Society

Saturday

James Hughesonslow

The sunshine solution

The late unlamented premier of Queensland Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen had an easy way with journalists, most of whom he perceived to be rabid pinkos. ‘Don’t you worry about that, my friend,’ he would say, when confronted with a hostile question. ‘You just leave it to me.’ In fact, he bequeathed Queenslanders quite a lot to worry about and nearly ended up in jail on charges of bribery and corruption. But his greatest legacy was a brilliant piece of gerrymandering which is still with us today, having been widely adopted by other states in Australia. I believe it could be of some use to whoever, by the time you read this,

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Why, as the Great War recedes further into the past, does it loom larger?

Another Remembrance Day app­roaches as I write. Another autumnal Sunday; another Last Post; those poppies again; in Derbyshire the church parades; another nationwide two-minute silence. The occasion always sets me thinking about what people call ‘perspective’ in history. Sir Percy Cradock, leaving Peking as ambassador nearly 30 years ago, said something about history’s rear-view mirror in his valedictory despatch: ‘In the socialist state,’ he wrote, ‘it is the past that is unpredictable.’ And not just in the socialist state. The longer one lives the more the past appears as a landscape in perpetual, usually gradual, sometimes radical upheaval. As each succeeding generation gets its recent history into what we like

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: Bond markets are telling Italy that the comedy is well and truly over

What are bond markets saying about Italy? With my usual proviso that markets are best understood as shoals of piranhas, communicating moods of panic, indifference, bloodlust and satiety rather than coherent ideas, the relatively clear message earlier this week was that Italian government bond yields were perilously close to the threshold of panic. That threshold is widely deemed to be 7 per cent, more than 4 per cent above benchmark yields for German, French and Dutch debt. Let me try to put this in perspective. The incremental interest cost to the Italian treasury is about €2 billion per percentage point per year, which doesn’t sound too terrifying. Italy has more

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Take six

In Competition No. 2721 you were invited to supply a short story incorporating the following: ‘rebarbative’, ‘solipsistic’, ‘lapidary’, ‘consequential’, ‘plangent’, ‘gibbous’. It was an impressive postbag with only the occasional stilted moment — you displayed considerable ingenuity in weaving the given words into a plausible and entertaining narrative. I was sorry to have to disqualify Adrian Fry’s amusing portrait of a village literary festival on account of a technical slip. Commendations, too, to Max Ross, Susan Therkelsen and John Plowman. The winners get £25; the bonus fiver is Brian Murdoch’s. Suddenly made redundant, James was one very angry lexicographer — he was furious, enraged, livid, wild, SEE: mad. Solipsistic as

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: Stars and asterisks

Parental advisory: what follows contains asterisks that some may find upsetting. It is clear that Steve Williams, Tiger Woods’s former caddy, and John Terry, the hopefully soon-to-be-former captain of England, are not particularly nice men. In fact they are assholes, to use one of Williams’s favourite words. So when Williams was asked what he would do with his joke caddying award at a blokey evening in Shanghai recently he said he wanted to shove it up Woods’s ‘bl**k asshole’. Now, had he just said ‘asshole’, nobody would have given it a moment’s thought beyond observing that, my oh my, Steve Williams is just the sort of guy you want to

Friday

The Spectator

The week that was | 11 November 2011

Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: Fraser Nelson says that we ought to remember the living too, and questions whether Britain really is a safe haven. James Forsyth asks why Chris Huhne is still shunning shale, and observes the Italian domino effect.  Peter Hoskin reports on the eurozone’s cash-flow problems, and wonders where David Cameron now stands on the 50p tax. Daniel Korski sets out the new German Question. Jonathan Jones gives his take on that Rick Perry gaffe. Nick Cohen argues that history is moving against Alex Salmond and his bid for independence. Rod Liddle reckons that Theresa May’s a goner. Alex

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Remember the living | 11 November 2011

Every time a politician suggests a introducing a flag-waving British national day, the idea falls flat. We already have one: 11 November, Remembrance Day, where we remember our war dead and resolve to help the living. In my Daily Telegraph column today, I talk about how the government can better serve the tens of thousands who have come back from active service in Afghanistan and Iraq.   Britain is, for the first time since the post-war years, a nation with a large veteran community. And we’re still not quite sure how to handle it. The Americans are: they had Vietnam, and learnt the hard way about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

Perry: ‘Just goes to show there are too damn many federal agencies’

Rick Perry’s doing his best to turn his excurciating “oops” moment last night to his advantage. Alex said it was the end of his campaign, but Perry certainly doesn’t see it that way. On NBC’s Today show, he quipped: ‘There are so many agencies out there, that I’m like many Americans and we would like to forget that the Department of Energy is one of those.’ And his campaign has just sent this email out to his supporters: It’s a commendable, if likely futile, attempt. Hat tip: Politico.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rick Perry, RIP

Gosh, I hope I remembered to add the caveat “if he’s any good at this stuff” to any post suggesting Rick Perry could or should be a GOP front-runner. Because his campaign ended last night. Here he is failing to remember what parts of the federal government he’d axe: Of course, scrapping the departments of education and commerce or at least sharply reducing their remits is not a bad idea. Nevertheless, “Ooops” is not the stuff of which Presidential campaigns are made. You can stick a fork in him, he’s done.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The trouble with e-petitions

Is the truth out there? This week, the US government has insisted it has ‘no evidence’ that extra-terrestrial life forms exist. The statement was a formal response to a petition on the White House website. In the name of ‘fostering a focused and civil conversation about how the federal government should address a range of issues’, the ‘We the People’ section of the site had promised to answer any petition which received more than 5,000 signatures, or mouse-clicks. But if you’re a conspiracy theorist who suspects the CIA has been covering up alien activity for decades, you’re hardly likely to be satisfied by an official denial. And if you’re not

Richard Marsh

Labour start attacking the NHS reforms – but did they need to?

So, the Labour Party has finally woken up to the idea that there might be some mileage in opposing the Government’s health reforms. Throughout much of this year a predictable alliance of the perennially opposed – doctors, health unions, Liberal Democrats, among others – has maintained a barrage of malice and misinformation against the Health and Social Care Bill. Nothing in their tactics, from their arrogant assumption of a monopoly of concern for ‘patients’ to their endless whining about ‘privatisation’, has come as much surprise.  The only remotely unusual thing about their campaign has been Labour’s near-total absence from it. Andy Burnham, who was made shadow health secretary last month,

Clarissa Tan

Angela we have heard on high

As Italy and Greece implode, and the pressure increases for Germany to do something, anything, Angela Merkel has made a call for ‘structural changes’ in the EU. In other words, in what’s bound to get eurosceptics’ hackles up, she’s pressing for Treaty change and an even more tightly-knit union. At a conference known as Falling Walls, which commemorates the end of the Berlin Wall, she said: ‘This is the time for a breakthrough to a new Europe. This is a time for a change toward more sustainability. That is the problem we have to contend with in Europe. And that means it is about more than declarations of intent but

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Great Poppy War of 2011

Galling as it may be to admit this, it is possible that in the Great Poppy Stramash of 2011 FIFA is right and the Football Association is wrong. Perhaps that puts it too strongly. Let me put it this way: were I in charge of FIFA, I’d make an exception to their general prohibition on “political statements and symbols” to allow England to adorn their shirts with poppies for their friendly match against Spain this weekend. But were I running the FA I’d respond to FIFA’s silly reluctance to make any such exception by saying “Well, we think this unfortunate but there it is. Let’s get on with the game.”

Peter Hoskin

The eurozone’s cash-flow problems

The markets, it seemed, wanted Berlusconi to go. Berlusconi duly announced his resignation yesterday. And now what? The interest paid on Italian ten-year bonds has just hit 7 per cent. The eurocrisis is hastening ever onwards, with our without the departing Italian PM. 7 per cent, as you will be reminded frequently today, is the rate at which bailouts became necessary for Greece, Ireland and Portugal. It’s not certain whether it will mean the same for Italy — as Sky’s Ed Conway recently blogged, some analysts reckon they could cope with a rate of around 8 per cent — but it does suggest that investors are rapidly losing faith in

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

The worst form of censorship

A week ago, the offices of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were burned down. This attack came after it advertised the founder of Islam, Muhammad, as ‘editor-in-chief’ of the new issue. The move was a light-hearted response to the very serious matter of the election of an Islamist party (the Ennahda party) as the leading party in Tunisia (a result which, incidentally, appears not to have greatly bothered most European media). As the staff of Charlie Hebdo contemplated the ruins of their magazine, a much grander and richer magazine, Time, ran one of those pieces which have become familiar whenever there is an Islamist assault against free speech. As

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Militarising the Police: Still a Bad Idea

Good grief, the Metropolitan Police have asked for – and worse, been granted – permission to deploy officers armed with rubber bullets as thousands of revolting students march through London tomorrow. I suppose the Met has always had this power but, this, as Sam Bowman says, is still a terrible idea: Deploying them now is a worrying step towards a dangerous “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to riot control, and should be reversed. Despite widespread public perception of them as relatively harmless method of crowd control, rubber bullets are extremely dangerous. In a study of 90 patients suffering from injuries from their use in Northern Ireland, one person died

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Joe Frazier, Lion of Manila

The defensive playground boast Stick and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me was always unconvincing protesting, as it did, far, far too much. In case you doubted this, consider the sorry example of Joe Frazier, lion of Manila and the Garden, forever embittered and broken by Muhammad Ali’s taunting. All before my time, of course, and boxing will never capture the imagination in Britain (or the United States) as it did back then. The 1970s were a golden era and not just in the heavyweight division either. The confluence of colour television and a phalanx of genuine stars prepared to fight one another anytime, any