Society

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

To catch a spy

When Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opens next week, it is likely to have all the spooks in London flocking to the cinema. John Le Carré, who wrote the book and helped direct the film, created a wonderful, almost romantic world of British espionage — mental chess games played against deplorable, but often brilliant opponents in Moscow. How things have changed. Nowadays the spying game means analysing Islamists’ rants, befriending ghastly regimes, fighting ambulance-chasing lawyers and having embarrassing secrets sprayed all over the press. One almost feels sorry for Sir Mark Allen, who was MI6’s head of counter-intelligence when Tony Blair was sucking up to the Libyans seven years ago. His

Mark Mason

Token gestures

Charity might begin at home, but worrying about charity begins at Waitrose. Those little green tokens they give you with your receipt — nice touch, I used to think. If the store won’t give me any of my money back by way of a loyalty card, at least they’ll give it to someone I can vote for, by dropping the token into one of three compartments in a big clear plastic box by the exit. Each compartment relates to a local charity. New line-up every month, new chance to feel good about yourself. But no good deed goes unpunished, so it didn’t take long for doubts to creep in. There

Andrew Gilligan

Looting for scoops

Tripoli Coming pretty much straight from the London riots to the Libyan revolution has made me more contemptuous than ever of Britain’s self-pitying, self-indulgent, social-security-claiming insurrectionaries. For all the fear and death, Tripoli’s uprising has been far more disciplined. Cool young rebels, in their bandanas and Free Libya T-shirts, guard the streets. Barely a shop has been looted, and trainers are still changing hands in the normal way. Only one group of people, in fact, is brazenly disregarding private property and disrespecting the law: western journalists. In the continuing absence of Colonel Gaddafi, there is only one other thing that most hacks want to find: the definitive government document proving

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Amy was right

Something queer has happened to Amy Winehouse in the six weeks since her death: she has been turned from an anti-rehab rebel into the poster girl for rehab. The tragic Camden songstress was famous for singing ‘They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no’. Yet now her demise is being held up as a sign that all troubled folk should seek expert rehabilitation as soon as they can. Her deeply distraught father, Mitch, is having meetings with Home Office ministers to discuss setting up more rehab centres. There’s even talk of opening something called the Amy Winehouse Rehabilitation Centre. It’s a bit like making

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

In the face of terror, Britain has surrendered to men in yellow fluorescent jerkins

Had your fill of 9/11 porn yet? I guarantee if you turn on the TV at this moment on some channel there’ll be a plane crashing into a building and a nutter from the Midwest telling you it was organised by the Jews via the offices of the Zionist Occupation Government, the towers packed with thermite, the Pentagon hit not by an aircraft but by a missile, Rumsfeld an alien lizard creature, Charlie Sheen or some other madman asking why They keep lying to us. Or one of the more upmarket programmes — same shot of the planes crashing in and people jumping out of the windows, but done in

Philip Delves-Broughton

A rich man for all seasons

Multibillionaire Warren Buffett may sound cuddly, but he’s talking from both sides of his mouth August was a typical month for Warren Buffett, America’s second richest man. While the leisure classes lolled, he called for higher tax rates for the rich. If America had a debt problem, he wrote in the New York Times, it was high time the rich paid a greater share of their earnings to the government. Then, two weeks later, he sank his fangs into the fleshy rump of Bank of America, one of the bailed-out giants still staggering three years since the start of the financial crisis. Buffett had been circling Bank of America for

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Convenience seems a small, mean word – but sometimes it’s all we’ve got

The reason why everybody gets so shrill over abortion, I’ve often thought, is that nobody is quite prepared to admit what they are talking about. By which I don’t mean ‘the slaughter of babies’. I mean the pros and cons of a system of morality that is coldly utilitarian, and nothing else. Oh God, you’re probably thinking. Not abortion. We’ve already read a cover article about that. Can’t you write about something else, with some laughs in it? British agents pretending not to realise when they hand people over to tyrants for torture, for example? And I won’t lie, I thought about that, and I had a particularly nice gag

Alex Brummer

Investment Special: The social network bubble

It’s an irritating daily occurrence. The names of two or three people I barely know pop up in my inbox asking me to join their ‘professional network’, LinkedIn. Early on, I was tempted by the idea that being part of this family might widen my range of contacts, and perhaps also my story-gathering capacity. But then I realised that anything that had grown so big and amorphous was hardly likely to be a source of exclusive information. Nevertheless, social networks from LinkedIn to Facebook are the new investment fad. Having been wrong about Google when it first floated — my view was that legal disputes over content meant that it

Tim Price

Investment Special: The doom boom

Not for nothing is economics known as the dismal science. Having failed to foresee the global bubbles in credit, banking and housing, mainstream economists have compounded the problem by advocating entirely the wrong solutions. Like generals fighting the last war, most economists (and leftists who think they understand economics) continue to bang the drum of Keynesian stimulus, evidently un-able or unwilling to understand that countries, like their citizens, cannot borrow their way out of debt. Cue the world’s largest ever sovereign-debt crisis. But not every economist got it lament-ably wrong. A number of financial thinkers anticipated both the bubble and the crash. Though few of them actually hail from Austria

Jonathan Davis

Investment Special: Bottom fishing

Here’s the good news. Share prices are falling. Investors are panicking. Talk of crisis dominates the headlines. These are precisely the conditions in which bargains tend to become available on the stock market. Just as history is written by the victors, so the day-to-day stock-market narrative is written from the perspective of those with most to lose: those who already have wealth, not those who need it in the future. Yet when it comes to investment, as all great investors know, what matters most is how cheaply you can buy, not whether the market is going up or down around the time you do so. The younger you are, the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 10 September 2011

A thunderous collapse could drown out the clamour over banking reform The banking lobby doth protest too much, methinks — to misquote Hamlet’s mother — and so doth its enemies, not to mention the opponents of planning reform. In fact, there’s a whole lot of grandstanding going on in the public arena which I fear may suddenly be silenced either by a thunderous collapse of the eurozone or the giant toilet-flush that will signal the onset of renewed global recession. Or both. And if that sounds unusually gloomy for this column, I refer you to this week’s news that in August the US economy generated no new jobs at all

Bruce Anderson

Drink: Rules of the game

We should all eat humbly. There is no sense in foraying to far-flung continents in search of fancy victuals. We should be content with the near-at-hand: the harvests of our fields, hills, rivers, seas and moors. The Chinaman has his bowl of rice, the Irishman his cauldron of potatoes. At this time of year, our equivalent ought to be a grouse. The grouse is a fascinating bird, and not just in the way that it swirls and swerves and, after a final jink, speeds by contemptuously. It can make even fine shots feel foolish, let alone those, such as your correspondent, whose marksmanship qualifies them for membership of the RSPB.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: The billionaires who no one seems to hate

Two interesting news items coincided the other week Two interesting news items coincided the other week. The growing debate about the relatively light tax burden shouldered by the massively rich and the partial retirement of Steve Jobs. One dog failed to bark in the night. No one, as far as I can see, dared name Mr Jobs as one of the people who should pay more tax. In fact, for a billionaire head of a vast, powerful US multinational, Jobs has enjoyed a special indulgence: to some people his is almost the only acceptable face of capitalism. Will Wilkinson, blogging for the Economist, suggests people are dazzled by the beauty

Aidan Hartley

Wild Life | 10 September 2011

Aidan Hartley’s Wild Life  Nairobi My friend Philip Coulson was shot at midnight while driving home after the theatre in Nairobi recently. He had slowed down to go over some rumble strips when a white car halted in front of him. ‘A man got out and I could see in silhouette that he had a gun,’ Philip tells me. He backed away in reverse but the man walked up and from a few feet away he fired his pistol at Philip’s face. The closed window exploded. Philip felt a tug in his stomach. ‘That was a bit over the top,’ he says. ‘I thought, “I’d better get out of here.”’

Deborah Ross

Fatal flaw

I love the story of Jane Eyre more than life itself, which has never been much cop but, infuriatingly, I could not love this adaptation. I say ‘infuriating’ because what it does right it does very right. It is stunningly mounted, for example, with ferocious landscapes and howling winds and the sort of storms that split skies open. But what it does wrong is fatal, and the error is this: it just isn’t passionate or sexy enough. It is Jane Eyre with all the awful weather but minus the throb of erotic impulse. Jane and Rochester’s first kiss must, surely, be the most longed-for kiss in all of English literature

Friday

Jonathan Jones

From the archives: 9/11

This Sunday marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Here is the article Stephen Glover wrote for The Spectator in response: “The terrorists want us to believe the world has ended. We must not fall into their trap.”, Stephen Glover, 15 September 2001 As those who are old enough remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was shot, so we will all recall what we were doing when we heard about the attack on New York. I was reading the controversial new book about Tina Brown and Harry Evans, which I had planned to write about for this column. Then my elder son rang

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Obama’s plan B: tax cuts

Washington, DC The clue is in the name. A stimulus is supposed to stimulate, and Obama’s first attempt stimulated nothing more than the American national debt. So he’s trying again, with a $447 billion package (he’s careful not to call it a “stimulus”) in what will probably be his last roll of the pre-election dice. But $245 billion of it would be debt-financed tax cuts.  Not sales tax cuts, the type of which Ed Balls is prescribing for Britain. It’s all payroll tax cuts: reducing the tax on jobs in the hope of encouraging more hiring. Given the temporary nature of the tax cuts, I doubt this will be the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

9.9.1513

The original and gravest episode of Disaster for Scotland. Today’s the 498th anniversary of Flodden. A bleak day for Scotland; bleaker still for King James himself and the Men of the Ettrick Forest. Legend has it only one man from these parts returned alive and the memory of that remains the centrepiece of Selkirk’s annual Common Riding. Jean Elliot’s lament, The Flowers of the Forest, dates from 1756. Here’s Ronnie Browne’s version:

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Blair returns to warn of the dangers of Iran

With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, Tony Blair has given an interview to The Times. What’s making news is his—to my mind, accurate–warnings about just how dangerous it would be for the Middle East for the Iranian regime to get a nuclear bomb. But what struck me about the interview was how much easier Blair believed things would be in Afghanistan and Iraq than they have been.  He tells the paper that: “What that means is that you can knock out, militarily, the regime, but then when you’re engaged in the process of nation building afterwards, it’s not like nation building was in, say, the Balkans or Eastern Europe.” “You know,

Thursday

The Spectator

Who cares about abortion?

Thanks to Nadine Dorries’ amendment to the Health and Social Care bill, abortion rights have been discussed a great deal this week – both inside and outside of Parliament. In her cover article for this week’s Spectator (out today), Mary Wakefield says that this debate has revealed a “strange and unpleasant consensus… that abortion is not just a necessary evil, but a jolly good thing.” In the piece, Mary asks “Why are we so keen on abortion?”: “The fact is that unless you’re a fan of infanticide you’ve got to agree that somewhere along the slippery ascent from that little Alka-Seltzer of pluripotent cells to the birth of an actual