Society

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

America continues to unravel

The humbling of America — the cover theme of this week’s Spectator — continues with S&P stripping Uncle Sam of his AAA credit rating. The debt downgrade, it says, “reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.” In other words: Obama’s still addicted to debt, and it’s time to stop pretending that his government’s IOU notes rank among the safest investments on earth. Its analysis seems to be pretty much that made by Christopher Caldwell in his brilliant cover story. This move will, as today’s

Bruce Anderson

Politics: An economy killed with kindness

About ten thousand years ago, man learned to control fire. That was one of the most important events in pre-history: a crucial part of the transition from a humanoid past to a human future. But the flames were domesticated, not tamed. Ten millennia later, fire is still a killer and a destroyer. In our cities, the sirens of the fire engine are part of the symphony of daily life. For fire, read credit, a more recent development, but one which is the economic equivalent of fire. Without it and its handmaiden, paper money, humanity would be much less prosperous: governments, less powerful. So which is more destructive — fire which

Aidan Hartley

Drought didn’t cause Somalia’s famine

War did. And food aid may well make it worse It seems wicked to question charity appeals for starving people in the Horn of Africa. Hunger is a terrible way to go, as I discovered when I once asked a dying Somali near Mogadishu to tell me what he was feeling. He was just passing into that zombie-like state with staring eyes. He said how the first ache was replaced by burning thirst that never leaves you. Marasmus turns children into martian-headed skeletons. Kwashiorkor swells their bellies. Glossy black hair turns reddish. Teeth fall out and ulcers like gunshot wounds eat into the cheeks. Inside, the body cannibalises itself, eating

Melissa Kite

Does everything give you cancer?

I’m sick of being scared by scientific studies Tall women are more likely to get cancer. As research findings go, this has to be among the most randomly vindictive scientific conclusions ever to spill out of a university research department into a screaming newspaper headline, and lord knows there have been a few. Women who breastfeed are less likely to have heart attacks or strokes. Women who don’t breastfeed are more likely to abuse children. Women who are stressed are more likely to have children with asthma (how stressful a piece of knowledge is that?). Men who are circumcised are more likely to suffer erectile problems. Children born to men

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 6 August 2011

‘To ______, or not to ______, that is the question…’ In Competition No. 2707 you were invited to fill in the blanks and continue for up to a further 15 lines. The challenge elicited a topical response from many competitors — ‘to hack or not to hack…’ agonised George Simmers — and dilemmas of the digital age loomed large too: ‘To tweet or not to tweet… Can fourteen times ten characters ever tell a tale…’ (Jenny Lowe). Tim Raikes, Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead and Elizabeth Bullen were unlucky losers. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. The extra fiver is D.A. Prince’s. To drink or not to drink: that is the question.

Andrew J. Bacevich

How good a general was David Petraeus?

Neoconservatives have constructed dangerous illusions around David Petraeus’s strictly limited successes History has not dealt kindly with American generals of late. Remember when ‘Stormin’’ Norman Schwarzkopf ranked as one of the great captains of the ages? When members of Congress talked of promoting General Colin Powell to five-star rank, hitherto reserved for the likes of Marshall and Eisenhower? When bombing the Serbs into submission elevated General Wesley Clark to the status of a would-be presidential candidate? Or when Tommy Franks travelled the world giving speeches at $50,000 a pop to explain how he had liberated Afghanistan and Iraq? More recently still, remember when journalists fell in love with Stanley McChrystal,

Christopher Ward

My grandfather, the Titanic’s violinist

When he died, the White Star Line sent a bill for his uniform There can be few better places to consider the irony of the phrase ‘the good old days’ than Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I went last week to visit the grave of my grandfather, a 21-year-old violinist in the band of the White Star liner Titanic. More than 120 passengers and crew are buried here, 40 of them still unidentified as we approach the centenary of Titanic’s sinking. The body of Jock Hume, my grandfather, was one of 190 recovered by the cable ship Mackay-Bennett and brought back to Halifax (more than a thousand

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 6 August 2011

So how was it for you, The Most Extraordinary Test Match Ever? Keen readers may have noticed this column two weeks ago was in raptures over the extraordinary batting, keeping and leadership skills of the Indian captain, M.S. Dhoni. Well that went very well, didn’t it? Bad luck if you were left holding the fort in the August exodus, catching glimpses of scores on mobile phones and TV screens and asking yourself what on earth was Bell doing back at the crease? And does that really say England are on 500 for seven? And who’s that on 90 — Tim Bresnan?? Hard to do anything but stop and gawp. My

James Delingpole James Delingpole

We’re destroying our countryside – and for what?

By the time you read this I’ll be in the place that makes me happier than anywhere else in the world: a section of the Wye valley in beautiful mid-Wales, where I’ll spend every day paddling in streams and plunging in mill ponds and playing cockie-ollie in the bracken and wandering across the sunlit uplands, drinking in perhaps the finest view God ever created — the one across the Golden Valley towards the Black Mountains, and beyond that to the Brecon Beacons. By the time you read this I’ll be in the place that makes me happier than anywhere else in the world: a section of the Wye valley in

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 6 August 2011

The greatest nation? This debt fiasco makes Washington look like a parish council I love America, and if you look at my Wikipedia entry — which I have neither the vanity nor the knowhow to bother to edit — you might suspect that I’ve been brainwashed to say so, because I am ‘a leading figure within the British-American Project’. I am indeed active in that excellent networking organisation, which has never been anything like the sinister Reaganite propaganda vehicle that Pilgerists and Guardianistas imagine it to be. And it has given me valuable insights into the national characters of movers and shakers from both sides of the pond who form

Friday

Jonathan Jones

From the archives: “Capital punishment is absolutely indefensible”

Thanks to Guido and his co-conspirators, capital punishment is back on the political agenda. Here’s what The Spectator, under the editorship of Ian Gilmour, wrote about the hanging of Ruth Ellis — the last woman to be hanged in the UK — some 14 years before the abolition of the death penalty in Britain: The execution of Ruth Ellis, The Spectator, 15 July 1955 It is no longer a matter for surprise that Englishmen deplore bull-fighting but delight in hanging. Hanging has become the national sport. While a juicy murder trial is on, or in the period before a murderer is executed, provided that he or she has caught the

The Spectator

The week that was | 5 August 2011

Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk during the past week: The Spectator publishes its summer reading list, featuring the revelation that David Cameron reads books backwards. Fraser Nelson says that the ghost of Gordon Brown still hovers over the 50p tax debate. Peter Hoskin reveals which government department could be replaced with a mathematical equation, and sifts through a bet-hedging report from the IMF. Peter Hoskin and Jonathan Jones write an open letter to Will Straw about deficit reduction. David Blackburn wonders whether capital punishment is to be debated in Parliament, and says that the government is split over policing the Internet. Daniel Korski says that the

Martin Bright

Norway: The Amy Winehouse Connection

One of the most irritating aspects of modern journalism is the tendency to make spurious connections between unconnected phenomena. The non-existent links between Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaeda is the most obvious and pernicious of these. Many conspiracy theories originate from making connections where none exist. So when I tell you I am about to connect the death of Amy Winehouse to the massacres carried out by a right-wing anti-Muslim extremist in Norway, I would forgive you for being sceptical. Both stories were running around my head while I was on holiday last week and I can’t stop thinking about them. I run the risk of sounding a combination of pretentious

Peter Hoskin

The markets wax and wane

CoffeeHouser ‘Ben G’ had it right in his comment underneath my earlier post: 24 hour news really does struggle in the face of economic crisis. This morning, all the talk was of a debt-induced apocalypse. Earlier this afternoon, the headlines were about the markets “rallying” after better-than-expected data on the US labour market. And now the BBC website’s main headline is that “turmoil in the stock market persists,” despite those very same labour market figures. Oh yes, it’s difficult to present a consistent front as the money merchants sway and buckle in the breeze. That said, the economic fundamentals remain discouraging. It shouldn’t be forgotten that yesterday’s losses were extraordinary;

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Gloomy Decade?

Tim Montgomerie is in full-on never waste a crisis mode today. Given the doom plastered across all the front pages (The Sun excepted) this is a good time for wheeling out old favourites: With the world economy facing such a bleak decade this is no time for half measures. We need to be cutting taxes on business and funding them with deeper cuts in the over-sized state. We should be suspending environmental measures that are imposing heavy and futile costs on our manufacturing industry. We shouldn’t be loading new regulations on our banks until the economy is strong again. We need them to be lending. We need reform of competition

Thursday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

In this week’s Spectator | 4 August 2011

The Spectator this week contains a brilliant piece on the crisis in Somalia by our Kenyan columnist Aidan Hartley. The Daily Telegraph today reports that voters are extremely sceptical about Cameron’s aid policy, wary of shovelling cash overseas when we’re hard-up at home. Aidan’s piece proves the voters absolutely right (no surprise). Not only would the cash be better spent in Britain, but according to Aidan, aid money in Somalia actually makes the situation there much, much worse. He says:  ‘I am haunted by the people I have seen die in Somalia, and by news pictures of the latest famine, but aid agencies are presenting this crisis misleadingly — as

David Blackburn

Barroso behind the times

There were rumours flying around Whitehall this morning that the EU leadership was feeling the strain from yesterday’s rise in Spanish and Italian borrowing costs. Both stand rather too close to 7 per cent for comfort, and the price of insuring against sovereign default in the two countries also soared to its highest level in two weeks. The limited progress made after the Greek deal of 21 July seems to have been undone. In fact, the problems stem from the piecemeal deal to allow Greece to selectively default. As I wrote at the time: ‘The European Central Bank has declared that it is happy to allow this and will continue

Wednesday

The Spectator

The Spectator’s summer reading list

As the headline suggests, what follows is a list of summer reading recommendations from Spectator staff members and writers — with more to come shortly. Although, it must be said, there is one contributor who doesn’t really count as a Spectator staff member or writer… David Cameron: I’ve been reading a book called Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, an Irish writer. I read it when I was in Ibiza and I haven’t managed to finish it, so I’ve picked it up again. What else have I got? I tend to have a pile of books that I dip into. For instance, I’ve got Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem. I’ve been reading

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Last of Mr Norris

Mary Robinson was (and is!) a woman and, just as importantly, the first President of the Republic of Ireland whose candidacy was not backed by Fianna Fail. Her successor, Mary McAleese is originally from Northern Ireland and thus, like Robinson, some kind of outsider. Both women expanded the idea of the Irish presidency and, in some small measure, helped refine the notion of what it means to be Irish in a modern european context. So you can see why some felt that David Norris, the independent Senator representing Dublin University in the upper house, would make an excellent candidate to succeed Mrs McAleese. These may be grim economic times but

David Blackburn

Moving slowly towards the future

Yesterday’s leak of Vince Cable’s response to the Hargreaves report into the Digital Economy Act (DEA) set tongues wagging. The headline was as expected: ‘web-blocking’, the practice whereby copyright infringers are barred from internet access, will be dropped because it is unworkable. In line with Hargreaves’ recommendations, Cable also plans to remove restrictions on using copyright material to create parodies, which is excellent news for Downfall enthusiasts. And he will rationalise copyright law to legalise supposedly forbidden practices like copying CDs onto an i-Pod. Finally, Cable has permitted an exception from copyright for data mining for research purposes. The Business Department and the Treasury believe that these reforms will net the economy an extra