Society

Monday

David Blackburn

Residents of Dale Farm win injunction

The residents of Dale Farm have been granted a last gasp reprieve by the High Court. The BBC reports: ‘Mr Justice Edwards-Stuart granted the injunction at London’s High Court on the basis that there was a realistic apprehension that the measures to be taken – while genuinely believed in by the council – “may go further” than the terms of the enforcement notices. He said: “Having regard to the fact there is no fixed date for starting these – but they are imminent – I do not see that any serious injustice will be caused if the actual implementation of any measures will not take place before the end of

Martin Bright

A piece of illiberal silliness

Memories are short in journalism, but reading about the attempts by the Met to force the Guardian to hand over source material in the Hackgate case, reminded me of a case the same newspaper group fought over a decade ago. Bizarrely, the story isn’t in the Guardian’s online archive, which doesn’t go back far enough. But here’s the report of the original hearing in The Independent. Libya, spooks and a renegade MI5 officer: the story had it all. “In a further crackdown on leaks from the renegade MI5 officer David Shayler, the Government launched a court action yesterday against two newspapers. It is part of the most aggressive legal campaign

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

JFK: a tax-cutting headbanger

Given that Vince Cable was once a lecturer in economics, it’s odd to see him feign ignorance over its basic concepts. Listen to his speech today.”There are politicians on both left and right who don’t [get it]. Some believe government is Father Christmas. They draw up lists of tax cuts and giveaways and assume that Santa will pop down the chimney and leave presents under the tree. This is childish fantasy. Some believe that if taxes on the wealthy are cut, new revenue will miraculously appear.” It’s perhaps worth quoting one such ‘childish’ politician who was articulating this long before Art Laffer doodled on a cocktail napkin. In 1962, John F

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 19 September – 25 September

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which — providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency — you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’, which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write — so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game, from political stories in your local paper, to

Sunday

Siobhan Courtney

Another voice: An afternoon inside Dale Farm

Siobhan Courtney, who blogged for us last week, is part of our ‘another voice’ series – occasional posts from writing from lines of argument different to the ones we normally take on Coffee House. She has sent this report from Dale Farm, where hundreds of travellers are due to be evicted tomorrow. Siobhan was granted access to the site, on what will probably be its last day of existence. Irish folk music pounds out from one chalet. Women vigorously scrub the outsides of neighbouring caravans, while their children bring tea to the men who are fixing their vans. Around them, plastic statues of Mary Magdalene are firmly rooted into the

Gordon Hector

The right to own is not all right

There was much to commend in Chris Skidmore’s article in the Telegraph earlier this week, calling for a radical approach to public services. But there’s one bit that’s worth dissecting: his idea that people in social housing might sell their homes to invest in shared equity, if they behave well. Here’s what he says: ‘Any social housing tenant, under certain conditions of tenure and behaviour, would be able to sell their property and retain a proportion of the equity, reserved for investing in a shared equity programme, giving them a first step onto the housing ladder. The remaining equity would be used to build more affordable housing to meet demand.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The real 50p split

Nick Clegg’s interview on Andrew Marr this morning subtly shifted the Lib Dem position on the 50p tax rate. When Marr asked him what he would do if the George Osborne commissioned HMRC study showed that it raised no money, Clegg replied ‘then I of course think we should look at other ways in which the wealthiest pay the amount that we’d expected through the 50p rate.’ So, in other words, he’ll accept its abolition if something else is put in its place. But, crucially, Clegg wants any replacement to raise not what the 50p rate actually raises but what it was supposed to raise. This presages the next debate

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Backward people

Oh dear: looks like poor ol’ Boris has got to do one of his famous apologies again. The not terribly good American singer Kelis claimed she was racially abused at Heathrow Airport, when, in the manner of primped up little divas, she jumped a queue. Someone in the queue called her a “slave”, allegedly, and “kunte kinte” (although she may have misheard this, I suppose). Nobody stood up for her and an immigration official merely smiled and shook his head, she complained – and added that Britain was an incredibly backward country. The Mayor of London, doing a passable imitation of an albino Martin Luther King, said he was appalled

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 17 September 2011

In denial about abortion Sir: Mary Wakefield (‘Who cares about abortion?’, 10 September) bravely argues that Britain needs a rational and reasoned debate about our abortion laws. Since 1967 there have been seven million abortions in Great Britain: in the past 12 months there were 189,574, with 48,348 women having had one before and, according to a parliamentary reply, some as many as eight during their lifetime. Lord Steel, the author of the 1967 Act, has rightly described this as ‘horrific’ and has said there are ‘too many’. About that, at least, we should all agree. A more profound debate would consider the status of the unborn child. An unborn

Dot Wordsworth

O

Someone was commenting in the paper about Catholics adopting an extra syllable in the translation of the Mass from this month by saying, ‘Glory to you, O Lord’ instead of ‘Glory to you, Lord’. It does sound more polite. O with the vocative sounds archaic now. I seldom say, ‘O my husband.’ But O still retains a lively existence. We may be condescending to former centuries for inconsistent spelling, but our spelling of O, which looks simple enough, has slipped in the past 100 years. In 1902, the Oxford English Dictionary commented that, as an interjection, the spelling Oh ‘is now usual only when the exclamation is quite detached from

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Food: Mothers’ pride

Oslo Court is the Jewish mother birthday party venue, or lunch if the Jewish mother must be home in time to be medicated — a convention, a summit, a trough for Jewish mothers. And so, when you telephone for a reservation, they will ask you, having as yet no idea who you are — do you need a cake? You should always say yes. Because who doesn’t need a cake? It inhabits the ground floor of an expensive but ugly apartment block in St John’s Wood. But that just adds to its lustre in Jewish mother circles. It is a restaurant that has been disguised as the home of your

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 17 September 2011

Q. I gave a drinks party at which I introduced two men who should have got on well. Instead one, who had had a bit too much to drink, became verbally aggressive, using a disagreement over architecture as the pretext for attacking the other. Despite my knowing the aggressor so well, and despite the passivity of his target, I was powerless to calm things down and it almost ended in (one-sided) fisticuffs. How could I have defused the tension? —M.W., London SW3 A. To distract an aggressor at a party, raise your hand in a general stop sign, tap your glass and call for general silence.  Announce that  a large

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Sophie Dahl is a saint – leave her alone

Poor Sophie Dahl. After appearing on the Today programme to make an appeal for charitable donations to the Roald Dahl Museum, she has become an object of ­ridicule. This was partly prompted by the amount of money she was asking for and the use for which it was intended: £500,000 does seem like rather a lot to fund the relocation of Dahl’s writing shed from the bottom of her grandmother’s garden to the nearby museum in Great Missenden. A couple of years ago I erected a ‘writing shed’ at the bottom of my garden — at least, that’s how I described it to my wife — and the total cost

Robin Oakley

The turf: Man with a system

It is not only the Arabs who have an intimate, almost mystical involvement with the horse. In Istanbul for the Topkapi Trophy, sitting beside the largest kebab I have ever seen (and, I kid you not, it was more than 12 feet long), I was reminded by my genial host Mehmet Kurt that the horse was special to the Ottomans, too. Their warriors, he insisted, were unbeatable. They never changed horses and their equine partners often saved their lives with their uncanny ability to anticipate and counter the enemy’s moves. There was perfect synchronisation of thought and movement between horse and warrior. Mehmet Kurt’s own orange and white colours have

Melissa Kite

Real life | 17 September 2011

My local cab firm has gone global. Its drivers are now so fantastically cosmopolitan they no longer speak any English or know anything at all about Britain. The situation reached crisis point the other night. ‘Royal Opera House,’ I kept saying, very slowly. ‘Royal …Opera …House.’ ‘Roya’ Oppa How?’ said the minicab driver. ‘No. Listen. Ro …yal …Op …er …a House. It’s a big building with opera inside it.’ He furrowed his brow. ‘Raya Open Horse?’ ‘Fine, just drive, we’ll work it out when we get near.’ ‘Poss Cod,’ he said, looking panic-stricken. ‘WC2,’ I said. He put WC2 into his sat nav but of course that only narrowed it

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 17 September 2011

The pub was taken over for a meeting. Every chair was occupied. The speaker’s words were being recorded by a sound engineer standing at a portable mixing console. The middle-aged audience was rapt, the atmosphere one of political and moral seriousness. Few were drinking. I mounted the only vacant bar stool and mouthed the word ‘Peroni’ at the young lad behind the bar as though he and I were involved in a dangerous conspiracy. The speaker, a woman aged around 50, was speaking articulately and authoritatively about something called the blood/brain barrier. To sustain it, she said, we need to maintain adequate levels of fatty acids, vitamin D and particularly

Taki

High life | 17 September 2011

Gstaad This is the worst news I’ve had since the surrender at Stalingrad. The Spectator’s deputy editor has become engaged to a former adviser to my favourite minister, Iain Duncan Smith. But how can this be when the deputy editor is already engaged to me? If true, what does it make her — words fail me — a bigatrothed? All I know is that I’m flying to London in order to investigate. If the worst comes to the worst I am going to hit my rival so hard he’s going to have to look up to tie his shoelaces. Enough said. I could also sue, but it ain’t my style.

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern: Too big not to fail

Commentators bang on endlessly about the desirability of a ‘global world’, with every economy linked seamlessly to every other. But when it goes wrong, as it has done in the last three years, the painful consequences are equally global. Ask the Romans. The Roman empire stretched from Britain to Iraq and from the Rhine-Danube to the northern edges of the Sahara desert. At its largest extent (c. ad 117) it probably comprised about 50 to 60 million people and covered 2.5 million square miles. When Rome took over a province, the local elites continued to run the show, as they had always done, but now under the ultimate jurisdiction of Rome’s governor and

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 17 September 2011

Home The Independent Commission on Banking, headed by Sir John Vickers, recommended that there should be insulation of high street banking from investment banking. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, accepted the commission’s call for its recommendations to be introduced by 2019. The report received cross-party support, although it would cost banking £7 billion a year, and some said it would make lending scarcer and lead to banks leaving Britain. The annual rate of inflation (by CPI) rose to 4.5 per cent, from 4.4 in the previous month; and (by RPI) to 5.2 from 5 per cent. Unemployment rose by 80,000 to 2.51 million. A shopping centre with 300 shops

The Spectator

Barometer | 17 September 2011

The comedian David Walliams performed the impressive feat of swimming 140 miles of the River Thames from Lechlade to Westminster. That is still a long way short of the swims undertaken by Martin Strel, a 56-year-old Slovenian. — After swimming the length of the Danube (1,866 miles), the Mississippi (2,360 miles) and the Yangtze (2,487 miles),Strel was challenged to swim the Nile but dismissed it as ‘not challenging enough’. — He swam instead 3,272 miles down the Amazon, employing a support team to pour buckets of rancid blood into the water in order to distract the piranhas. — His next project is the Colorado, which is shorter but has faster