Society

Saturday

28 Jan 2012

Diary – 28 January 2012

I have a book out this week and, as always, it’s a torrid time, alternating between delight at good reviews (A.N. Wilson in this magazine) and despair at the massacres (the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton in the Guardian). It was just after one such dark assessment of my future that happier news arrived from an unexpected source. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, had just read the book (it had only been out two days) and tweeted his assessment to his 153,000 followers: ‘Just read Religion for Atheists. Great writing, thoughtful, disturbing. Highly recommend.’ At once, pandemonium broke out: Murdoch’s account is followed by pretty much every newspaper in the

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 January 2012

As the Labour party wrestles with self-definition in hard times, I wonder if it was wise to ditch Clause 4. In 1994-95, it was important for Tony Blair to win a symbolic victory over the left. This undoubtedly helped get him into Downing Street. Clause 4 of the party’s constitution was considered a doctrinaire text of nationalisation. But the key contentious words do not have to bear that interpretation. The clause promises ‘to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 January 2012

Home The government was defeated in the Lords by 252 to 237 on an amendment by the Rt Rev John Packer, Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, to the Welfare Reform Bill, removing child benefit from the proposed welfare cap of £26,000 a year per household. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, said in the Commons that he wanted to see legislation to give shareholders a binding (rather than the current advisory) vote on executive pay. MPs heard that the clock tower that houses Big Ben was leaning by 0.26 degrees to the north-west, which was just visible, but that it would not become unstable for more than 4,000 years. ••• The

Peter Hoskin

Miliband hopes to put a cap on his welfare policy problems

A-ha! Labour have hit on a line on the benefits cap, and Liam Byrne is peddling it in the Daily Telegraph this morning. ‘Now, there are some people who are against this idea altogether,’ he writes, ‘Neither I, nor Ed Miliband are among them.’ The way he sees it, he goes on to explain, is that there should be a cap but it should be set locally, so that it could be higher than £26,000 in more expensive areas such as London, and potentially less in other areas. Bryne adds that there should be an ‘an independent body like the Low Pay Commission to determine the level at which it

Melissa Kite

Race card

Meet Kevin Jackson, the black Tea Party activist disgusted at the prejudices of Obama’s supporters Kevin Jackson talks a lot of sense. He also says things that make you wonder if your ears are playing up. As the newest star of the Tea Party circuit gives you his views on Obama, Palin and David Cameron, you repeatedly ask yourself, ‘Did he just say what I think he said?’ I am interviewing Jackson, a Republican blogger and author of The Big Black Lie, a critique of liberal America, because I heard him on US television saying that voting for Obama was racist. ‘They wanted the black president,’ he told Fox News.

Rod Liddle

They are the masters now

I was on a plane once that malfunctioned as it was trying to take off from JFK Airport in New York. There was a horrible screeching noise and some smoke and the thing skidded to a halt with its nose poking out over Long Island sound. Trucks pulled up alongside us and sprayed stuff. I don’t think anyone had been particularly scared because the plane was still on the ground. The only thing that worries people about planes is when they fall out of the sky; if they blow up on the runway, that’s sort of OK. It was a scheduled KLM flight bound for London and the Dutch cabin

Matthew Parris

We all take risks. Only some of us are punished

James Moriarty, Hannibal Lecter, Silas Lynch, Simon Legree, Iago, Iscariot, Schettino… pity Francesco Schettino: all but doomed by his name alone. What a great name for an alleged villain. The skipper of the Costa Concordia, the cruise liner now wrecked off a Tuscan island whose name sounds like a typographical tweaking of ‘gigolo’, presents an Anglo-Saxon media in search of cliché with an embarrassment of riches. The disaster happened because (it’s claimed) Schettino was ‘attempting a “sail-by” salute to impress the islanders and passengers’. Tut tut. He fled his ship ahead of 100 passengers and crew. Boo hiss. He was ‘friendly with a Moldovan hostess’ who has helped the headlines

Laurance Reed

Free the Shetlands!

On Tuesday night in Lerwick, capital of the Shetland Islands, hundreds of men dressed as Vikings will parade through the centre of town, carrying torches to set fire to a wooden long ship in a festival known as Up Helly Aa. All will march to a repertoire of battle songs, with blood-curdling lyrics. ‘Our galley is the People’s Right, the dragon of the free’ runs the main hymn of the evening. ‘Sons of warriors and sages: when the fight for freedom rages, be bold and strong as they!’ And not even Alex Salmond would be bold enough to suggest that they are singing about Scotland. The people of Orkney and

Patience Wheatcroft

Mind your own business

Who will rescue capitalism? As the voices of its critics grow louder, those of us who would defend the moneymakers must not be cowed. But even the most ardent supporters of the profit motive would probably concede that capitalism has been veering in the wrong direction, providing sufficient ammunition for its detractors to raise doubts over the sustainability of the system itself. With public anger over bankers, in particular, and ‘fat cats’ in general, politicians — of all parties — have seen an opportunity to empathise with demonstrators’ banners and the shrieking from the media. Warm, even occasionally wise, words have flowed, defining how capitalism should be. David Cameron wants

Jonathan Ruffer

Give – and you shall receive

Does the banker deserve his bonus? Of course he doesn’t, but the problem is that the wrong sort of people point it out. The envious and the angry combine at shaking their fists at the super-wealthy; the politicians rehearse the arguments more in sorrow than anger. The rich are impervious to criticism from the unlucky outsider: opprobrium doesn’t work and it hardens them, closing the fist around their wealth. What cannot be said effectively in anger can nevertheless be said in love. The great calling to mankind is that we love one another, and it is in giving that we find its clearest expression. It is more blessed to give

James Delingpole

Peak oil really could destroy the economy – just not in the way greens think

If the global economy goes seriously tits up — as I believe it is about to do — the important thing is that we understand the actual reasons why it went tits up. Otherwise the drastic remedial action we’ll inevitably take to ensure that it never happens again may well result in the exact opposite. Consider, for example, that disturbingly tentacular collective of self-righteous hippyish busybodies Transition Towns. Here is an ideological movement which senses, as most of us do, that there’s something seriously amiss with western industrial civilisation. It senses — again, wisely and correctly, I believe — that we urgently need to form networks, build stronger and more

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 28 January 2012

Wau, South Sudan ‘Let’s visit the brewery,’ said Ken when we reached Wau. We were dusty and parched. It was searing hot. Like a character in Ice Cold in Alex, I saw before me a mirage of the cap popping off a chilled bottle. ‘Yes,’ I croaked. We had driven thousands of kilometres across South Sudan, which seven months ago won independence after half a century of persecution and war at the hands of Khartoum. On the road, we had met friendly, decent people struggling to create a new nation despite so many hardships and continuing attempts at sabotage by the Arabs. We had driven through lands that were as

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Pause and effect

In Competition No. 2731 you were invited to supply a poem in praise of punctuation. An excellent entry, this. Space is tight and I very much regretted not having room for Alan Millard, David Duncan Jones and Frank Osen in addition to the worthy winners below. The bonus fiver belongs to Basil Ransome-Davies. The rest pocket £25. I dallied with a comma whose cute curves had made me pause And catch my breath, if only for a second, But she’d a wild obsession with an adjectival clause Whose charismatic syntax always beckoned. My rebound squeeze, a semi-colon eager to be kissed, Proved versatile, a mark of many talents. She had

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: While no one was watching…

By chance I was in Abu Dhabi as England’s first Test against Pakistan was getting under way just up the road in the sepulchral wastes of the Dubai Cricket Stadium. What could be nicer, I thought, as I sat in my hotel room, than watch a bit of cricket, and it’s local too. But in 24 sports channels, not a sausage. I could find camel racing, horse racing, snooker, meaningless Premier League games from days before, Australia’s T20 Big Bash, and some pointless veterans’ golf. But Test cricket, zilch, zero, nada. The new destination for global sport doesn’t really seem to give one. The best joke came from the BBC’s

John Laughland

Travel: The charms of le barroux

If you are looking for an undiscovered part of Provence, then you can forget about Le Barroux. Apart from the fact that both Petrarch and Pope Clement V spent their summers nearby in the 14th century, the pretty hilltop village topped by its disproportionately large castle has been the holiday destination of members of the British social stratosphere for generations. The Anglo-French descendants of Axel Munthe, the Swedish author of the spectacularly successful Story of San Michele — perhaps the first example of escapist travel literature — have a very beautiful house in the village, as did Prince Charles’s godmother. The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury is just down the hill.

Friday

27 Jan 2012

James Forsyth

When one euro is worth more than another

Faisal Islam has a very interesting report from Davos on how at least one bank no longer believes that a euro from Ireland, say, is worth the same as one from Holland or Germany. He writes that: ‘A leading European bank has begun to account for euros differentially, by nation state. That is to say, they are differentiating a risk to euros that originate in a potentially defaulting country from that of a euro-cert. They, in effect, have invented the concept of a German, Greek and Irish euro. Now we accept that government debts from these nations are different. The idea that a bank treats cash differentially, is an incredible

The Spectator

From the archives: Remembering the Holocaust

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day, here’s a piece Sam Schulman wrote for The Spectator 12 years ago, on his fear that ‘Holocaustology’ will create a new form of anti-Semitism. Did six million die for this?, Sam Schulman, 1 January 2000 The Holocaust dominated the moral imagination of the 20th century. Before the rise of Hitler, anti-Semitism was a parochial concern of the Jews; after the war it was everyone’s concern, and everyone regarded it with horror. The cause of anti-Semitism is a mystery to most Jews and most Gentiles, but it was not a mystery to Isaiah Berlin. He blamed it on the New Testament. That is true of one

The Spectator

The week that was | 27 January 2012

Here are some posts made on Spectator.co.uk during the past week: Fraser Nelson tells Tristram Hunt that capitalism is just what Britain does, and says Osborne owes Darling an apology. James Forsyth thinks the Tories will be delighted to see the battle over the benefit cap prolonged, and says Alex Salmond’s strategy is both subtle and dangerous. Peter Hoskin watches Vince Cable teach Chuka Umunna a lesson about the past, and says Barack Obama’s State of the Union was a Romney-seeking missile. Jonathan Jones says Mitt Romney’s tax returns are a gift to the Democrats, and spots striking similarities between speeches by Obama and Nick Clegg. Hamish Macdonell takes a

Jonathan Jones

Is Newt’s chance slipping away?

Thanks to his spectacular surge last week, culminating in a big win in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, Newt Gingrich looked like he was back in contention for the Republican presidential nomination. Immediately, he took a commanding lead in Florida – which will host the next primary on Tuesday. And though Mitt Romney remained the clear favourite to go up against Barack Obama in November, Gingrich was still in the hunt. But this week – just when he was looking strong – it’s all gone a bit wrong for Gingrich. $13 million worth of ads from the pro-Romney Super PAC ‘Restore Our Future’ have dwarfed the $3 million spent

Daniel Korski

‘Let everyone live happily…’

Created to remember one of the darkest chapters in mankind’s history, Holocaust Day is for many people an occasion for unadulterated discomfort. Most of my family perished in the Holocaust and those who survived either hid in occupied Poland, pretending to be Catholics, fled to Uzbekistan in the then-USSR or, like Marcel Rayman, fought the Nazis. Today I re-read a letter Marcel sent to his family the night before he was executed by the Nazis for trying to kill the German commander of Paris: Little mother, When you read this letter, I’m sure it will cause you extreme pain, but I will have been dead for a while, and you’ll