Society Archives

Saturday

11 Dec 2010

Freedom starts with plain speaking

The Jeremy Vine show (BBC Radio 2) rang the other day to ask whether I’d come on and talk about the newly ennobled Tory peer Howard Flight’s remarks about ‘breeding’ and the underclass. The Jeremy Vine show (BBC Radio 2) rang the other day to ask whether I’d come on and talk about the newly ennobled Tory peer Howard Flight’s remarks about ‘breeding’ and the underclass. As usual, my immediate answer was, ‘No. You just want me to come on and be your token hate figure.’ ‘Oh pleeeeze,’ they said. ‘We’ll send a car. A really nice one.’ ‘Oh, all right then. But not because of the car. You’d have

Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 11 December 2010

Why the Governor is in the soup — and how I got the soup into the Governor I’m no WikiLeaker, but I am prepared to reveal that I have, on two occasions, lunched à deux with Professor Mervyn King in his private dining room at the Bank of England. Not a single word of what he said will appear in this column or anywhere else. But I think it’s probably OK to tell you about the soup. As soon as this smoothly indeterminate vegetable concoction was served at our first encounter, the Governor filled his spoon, raised it halfway to his mouth, and embarked on a tour d’horizon to which,

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: Goodbye World Cup, hello xenophobia

So here’s a thing: if Fifa is so bloody venal and corrupt, then why on earth did England ever have anything to do with it? If much of its activity is spent lumbering poor regions of the earth with a vast web of unaffordable stadiums and expensive infrastructure before disappearing with billions of untaxed income, then why has there been such a howl of outrage that England wasn’t allowed to join in? And if they’re all so ‘buyable’, to use Andy Anson’s word, why did we send a prince among men, not to mention Prince William and the Prime Minister, to grovel before it? England’s misconceived and (apart from the

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Backchat

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2676 you were invited to submit a reply to the poet from Wordsworth’s cuckoo or Keats’s nightingale. A huge entry yielded an entertaining parade of stroppy birds with a fine line in put-downs. While Wordsworth took the greatest punishment (deservedly, some might say) in terms of volume, the nightingales were on especially withering form. Everyone shone this week, but Jan D. Hodge, Catherine Tufariello, W.J. Webster, John Beaton and G.W. Tapper stood out and were unlucky losers. The winning entries, printed below, earn their authors £25 apiece; George Simmers pockets the extra five pounds. Darkling I’ve listened, too, while you orate

Mary Keen

Pretty maids all in a row

It is received gardening wisdom that men tend lawns and women plant flowers. This is a good year to see how two exceptional writers on gardens live up to that definition. Our top horticultural columnists, Anna Pavord of the Independent and Robin Lane Fox of the Financial Times, have both published elegant and witty collections of journalism in 2010. Lane Fox’s Thoughtful Gardening (Particular Books, £25) has already been reviewed in The Spectator. For the purposes of male/ female comparison I can record that Lane Fox writes that flower gardening is what interests him, which makes a nonsense of received wisdom. He does not appear to mow much, but he

Friday

10 Dec 2010

James Forsyth

Holding the line

I must admit to being surprised that we haven’t heard of more people—both protesters and police—being injured yesterday. The window of my office here in parliament looks out onto the gates of the Commons and Parliament Square and almost every time I looked up yesterday afternoon the rioters seemed to be charging the rather thick blue line. It wasn’t a crowd surging forward but a full-on medieval style assault. Obviously, it is wrong and worrying if innocent protesters got beaten by the police. But there were so many people intent on violence at yesterday’s protest that the police were in a nigh-on impossible position. If they had not forcefully held

Alex Massie

Trump Considers New Low

This is, I’m pretty certain, just the usual sort of publicity-whoring nonsense but, just in case it comes to anything, we’d have a new winner in the Worst, Most Ludicrous Presidential Candidate Ever stakes: Let’s get one thing straight: Donald Trump doesn’t want to run for president. Honestly, he doesn’t. Not interested. But because the country is in such dire straits, he says, the business tycoon and perennial publicity hound just might have no choice. The country needs him. “For the first time really would think about it. And I am thinking about it. It doesn’t mean I want to do it. I’d prefer not doing it. I’m having a

The Spectator

The week that was | 10 December 2010

Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: Fraser Nelson explains why we must remember the lessons of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, and says that the student protesters may have a point. James Forsyth tracks how far our schools have fallen, and reports on a day of gaffes. Peter Hoskin watches Labour stumble into the tuition fees vote, and outlines the coming battle over mainstream Conservatism. Ed Howker reveals the great Olympics cash-in. Daniel Korski says it’s time for an Afghan inquiry. Nick Cohen takes on the Illiberal Democrats. Rod Liddle see little sense in Ken Clarke’s prisons plans. Alex Massie sets out to define authentic

Alex Massie

A Horse Outside

Clearly, this song should top the Irish Christmas charts. The ghosts of Yeats, Kavanagh and all the other lads have nothing on the Rubberbandits. The Plain People of Ireland have a horse outside and they’re going to ride it. Warning: this song contains a considerable amount of huge quantity of profanity. Warning too: if you’re Irish or have spent heaps of time in Ireland you may also find it very funny.

Thursday

9 Dec 2010

Alex Massie

Cricket, Lovely Cricket

Many thanks to Brother Bright for pointing me towards this completely charming British Council film about cricket. It’s narrated by Ralph Richardson and John Arlott and features the 1948 Lords Test – Bradman’s last appearance on the ground. The thing that’s striking is that while everything has changed, the essentials remain much the same. In that respect then, like monarchy, cricket is close to the epitome of a certain kind of English conservatism. For more terrific films from the 1940s and 50s, digitised and made accessible in part thanks to Martin’s New Deal of the Mind, pop over here.

Fraser Nelson

Christmas cheer, Spectator style

It was the Spectator’s Carol Concert last night, in the Fleet St church of St Bride’s – and one of my favourite nights of the year. The choir is amazing: if you’re a sucker for John Rutter-style choral arrangements (which I very much am), then it was heaven. The choir’s first piece was Harold Darke’s stunning arrangement of In The Bleak Midwinter, perhaps my second-favourite piece of Christmas music.* I was up for the first reading, Isaiah Ch9, predicting the birth of Christ. It was weirdly short, so I looked up the Good Book to see if I could beef it up a little – and it was one of

Wednesday

8 Dec 2010

Alex Massie

The Peculiar Genius of Thomas Friedman

Is, as someone suggested recently, to be either a dumb person’s idea of a clever person or a clever person’s idea of a dumb person. Or both. Perhaps the worst paragraph written this year comes, not surprisingly, from America’s chief metaphor-mangler Thomas Friedman: More than ever, America today reminds me of a working couple where the husband has just lost his job, they have two kids in junior high school, a mortgage and they’re maxed out on their credit cards. On top of it all, they recently agreed to take in their troubled cousin, Kabul, who just can’t get his act together and keeps bouncing from relative to relative. Meanwhile,

Daniel Korski

Time for an Afghan Inquiry

The Iraq Inquiry had been conspicuously silent, but now John Chilcot’s team has called Tony Blair to give evidence again. It’s expected that our former PM will make the trip to the Queen Elizabeth II centre early next year. That would push the expected deadline for the inquiry’s work finishing – at the end of this year – into 2011. Few people, however, expect the inquiry to say anything novel or get Tony Blair to say anything different than before. Its well-phrased final report may change policy in the margins – but in the security establishment there is little question of what needs doing. RUSI has published reams of reports

Ted Sumpster

Keeping the financial sector in Britain

The financial services industry in the UK is at a crucial juncture. Our new research report “Not with a Bang but a Whimper” – published tomorrow – highlights the decline in the UK’s competitiveness as a domicile for this sector, and the increasing likelihood that both companies and workers will take the leap and choose to base themselves elsewhere. Many will see this as a good thing. The economy is still recovering from the financial crisis, the eventual cost to the public purse of the bank bailouts remains unknown, and the yearly round of hated bank bonuses are impending. On the other hand, losing such a significant contributor to GDP,

Alex Massie

Oh Christ, Bloody Lockerbie Again

Whaddyaknow, Wikileaks have some Lockerbie-related cables? Unfortunately they’re only about the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and so less interesting – or perhaps simply less illuminating – than Lockerbie-related cables from the investigation and trial years might be. The Guardian’s headline is typically tendentious: Lockerbie bomber freed after Gaddafi’s ‘thuggish’ threats. This is true in as much as Gaddafi threatened to cut-off British business interests in Libya and then Megrahi was released. It is not true however that, as the headline implies, Megrahi was freed because of those threats. Nor, despite everything, is there any evidence in these cables that Gaddafi’s threats – made to a body that was not

Tuesday

7 Dec 2010

James Forsyth

How far our schools have fallen

Comparing GCSE or A-Level results to previous years is a meaningless exercise. Leaving aside all the arguments about whether or not these exams are getting easier, it doesn’t much matter if children today are doing better academically than their peers a generation ago. What does matter is how they are doing in comparison to children in other countries, the people they’ll be competing with in the global marketplace. Today’s PISA rankings, the OECD’s comparison of education standards, makes for depressing reading on this front. England has fallen from 7th in reading in 2000 to 25th today, from 8th to 27th in maths and 4th to 16th in science. Admittedly,

Alex Massie

Is Oxford University Racist?

That’s the question asked by David Lammy and the Guardian today. According to the paper 21 Oxford and Cambridge colleges made no offers to black, British students last year. At Oxford just one student of self-described “Black Caribbean” background won a place. Only 35 applied. The headline figures are pretty terrible and enough to give anyone pause. But they are only headline figures. Virtual Economics argues that they don’t tell the full story, not least because the sample sizes are often so small. He has a point: if just 35 Black Caribbean students applied to Oxford last year that’s not much more than one per college. I’m not sure this

Nick Cohen

The Illiberal Democrats

I would be taking high-mindedness too far if I were to say that the press is missing the real point of the Mike Hancock story. I cannot blame editors for falling to their knees and thanking whatever gods there may be for giving them the tale of how a bearded old man hired a gorgeous Russian assistant, whom MI5 now believe to be a Kremlin spy. Editors are only flesh and blood, after all, despite appearances to the contrary. So I will just say that, when they have finished feasting their eyes on Ms Zatulitever and the other East European lovelies Mr Hancock has found himself obliged to assist in

Peter Hoskin

Some framework for the prisons debate

I thought that CoffeeHousers might appreciate a few graphs to steer them around the prisons debate. It’s by no means a complete overview of the issue, but just three of the trends that hover over Ken Clarke’s proposals: 1. Rising prison population, falling crime Well, that’s striking enough. Expect, as any fule know, correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation – which is to say, the fall in crime could be due to something other than the rise in prisoners. Some put it down to improving economic conditions. Others mention deterrents such as CCTV. But those correlations can barely be hardened into a cause, either. So, all rather inconclusive. The Prison Works

Alex Massie

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust: If Swanny Don’t Get You, Anderson Must

So, little blogging here. Partly because, even more so than usual, I’ve been living on Australian time these past few days. I’ve a quick piece up at Critical Reaction on the Adelaide Massacre: Never mind ‘Were you up for Portillo?’ Were you up for Adelaide? An entire generation of England supporters have waited all their lives for this sort of payback moment. Not since 1985 have England dominated a series in this fashion; not since Mike Gatting led MCC to victory in 1986-87 have England enjoyed even a marginal supremacy Down Under. Indeed, Gatting’s side was the last to win a ‘live’ test in Australia. You have to be over 35