Society

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Security Theatre Comes at a Price

Quick public service announcement*: you’ve only got a few hours left to register to avoid having to pay £9 every time you want to enter the United States. Yup, even the Visa Waiver programme costs these days. (And even registering to avoid the fee offers but partial relief since in two years time you’ll have to pay anyway.) And why is this happening? Why, because of our old friends in the United States Senate: The US Senate introduced the charge in an attempt to reverse the declining number of visitors to the country – the majority of the money raised will be used to fund promotion of the US as

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The Good Colonel 

I know he is a maniac and we should have had him shot or poisoned years ago; I know that his son is a ghastly arriviste who, worse, is friends with Peter Mandelson. But there is still something about Colonel Gaddafi which gladdens the heart. I first decided I liked him a bit when he insisted that out greatest literary figure was actually an Arab called Sheikh Spear. And his plan to extort billions and billions of pounds from the EU in order to stop African emigration here has a terrific very un-PC chutzpah about it. Here’s what he said: ‘Europe runs the risk of turning black from illegal immigration,

Peter Hoskin

Johnson caught in the crossfire

The shrapnel from the phone-hacking scandal is scorching more flesh by the day. This morning, it’s not Andy Coulson nor the Metropolitan who are under question – but Alan Johnson and the Home Office. According to a leaked memo obatined by the Guardian, the department considered launching an independent inquiry into the Met’s investigation last year, but abandoned the idea after a Home Office official stressed that Scotland Yard would “deeply resent” any such action. The police, continues the official, would have taken it as a sign that “we do not have full confidence” in them. And so it went no further. Johnson was, of course, in charge at the

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Prohibition Still Doesn’t Work

Stephen Pollard argues that this piece by Antonio Maria Costa, formerly Executive Director at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “simply rips apart the dangerously sloppy thinking from those who argue for the legalisation of hard (and soft) drugs.” Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Alternatively, one can think it profoundly misleading and alarmist. Costa argues that any attempts to introduce sanity (that’s not how he describes it) to the drug conversation will inevitably produce a sharp rise in drug use, and consequently addiction. Leaving aside the philosophical debates about drug-use, this is an argument that while intuitively plausible isn’t necessarily endorsed by the evidence available.

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 6 September – 13 September

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’ – which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write – so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game – from political stories in your local

David Blackburn

Coulson loosens the noose

The New York Times has produced what last year’s Guardian phone-hacking campaign lacked: direct testimony against Andy Coulson. Sean Hoare and an unnamed former News of the Screws editor allege that the practice was widespread and that Coulson encouraged it. These new revelations have rightly forced the Met to re-consider the case. At present, the political furore surrounds the Met’s incompetence not just the allegations against Coulson. Bill Keller, executive editor of the NYT, has claimed categorically that the ‘police already have evidence that they have chosen not to pursue’. Critics always believed the original investigation’s remit was too narrow, and Yates of the Yard was less than convincing when

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Sir Liam Donaldson can seriously damage your health

Apologies for the interregnum – I’ve been away in Austria, where there are mountains and you can smoke in hotel lifts. It’s a beautiful country. While there I read Michael Burleigh’s superb book, Moral Combat, which is about why we were totally right in World War Two. It was an enormous pleasure to have it propped up on the breakfast table as the Austrian waiters scurried hither and thither. I wonder if Sir Liam Donaldson has ever gone to Austria and if so, what he took to read there. Austrians have the highest smoking rate of any country in western Europe. They also have a fantastically unhealthy diet; not a

Sunday

Patrick Nolan

What you need to know ahead of the Spending Review: the Irish experience

This is the latest of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. The first six posts were on health, education, the coalition’s first hundred days, welfare, the Civil Service, and the New Zealand and Canadian experiences. Ireland As Colm McCarthy, Chair of Irish Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure, noted at a recent Reform conference the macroeconomic downturn in Ireland has been more severe than in almost any other European country: — The budget deficit, excluding the Exchequer cost of the banking collapse, went from near zero in 2007 to 11.5 per cent of GDP in the current year, despite fiscal cutbacks which began in

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Gove to introduce baccalaureate for 16 year-olds

Fixing the education system in Britain is absolutely crucial to promoting social mobility, the principal domestic social policy aim of the coalition. So Michael Gove’s announcement on the Andrew Marr show this morning that the government plans to introduce an English baccalaureate is to be welcomed. The baccalaureate programme will end at 16, still allowing specialisation at A-Level—one of the things that allows undergraduate education in this country to be far more intellectually rigorous than in the States, and will require pupils to do English, maths, science, a foreign or ancient language and a humanity. This should help stop the drift to softer subjects at GCSE and place pressure on

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Broken trust

‘You can’t get better than a Kwik-Fit fitter. We’re the boys to trust!’ I remember the TV advert well. When I was a child, the sight of the dancing men in blue overalls made me look forward to being old enough to drive a car so I could go to the cheerful cockney geezers to get my flat tyres seen to. A sequence featuring a boy in blue twirling a young girl around the depot floor particularly convinced me of the essential goodness of this organisation. The lyrics were stirring stuff (I’m not so sad that I remember them; I looked up the advert on YouTube): ‘Every Kwik-Fit fitter has

Jeremy Clarke

Healing hands

I turned up at Trixabell’s massage studio in a lather. It was a hot morning and I’d been rushing. Sweat was trickling down the sides of my face and soaking through my shirt in the usual places. I’d better have a shower, I said. There wasn’t one, she said. Nor was she worried about a bit of sweat. Trixabell was as friendly and talkative as she had been when she gave me her card in the gym. I should take off everything except my underpants, she said. As I stripped, she told me about how embarrassed she’d been at the garage earlier, not having enough money to pay for the

Taki

Young and beautiful

Spetses I was filled with unbearable nostalgia. There I was again, boating, swimming, sunning, drinking wine with good friends, feeling the ecstasy that only a Mediterranean afternoon can arouse in me. Transforming one’s feelings into language is difficult. One has to avoid sounding corny. Byron wrote about the Isles of Greece, and the sea that murmurs softly ‘Come again, and again’. I, too, have heard such voices, mostly when very young, swimming off my father’s boat, checking out the girls lolling on the beaches. The Med’s a drug hard to give up. Later, by now quite drunk, I floated around Bushido, all in black, its 90-foot-plus masts gently rocking in

Robin Oakley

Prodigal’s return

Oh, how we love a prodigal who makes it. And oh how quickly we will dismiss those who remain on the wastrel path. A year ago this week, Kieren Fallon, the six times Champion jockey and winner of 15 Classics, started riding again in Britain for the first time since 2006. After the long absence from British racecourses, occasioned by two positive drug tests and earlier race-fixing charges which were dismissed in court, the Jeremiahs had a field day. Typical was the prediction: ‘By the time his suspension expires in the summer of 2009 he will be yesterday’s man’ and the headline: ‘Fallon: no way back for the finest talent

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 4 September 2010

Q. My teenage son, who has started a new school, wants to bring some friends to stay over an exeat. He is keen not to alienate these new friends by appearing to have overly authoritarian parents, but I have reason to believe they will bring mobile telephones to the table and will assume they may make and receive calls during dinner. How can I impose the normal rule of any civilised household without embarrassing my son? A.S., address withheld A. Informants tell me your house is particularly grand. Where this is the case, the parent figure usually has no trouble. It has been observed that teenagers will rise to the

Toby Young Toby Young

A Journey is about the UK’s tack to the centre, but Blair fails to nail his own legacy

There’s a scene at the beginning of The Special Relationship, the third part of Peter Morgan’s Tony Blair trilogy, in which Hillary Clinton offers Blair some advice. ‘People tend to remember you for one thing,’ she says. ‘You have to make sure you define what it is.’ Presumably, Blair’s main reason for writing A Journey is to put a positive spin on his premiership, but he’s left it a little late by Hillary’s standards. The scene above takes place when he’s been in office for less than a month. The point of view of the film — echoing the conventional wisdom — is that Blair will chiefly be remembered for

The Spectator

Letters | 4 September 2010

U and Pre-U Sir: I am, as a student approaching the A2 year, sick with envy at the small number of my friends lucky enough to be currently taking the Pre-University course. Not only did John Witheridge (‘An answer to the A-level debate — and Gary Lineker’, 28 August) succinctly describe the previous year of school for me with ‘spoon-fed coursework, punctuating and confusing the learning process with obsessive assessment’, but he also displayed the far more appealing alternative in the Pre-U syllabus. While I continue to attempt to meet the endless, pointless ‘Assessment Objectives’ of A-levels, it appears that Pre-U students enjoy a far more rigorous, yet encouragingly independent,

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 4 September 2010

Newspapers recently carried reports of a ‘secret vault’ at the Oxford English Dictionary containing words rejected for inclusion. Newspapers recently carried reports of a ‘secret vault’ at the Oxford English Dictionary containing words rejected for inclusion. Well, I suppose one way of keeping a secret is to publish it in a work of reference, for the OED explains that its ‘Quotations Room contains thousands of words for which we have only a single example, many of them dating back decades or even centuries: usurance has been awaiting a second example since 1912, and abrasure since 1827!’ ‘Words that are only used for a short period of time,’ it says, ‘or

Olivia Glazebrook

Diary – 4 September 2010

I have of late, for the most cheerful of reasons*, been getting up early to work. All well and good — deadlines have been met — but now I can’t break the worm-catching habit. Long before dawn the eyelids flutter open and the brain begins its spinning machine whirl. I force myself to stay in bed until five o’clock, the point at which I consider a late night to be baptised as an early morning — or in other words, the earliest acceptable moment to switch on radio and kettle. As the World Service gives way to the Shipping Forecast I sit down at my desk, wondering whether I would

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 4 September 2010

Mr Tony Blair, the former prime minister, published his political memoir, A Journey, in which he said that Mr Gordon Brown drove him to drink, but not an ‘excessively excessive’ amount: ‘The curse of Gordon was to make these people co-conspirators, not free-range thinkers. Mr Tony Blair, the former prime minister, published his political memoir, A Journey, in which he said that Mr Gordon Brown drove him to drink, but not an ‘excessively excessive’ amount: ‘The curse of Gordon was to make these people co-conspirators, not free-range thinkers. He and Ed Balls and others … it was more like a cult than a kirk.’ He did not sack Mr Brown

The Spectator

Science fictions

What is it about international organisations that makes them so impervious to criticism? If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were a British ministry or quango, it is inconceivable that its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, would still be in his post. The IPCC’s reports, which have been accepted by governments around the world as a definitive judgment on the science of global warming and used to influence policies with huge economic and social consequences, have over the past few months been exposed as shoddy pieces of work which would have disgraced an undergraduate thesis. A fantastic claim that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 turns out to have been