spending, but also for benefit cuts

‘Support for an increase in public spending rises.’ That’s the headline generated by the latest British Social Attitudes survey results, out today. They show that the proportion of the population saying that the government should ‘increase taxes and spend more’ rose from 31 per cent in 2010 to 36 per cent in 2011 — the first such rise since 2002. Meanwhile, the proportion backing tax and spending cuts fell from 9 per cent to 6 per cent. Notably, the survey doesn’t give the option of reducing taxes and spending more (ruling out, for example, Ed Balls’ proposed combination of a VAT cut and increased infrastructure spending), nor of increasing taxes