Society

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Corporatism is not an adequate foreign policy

The events of the last two weeks have demonstrated that David Cameron needs a revamped foreign policy. This is not, in itself, a surprise. Foreign policies sketched out in opposition seldom survive contact with reality. Remember Bush saying he did “not do nation-building”? And who can forget the ignominious fate of Robin Cook’s “ethical foreign policy”? David Cameron sought to distinguish himself from the adventuring, idealistic Blair with what he regarded as a ‘pragmatic’ foreign policy – that is, promoting British exporters.   But as I say in my News of the World column (£) today, this rebounded spectacularly last week when his tour of the Arab world was overshadowed

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 26 February 2011

Another date with a younger man is not ideal. But as I only get asked out by men in their 20s nowadays — something to do with evolution, no doubt — I have decided to go with it. So, to drinks and dinner with a very handsome 26-year-old student. Actually, he is retraining to be something artistic after leaving banking, so he is not really a student. More a conscientious objector. But he is still very young. Technically, if I had had a baby at the same age my best friend at school did, I could be his mother. Perhaps I have been watching too much Cougar Town but I

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 26 February 2011

‘How are you getting on?’ said my landlady. ‘We can see the moor from our place, and every time I’ve looked at it lately it’s been shrouded in fog.’ ‘It has been foggy,’ I admitted. ‘Wet, too. And the pipes froze again.’ ‘Would you like to come wassailing?’ she said. ‘There’s nothing like a wassail to help you through a cold, wet February.’ So last weekend I went a-wassailing with my landlady. She’d said to bring a gun if I had one. If not, something noisy to frighten away the evil spirits. And it’ll probably be muddy, she said, so bring boots. I don’t have a gun. But I did

Taki

High life | 26 February 2011

I haven’t got that much time left, but I’d gladly give ten years of my life to see that homicidal maniac Gaddafi strung up from a palm tree alongside his warthog sons, especially Hannibal Gaddafi, an expert in imprisoning and torturing helpless servants and beating up women in posh Western hotels. What a ghastly world we live in. Gaddafi has been bullying us for 42 years, his henchmen murdering an English policewoman, killing 1,200 Libyan prisoners in cold blood back in 1996, shooting down an unarmed civilian airliner, then cheering when the convicted terror-bomber is released by a spineless British government more interested in oil and gas than in justice.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 26 February 2011

Q. Our son is at school in England with the son of a billionaire. They have become friends and we would like to invite the child for the week-end. However, our own manor house, while of historic and architectural significance, does not offer the opulence to which our prospective guest might be accustomed. How can we address our pangs of social anxiety? In the country where we live, we have certain social and literary cachet but no serious money. —Name and address withheld A. Your problem needs to be put in context. You are a high-profile political figure; the billionaire boy will be aware of this. Even if he has

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: A lesson in satire

You have to take your hat off to Michael Gove. In spite of the Herculean task he has saddled himself with — saving the state education system of this country — he has managed to find time to produce a brilliant piece of satire. I’m referring to a blog on the Local Schools Network entitled ‘Celebrating diversity at Stoke Newington School’. The Local Schools Network is a website that exists primarily to disseminate smears and lies about free schools. It boasts the patronage of Fiona Millar and Melissa Benn, but by far its most energetic contributor is Francis Gilbert, a media studies teacher in Bethnal Green. Gilbert has devoted himself,

The Spectator

Letters | 26 February 2011

Question the sceptics Sir: Let’s set aside the fact that the article by Matt Ridley and Nicholas Lewis, ‘Breaking the Ice’ (19 February) — to which you oddly gave cover prominence — was outstandingly the most boring thing I have come across in The Spectator for over 30 years. What, exactly, is the point of this self-confessed ‘group of amateurs’? I am not a scientist, but I was for some while responsible for developing Conservative party policy on climate change. Nerdy quibbles about the extent or location of melting ice in Antarctica don’t get us very far. The various embarrassing, though not devious, cock-ups by the University of East Anglia,

The Spectator

Barometer | 26 February 2011

University challenge An analysis of university applications has suggested that 30,000 students had committed plagiarism when writing personal statements on their forms. An earlier trawl through applications found: 175 applicants were inspired to apply for medicine by an infirm grandfather 234 had developed an interest in medicine after ‘burning a hole in my pyjamas aged 8’ 370 professed ‘a fascination for the way the human body works’. Source:  UCAS Top guns The government has said it will review arms exports to Bahrain after the suppression of peaceful protests there. Who are the biggest arms exporters and importers? Arms exported in 2009 USA: $10.3bn Russia: $6.8bn Germany: $3.8bn France: $2.8bn UK:

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 26 February 2011

Iain Duncan Smith said last week that he was going to ‘lift a million out of poverty’. Lifting is something of which people in poverty run a perennial risk, especially if they are children. It is as though they were a field of root crops. ‘Some potatoes in Lincolnshire are lifting well, others are below average,’ the agricultural news used to say, when papers ran such items. Iain Duncan Smith said last week that he was going to ‘lift a million out of poverty’. Lifting is something of which people in poverty run a perennial risk, especially if they are children. It is as though they were a field of

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 26 February 2011

The point about crowds, as Gaddafi is now learning, is that there are more of them than there are of him. Romans knew this only too well and, like Gaddafi, went out of their way to prevent large gatherings. Time, therefore, for Libyans to take radical Roman action. In 494 bc, the Roman poor were in conflict with aristocratic landholders because so many of them had been placed in bondage through an inability to pay their debts. The Senate refused to move on the matter and, in the face of riots and disturbances, threatened to bring in the army to quell incipient mutiny spreading among the ordinary people (the plebs).

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 26 February 2011

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, visited Egypt, speaking to Mohamed Tantawi, the head of the armed forces supreme council, and to Ahmed Shafiq, the caretaker Prime Minister. Later, in Kuwait, he said that ‘denying people their basic rights does not preserve stability, rather the reverse’. Before leaving Britain, Mr Cameron had written about the government’s plans to allow private and voluntary groups to run almost every kind of public service. Foreign migrants accounted for a net increase of 3.2 million in the United Kingdom population between 1997 and 2010, according to the Office for National Statistics. Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, gave new criteria for adoption to allow white

The Spectator

Leader: Freedom fight

To turn an army on one’s own people is bad enough. But to call in foreign mercenaries, as Colonel Gaddafi did this week in Libya, is a rare form of savagery, one which offers a chilling glimpse into the real nature of his dictatorship. He should be stopped. We have heard this week the familiar calls for Britain to sit back and watch what is an internal matter for the countries involved. But like it or not, Britain is involved in Libya. Quite apart from the various oil contracts, the last government granted licences to export £8 million of arms to Libya. The SAS have even been training Libyan forces,

Peter Hoskin

Are right-wing politicians better looking? Discuss…

Did any CoffeeHousers hear this discussion between Bill Cash and Stephen Pound on whether the left or the right have the most attractive politicians? It was inspired by a recent Swedish research report that came down in favour of the latter. You can read the whole thing at this link – but, seeing as it’s the weekend, I thought a summary might be in order. So here, to help you form an opinion on this most crucial of issues, are four points taken from its pages. Whether their generalisations are correct or not is another matter entirely: 1) The right is better looking. The report dwells, for a whole host

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

FAO Hexhamgeezer and other Northerners

I was up in your neck of the woods last week – frankly, I expected you to put a bit of a spread on, but there we are. This was a brief break designed to convince the missus that we should move to Northumberland and that, contrary to what she believes, you really can buy tampons north of Daventry. The reasons for wanting to move north are a) the people are nicer, b) I’m from up there anyway and miss it, c) the countryside is nicer, d) the property is cheaper, and e) there are next to no mewing media scumbags. It’s also safer, as I patiently explained to my

Martin Bright

So Gaddafi is a psychotic murderer: don’t say you weren’t warned

It is nearly two decades since the murder of Ali Abuzeid, a Libyan dissident, who was cut down on the streets of London in the most brutal fashion. Having been identified as one of Colonel Gaddafi’s “stray dogs”, he was tracked down to his west London grocery, where he was living out his time in exile and assassinated. It was a particularly brutal murder: kebab skewers were thrust through Mr Abuzeid’s face.   I first wrote about the case in the Observer with my colleague Antony Barnett when Security Service files were leaked that showed how MI6 had been led a merry dance by a senior Libyan diplomat they had

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 26 February 2011

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2685 you were invited to submit a marital dialogue in verse. The scene set was one of interspousal disharmony: a domestic hell peopled by a familiar cast of nagging frigid wives and long-suffering, emotionally disengaged husbands. Not much ammo there for the pro-marriage lobby, then. Tim Raikes, Bill Greenwell and Josephine Boyle were only narrowly eclipsed by the winners, printed below, who are rewarded with £25 each. Max Ross nabs the extra fiver. Shall I compare thee to a summer day? No, no — I need to sleep. No time for play. Then, dear, make me immortal with a kiss. I

John R. Bradley

Arabian nightmare

In Abdallah Guech Street, a few hundred metres from the main mosque in the heart of Tunis’s old quarter, lies a red-light district which has thrived since the 19th century. Here the Ottomans legalised (and regulated) prostitution as they had in much of the rest of the Muslim world. Uniquely, though, in the Arab world, the tradition in Tunisia endured: every one of the country’s historic quarters boasts bordellos — even, most remarkably, Kairouan, Islam’s fourth holiest city after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. In keeping with Tunisia’s deep-rooted secularism and unprecedented championing of Muslim women’s rights, the prostitutes carry cards issued by the Interior Ministry, pay taxes like everyone else

Kevin Myers

Eire of sorrows

It doesn’t matter who wins the Irish elections – the country will remain an outpost of Brussels Dublin There is something tragically irrelevant about the elections taking place this weekend in Ireland. In recent months, Ireland has felt less like a country and more like the first acquisition of the Reborn Frankish Empire, after the Central European Bank and the IMF in effect took over day-to-day management of Irish affairs. The effect of this is to so reduce the significance of the general election that it’s more like appointing the staff of a small post office, in which the Taoiseach is actually just a shop steward negotiating tea breaks. The

Matthew Lynn

Sister act | 26 February 2011

Josef Ackermann is something of a rarity in big business these days. Speculating last month on the possibility of a woman one day joining his board, the Deutsche Bank chief executive remarked that she might make it ‘more colourful and prettier’. Despite howls of outrage from the sisterhood — or the Schwesternschaft, as they are somewhat scarily called in Germany — what was interesting about the banker’s casual sexism was how odd it sounded rather than how ordinary. Most CEOs these days would rather boast about how their factories pumped millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere than make any remark that could be construed as disparaging to women.

Ed Howker

The alternative story

What the Electoral Reform Society doesn’t want you to know In ten weeks’ time, Britons will be asked to vote on arguably the dullest question ever put to a referendum: whether to adopt the Alternative Voting system in our general elections. Under AV, instead of picking one MP, voters would list their first, second and third preferences. Our elections would be made infinitely more complicated. Counting extra votes means extra bodies, computers, and so on. And that, in turn, means lots of money can be made. The additional cost of switching to AV could be as much as £120 million, since this complex system may require voting machines. Little wonder