Society

Saturday

27 Aug 2011

The post-Gaddafi future

The question for Libyans, as they take their first momentous steps into the post-Gaddafi era, is whether they can now build a government and country worthy of their heroic struggle against one of the world’s worst tyrants. For decades, conventional thinking about Arab nations, especially among the experts, argued that they were best ruled by ‘strongmen’, a western euphemism for pro-western dictators such as the deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his former counterpart in Tunisia Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. According to this line of thought, Arabs don’t do democracy. They are too tribal and fractious for such enlightened politics. For western leaders, it has been a case of

Rod Liddle

Libya suggests that Cameron has a bad case of the Blairs

These are heady days for the proponents of liberal evangelism. Saif Gaddafi had to leave a telephone call because, he explained, ‘There is shooting inside my house’ and a little further away there are people whooping loudly in Tripoli. The news of the rebels’ victory may be a shade premature at time of writing — they have form in overstating their conquests — but it looks as if ol’ Muammar has had his lot. These are heady days for the proponents of liberal evangelism. Saif Gaddafi had to leave a telephone call because, he explained, ‘There is shooting inside my house’ and a little further away there are people whooping

Michael Mcmahon

Blots on the landscape

On a walking holiday in France a couple of weeks ago, I was making my way along the ridge that forms the very edge of the plateau of the Vercors when I heard a whooshing, rushing sound behind me that made me jump. When I turned, I jumped again, for there, less than 100 yards away and level with me, was a glider sailing through the sky, so close that I could see the pilot’s face as he gracefully rode the thermals that rose from the valley bottom, a thousand feet below. As the plane flew away, some words flew into my head: ‘Then off, off forth on swing,/ As

Bruce Anderson

Drink: The star of the Stars

Forty years ago this English summer, Australia was stricken by a cultural catastrophe. The damage to national morale has reverberated down the decades. It has contributed to the implosion of Australian cricket and the loss of the Ashes, now irrevocable. The disaster occurred when the only two intellectuals in the convict settlements both bought one-way tickets to London. Forty years on, Clive James is marginally the better known. But from the outset, Roxy Beaujolais (née Jean Hoffmann: New South Wales meets New Orleans) has been part of the va et vient. For a time, she ran the front of house at Ronnie Scott’s. She then decided that she wanted to

Frank M-Ahearn

The truth behind hacking? It’s a global business – and journalists are the least of it

‘Hi, this is Mr Pretext from mobile phone activations. Our systems are down and I need you to bring up a customer’s mobile account for me please.’ I must have repeated this lie thousands of times in the past 20 years. It helped me gain access to information — criminal records, social security numbers, phone logs — that I would then hand on to all sorts of clients: journalists, insurers, cuckolded husbands and even policemen. As an American who spent many years in this underground industry, I can tell you that the British phone-hacking scandal has exposed only a tiny part of a vast criminal network. In the old days,

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Tube lines

In Competition No. 2710 you were invited to supply a poem reflecting on travelling by Tube. Not something, perhaps, that would inspire many of us to heights of lyricism, though T.S. Eliot evokes subterranean travel to powerful effect in Four Quartets. Here he is, in ‘East Coker’, on the experience of stopping in a tunnel, when life itself seems to stands still: ‘Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations/ And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence/ And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen/ Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about…’ And then, of course, there

Professor Sir Simon Wessely

Mind the gap | 27 August 2011

It’s time to stop separating psychiatry and neurology In 1987, I went to work as a trainee psychiatrist at the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen’s Square in London. One of my jobs was to see a group of patients who were not popular with the neurologists who ran the place. The patients had symptoms that might have had a neurological explanation — muscle pain, inability to walk, being unable to think clearly, feeling exhausted after the most minimal physical or mental exertion — yet the neurologists thought that they were at best suffering from depression or at worst swinging the lead. They found it irritating that the patients insisted

Hugo Rifkind

Suddenly everyone wants an iron bar under their bed

I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘ I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘Where did you get an iron bar?’ she wanted to know, and I told her I’d salvaged it from a towel rail. I think it was that little act of ingenuity which impressed her the most. It’s terrible, really, the hopelessness of the urban middle classes. It’s wonder we still know how to feed. She’d taken to sleeping with

Jesse Norman

Borneo Notebook

••• After a week in the jungle, it is perfectly clear to me that in any contest for creepy-crawly capital of the world, Borneo would be right up there with no questions asked. They tell you about the mosquitoes. What they don’t tell you about are the leeches, which are everywhere. The ordinary brown kind lie in wait on the path, rearing up like two-inch mini-Godzillas full of gangster attitude and the will to win. Used to chomping through boar and mouse-deer hide, they made short work of my hiking socks. They pump up from matchstick to chipolata size in a few minutes if you don’t catch them quickly, and

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: Technology and the riots

It was the biggest technological story of the month and I missed it. Instead it was my much cooler friend, Jonathan Akwue, who first mentioned Blackberry Messenger and its possible connection with the riots (at urbanmashup.wordpress.com). He spent the next two weeks fielding inquiries from the media. Blackberry Messenger (or BBM, as its users call it) is an application unique to Blackberry handsets, which allows users to message each other in a way similar to text messaging, yet to larger groups and at lower cost. On its own, it has earned the Blackberry, once exclusively a businessman’s handset, a huge following among the young. (Blackberry has in the process become

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Any other business | 27 August 2011

The shocks won’t end with the summer The world’s stock markets have had a pretty gruesome August. Listen to most of the financial press and you might think the reasons for this are hideously complicated. Not so. It boils down to the simple truth neatly summed up by Tim Price, director of investments at PFP Group: ‘What is unsustainable by definition cannot indefinitely last.’ If there isn’t enough real money around to repay debt, be it Greek, Irish and US sovereign debt or next door’s mortgage, it won’t get paid back. As every day goes by it becomes increasingly obvious to everyone that the West will never be able to generate enough income to service its debts and its

Charlotte Moore

All in a night’s work

This inter-war story of an Anglo-Irish family in crisis opens with a bang. Caroline Adair, recovering from measles at Butler’s Hill, her aunt and uncle’s lovely house in the South-west, wakes in the night to find Sinn Feiners surrounding the place. This inter-war story of an Anglo-Irish family in crisis opens with a bang. Caroline Adair, recovering from measles at Butler’s Hill, her aunt and uncle’s lovely house in the South-west, wakes in the night to find Sinn Feiners surrounding the place. The family are given ten minutes to clear out. ‘Don’t be frightened, darling’, says kind Aunt Moira, ‘they won’t do us any harm, they only want to burn

Friday

26 Aug 2011

Danielle Lazarus

The danger of disproportionate sentences

It’s great that hundreds of looters are being punished properly, and the police are to be congratulated for working hard to find the thugs responsible for damage during the riots. But whilst it’s important to be tough, let’s also beware of completely ludicrous, perhaps counterproductive sentencing. Today it was reported that a young man called Anderson Fernandes has been jailed for 16 months for stealing an ice cream. He walked into an open ice cream store, prepared two scoops on a cone, took one lick, then passed it on to a nearby woman because, he said, he didn’t like the coffee flavour. Is this really a crime that deserves a

The Spectator

The week that was | 26 August 2011

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the last week. Fraser Nelson celebrates the schools revolution, and considers Cameron’s immigration problem. James Forsyth reveals how the government plans to overcome Labour’s education legacy, and reports on an encouraging start for the new Libya. David Blackburn charts the constructive debate between left and right over the riots, and examines thelatest divisions in the Eurozone. Martin Bright is pleased that the EDL Tower Hamlets march has been cancelled. Rod Liddle is sceptical about our “great victory“. Alex Massie explains how the Eurozone is affecting the SNP. The Arts Blog reads the work of Britain’s most tweetwise woman. The Books Blog has collected

Peter Robins

Local interest | 26 August 2011

A couple in Merthyr transformed their front room into a shop selling cannabis and diazepam in order to pay off a loan on a mobility scooter. The woman was jailed for 10 months; the man, whose scooter it was, for 15. (South Wales Echo) An allotment-holder in Stourbridge has grown a 25lb cabbage. The secret, he says, is feeding them with liquid comfrey – and adding urine to the compost. (Express and Star, Wolverhampton) A six-year-old girl from Rushey Mead, Leicester, has received a B in maths GCSE. A girl of five took the same examination in east London, but she only managed an E. (Leicester Mercury) A 33-year-old man from

David Blackburn

Bernanke delays decision on QE3

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke has signalled that there will be no Quantitative Easing until next month’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting, which has been extened to two days. Markets have been anticipating Bernanke’s speech all day and many traders were expecting some discussion of further easing. But Bernanke has declined them, saying that now is not the time for these issues as the summer’s economic storms continue to blow across the globe and their effects on America remain unclear. His comments came soon after the news that American growth is being downgraded to 1 per cent this year, further hitting the markets’ confidence. There are those who wanted decisive action on QE3 today and it is

Mark Mason

Bookends: Pooh-poohed by Owl

Mark Mason has written the Bookends column in this week’s magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: ‘Owl?’ said Pooh. ‘What’s a biography?’ ‘A biography,’ replied Owl, ‘is an Important Book. Such as an Interested Person might read. Anyone who is interested in the real-life toys which inspired you and Piglet and the others, for instance, might be tempted to read The Life and Times of Winnie the Pooh by Shirley Harrison.’ ‘Is that the one you said was published by Remember When at nineteen pounds ninety-nine?’ asked Pooh. ‘The very same,’ answered Owl. Then he fixed Pooh with a Meaningful Stare. ‘But — and I say this

Alex Massie

Let the English Defence League March

Speaking of the Black Shorts, there are two ways of dealing with the English Defence [sic] League: ruthless suppression or equally ruthless public mockery. So, with all due and deserved respect to Brother Bright I’m unpersuaded that it’s possible to be a “freedom of speech fundamentalist” and support banning the EDL’s proposed march through Tower Hamlets. That the EDL wants to stir up trouble is not in doubt. But unless the view is taken that their organisation should be proscribed, they have rights too and the grimness of their views is not of paramount concern. Indeed, it may be that banning their marches is more useful to them than anything

Alex Massie

Plum Imprisoned

There is not much that’s new, I think, in the release of the MI5 files on PG Wodehouse and his wartime broadcasts from Germany. The Guardian headline reads I was not a Nazi collaborator, PG Wodehouse told MI5 and, of course, Wodehouse told MI5 he wasn’t a Nazi collaborator because he was not, in fact, a Nazi collaborator. Naive? Perhaps. Foolish? Certainly. But a collaborator? Don’t be ridiculous. And yet, one way or another this stuff keeps resurfacing even though you’d have thought Plum’s knighthood – delayed by the whiff of There’s Something Not Quite Right About Those Radio Programmes – might have settled the matter. If that weren’t enough

James Forsyth

The advent of social impact bonds

Today’s announcement of social impact bonds is one of the best things that the government has done. These bonds offer a chance to deal with some of this country’s most difficult social problems at no cost and no risk to the taxpayer. The bonds see money raised from the private and voluntary sectors to fund local government’s work with problem families. The idea is that the bond holders earn their money back and some through the savings made by sorting the lives of these households out. Considering that close to £100,000 a year is spent on some of these families, the opportunities here are considerable. At the moment, only ‘social