Society Archives

Monday

13 Feb 2012

Will Germany let Greece stay in the euro?

The German government is split on the biggest policy question of the day, according to the FT’s German edition. As Open Europe points out, the paper has a senior member of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag saying that finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble ‘supports the bankruptcy of Greece, Merkel wants to strictly avoid it… It goes back and forth, which is not very helpful.’ If true, this is a remarkable story. The British Foreign Office has been convinced since the beginning of the year that the Germans are keen to kick the Greeks out of the euro. Their conversations with the Germans have convinced them that Berlin believes that the

Fraser Nelson

Gotcha! | 13 February 2012

The Spectator‘s cover, a few weeks ago, borrowed one of The Sun‘s most famous headlines: ‘Gotcha’ — but, this time, with tabloid journalists caught in the trap. It was supposed to be a parody. But, this weekend, the Metropolitan Police arrested a further five journalists from The Sun using methods normally meted out to drug dealers: pulling them out of their beds, searching their houses for concealed evidence. No one has been charged, but all five are suspected of paying sources for information: i.e. ‘aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office … and conspiracy in relation to both these offences.’ If the definition of bribery extends to buying sources outrageously-priced

Rod Liddle

RIP Ray Honeyford

So RIP Ray Honeyford, the former headmaster of the Drummond Middle School in Bradford. He died on February 5; he had not worked in teaching since the anti-racccccccccisst left forced him out of his job in the middle of the 1980s. His crime was to have insisted that the Asian kids in the school receive exactly the same teaching as the white kids. That meant such controversial stuff as swimming lessons for the Muslim girls. He wrote a couple of articles expressing this point of view and was sacked by an alliance of the Tory government and the local Labour council. He was not, of course, remotely a racist. And

Sunday

12 Feb 2012

Fraser Nelson

Nassim Taleb: Ban Tesco bonuses

There have been precious few people able to make sense of the crash. The main commentators didn’t see it coming — and so have focused their energies stressing how no man born of woman could have predicted it. But Nassim Taleb did. He has been a voice of sense, originality and common sense throughout, and David Cameron has been listening. The respect is mutual: Taleb even described Cameron as ‘the best hope we have left on this planet’ because he understood the dangers of deficits. If CoffeeHousers haven’t come across Taleb’s books, such as Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan, I can’t recommend them enough. I met him recently, and

Nick Cohen

Whatever happened to Human Rights?

Human rights campaigners need to follow a self-denying ordinance if they are not to become enemies of the values they espouse. Like a civil servant or judge, they must leave their passions at the office door, and oppose the oppressive, whoever they are and whatever the consequences. It is easy for me to say that, but the record of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International tells you that it is hard for them to do so. To their politically committed workers impartiality can feel a thin and bloodless doctrine. It requires them to criticise people they regard as friends and provide inadvertent comfort to enemies. The effort required in maintaining

Peter Hoskin

Lansley’s holding on — for now

After originally deploying Sayeeda Warsi against ConservativeHome’s anti-Health Bill sentiment, David Cameron is now doing his fighting for himself. He has an article in today’s Sunday Times (£) that says, with no equivocation, ‘I am at one with Andrew Lansley, the reform programme and the legislation going through parliament’. And, aside from that, it’s also an unusually spirited explanation of just what the government plans to achieve by these reforms. Much better than Cameron’s wavering performance in PMQs on Wednesday. For all its spirit, though, this article doesn’t come across as angry. There is a mention for ‘today’s opponents of reform,’ but nothing that could really be interpreted as a

Saturday

11 Feb 2012

Dot Wordsworth

Register

The fatuousness of remarks on Radio 3, about which Charles Moore complains, is an established aim on Radio 4. Last Sunday, before The Archers, I was invited to ‘Have another cuppa’. The implicit intention was to sound like someone who had just dropped in to the kitchen. But a stranger dropping in to the kitchen and talking as if he were an old friend would be alarming. Indeed, we might suspect him of being a psychopath. It is all to do with register. Register in language is not mentioned in old-fashioned grammars. It entails differences in vocabulary, pronunciation and even tonality, according to circumstances. (Charles Moore mentioned the funny noise

Tanya Gold

Food: Movie dinners

The Odeon cinema in Whiteleys, Bayswater, has refurbished; it now has eight ‘Lounges’ where you can watch a film and stuff your face with only 49 others, planted on leather seats like fellow passengers on a spaceship to nowhere. Other London cinemas do food (the Everyman, the Electric) but the food is mostly olives and the audience won’t talk to you because they are evil. The Electric, particularly, has the vibe of a Notting Hill serial killer convention; when watching a horror film at the Electric, you sense the audience is rooting for the demon/Antichrist/hot slayer of priests. The Lounge does real food, by Rowley Leigh of Le Café Anglais,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 11 February 2012

Q. Recently my wife and I received a thank you letter from ‘John and Kate’ giving an address in Pimlico. They wrote to thank us for a picture of roses that ‘we’ had given them for a wedding present. My mother-in-law painted beautifully and often chose roses. My wife and I racked our brains to think who this well-mannered couple could be. Not one of ours — over to you Rollo and Janie (a local couple with whom I and my wife, Rollo and Caroline, are often confused). But it was not one of theirs either… How do you suggest both Rollos come out of this smelling of roses? —

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 11 February 2012

As the co-founder of the West London Free School, I receive a lot of junk mail from ‘educationalists’ trying to sell me various bric-a-brac, most of it pretty harmless. Occasionally, though, I get something genuinely disturbing. For instance, this week a publisher tried to interest me in the novels of Charles Dickens ‘retold in a sophisticated graphic novel format’. ‘With atmospheric black and white illustrations and simple text this series is ideal for drawing in readers who struggle with the original version,’ he wrote. It’s a truth generally acknowledged in the state education sector that children aged 16 and under cannot cope with the novels of Charles Dickens. His books

Melissa Kite

Real life | 11 February 2012

Miraculously, mysteriously, almost supernaturally, I found a man. I’m sorry for not mentioning it earlier but it crept up on me. I didn’t realise I had found him until ages afterwards. I had to have the whole thing signposted in neon, and even then I did my best to drive past it. What happened was this: my friend Ingrid rang me in a state of considerable excitement last June. She had been shopping in Cobham and had got chatting on the street with a man in jodhpurs. She decided he would be perfect for me and, with a flash of extraordinary matchmaking flair, persuaded him on the spot to move

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 11 February 2012

If there’s a hotter, smellier and more cramped men’s changing room in Britain than the one at our gym, then I’d like to hear about it. It’s next door to the sauna and connected to it by an air vent. My glasses steam up the moment I walk in. After a workout, I shower, towel off, and before I’m dressed I’m soaking wet again with perspiration. There’s room, just about, for up to four people at a time. Sometimes there are six or seven in there showering, robing or disrobing. Intimate is the word. You have to negotiate your personal space with your neighbour and watch where you put your

Taki

High life | 11 February 2012

At ten minutes past four on the afternoon of 28 April 1945, a plumber by the name of Moretti shot and killed a prematurely aged man and a youngish woman, who was not wearing any underwear, in front of the Villa Belmonte, near Lake Como. Next to Moretti, who was later tried for theft and other misdeeds, was one Colonel Valerio, whose submachine-gun had jammed while trying to shoot the defenceless couple. Millions of words have been written about the last moments of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci, but until now not a single writer — not even the definitive biographer of the Duce, Nicholas Farrell — has managed to

The Spectator

Letters | 11 February 2012

China’s foreign policy Sir: As Hillary Clinton just stated, China and Russia ‘neutered’ the UN by vetoing the sanctions on Syria. Russia did it because Syria is an ally with which it does business. China vetoed because it wants no judgments on how it has mauled its own population since ‘Liberation’ in 1949. Beginning with the slaughter of millions of landlords in the early Fifties, through the persecutions of the Great Leap, the Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen, not to mention the suppression of Uighurs and Tibetans, Beijing never shrinks from internal violence. It is to Foreign Secretary Hague’s credit that, like Secretary Clinton, he condemned China’s veto. This is almost

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: Scapegoat of the year

The world informs us that the ex-Sir-cised knight Fred has been tipped off his horse onto a scapegoat. Wrong again. The Judaic [e]scapegoat ritual provided annual blanket cover for the community by transferring its sins mechanically onto a wilderness-bound goat. It was not a response by the ‘mob’— that’s us — to a one-off crisis. For that, we turn to the Greeks. Their scapegoat (pharmakos) often referred to those who touched religious sensitivities at times of political crisis. One Andocides, for example, was involved in a sacrilegious scandal in 415 bc that threatened the success of a huge Athenian military expedition to Sicily. The prosecutor said of him ‘in punishing

The Spectator

Barometer | 11 February 2012

Long to reign over us The Queen has become only the second British monarch to spend 60 years on the throne. To overtake Victoria, she would have to reign until 10 September 2015, but would still then be 19 years short of Sobhuza II of Swaziland, who began his reign on 10 December 1899, at the age of four months, and died on 21 August 1982. Some other long reigns: Louis XIV of France 1643–1715 Johannes II of Leichtenstein 1858–1929 Franz-Joseph I of the Austro-Hungarian empire 1848–1916 Bhumibol Adulyadei of Thailand 1946– Doctor sued The Commons Public Accounts Committee revealed that the NHS has had to put aside £15.7 billion

David Hare

Diary – 11 February 2012

One of the best things about being a writer is that you get asked to interesting places. I’ve always turned everything down because I believed I should sit at my desk and write. About six months ago, I decided to see what would happen if I accepted everything for a while. Admittedly, I had a kick-start. My BBC film Page Eight, about the moral ructions in MI5 in the past ten years, was given the unusual honour, for a TV film, of closing the Toronto Film Festival. So I went to Toronto (refreshing), then to Edinburgh (uplifting), Warsaw (fascinating), Rome (matchless), Hamburg (serious), Jaipur (fabulous), Eastbourne (serene) and Gothenburg (-14°C).

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 11 February 2012

Home A judge granted bail to Abu Qatada, once described by a Spanish judge as ‘Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe’, who was to be freed from Long Lartin prison and allowed to leave a fixed address in London for two one-hour periods a day, in order to take his youngest child to school. Ed Davey replaced his fellow Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne as Energy Secretary after Mr Huhne’s resignation to concentrate on defending himself against charges that he persuaded his ex-wife to accept his speeding points in 2003 to avoid a driving ban. The Metropolitan Police unlawfully failed to warn people that their telephones had been hacked by

The Spectator

Economies of shale

The weather conditions of the past week could not have been better conceived to show up the inadequacies of Britain’s — and the rest of Europe’s — energy policy. A vast anticyclone extending from Siberia to eastern England has brought snow as far south as Rome and temperatures of minus 40˚C to Eastern Europe. With North Sea gas production in sharp decline, never has Europe’s position on the end of a long gas pipeline originating in Russia been so exposed. As that country’s demand for energy has spiked, so the quantity of gas which it is prepared to export to the rest of Europe — also gagging for extra energy —

Martin Bright

Making the Work Programme work

Last week David Milband showed some real class when he presented the recommendations from his Commission on Youth Unemployment. This was a sober and intelligent review of the crisis and the government would do well to take note. He has welcomed the introduction of job subsidies under the new Youth Contract, which will come in from April, but is right to urge a boost in the number of these that will be made available to employers. His idea to set up Youth Employment Zones in hotspots of worklessness around the country is also a solid idea that should be lifted by ministers. One element that was not highlighted by the