Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 20 November 2010

Home The engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton was announced. The Prince proposed last month in Kenya and gave his fiancée the engagement ring belonging to his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. The wedding is to take place next year. Britain must ‘sort out’ its economy if it wants to ‘carry weight in the world’, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said in his speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet. Mr Cameron decided after all against employing a personal photographer at public expense. Legal aid will no longer be available in divorce, welfare benefit and school exclusion appeals, Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, announced, in plans to save £350

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 20 November 2010

My husband’s temper noticeably improved when we had that BBC strike, when there were fewer irritants from nettle-beds such as Today. My husband’s temper noticeably improved when we had that BBC strike, when there were fewer irritants from nettle-beds such as Today. But he’s over it now, and cursing the smallest, most niggling annoyance yet broadcast: the word so. Instead of well, it is used as a mere preliminary utterance to interviewees, with perhaps a hint of challenge. This is what my husband finds more and more annoying as the cumulative count increases. ‘So and so,’ he shouts at the wireless, still surprised at the ineffectiveness of his intervention. It

David Blackburn

Progress towards an Afghan solution?

Nato has agreed to the Afghan plan, or so they say. As Lieutenant-Colonel David Eastman says, Afghan security forces are deemed to be sufficiently capable for the handover to begin next year, as Obama and Petraeus hope. There are those who disagree – some doubt the Afghans, some doubt success itself. Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen may have to be added to that former group of dissenters. He said earlier today: ‘If the Taliban or anyone else thinks they can wait us out, they can forget it.’ The problem for those of Rasmussen’s thinking is that the Taliban can wait; Nato can’t. William Hague has reiterated the government’s promise

David Blackburn

Nato – from the glass half empty point of view

Nato leaders are in Lisbon and Daniel Korski has argued that the most successful military alliance in history isn’t done yet. Writing in the Independent, Patrick Cockburn gives an alternative. He contends that Nato will never recover from the Afghan mission, and he has three substantive points: 1). Nato’s solutions are the problem. ‘It is not just that the war is going badly, but that Nato’s need to show progress has produced a number of counter-productive quick fixes likely to deepen the violence. These dangerous initiatives include setting up local militias to fight the Taliban where government forces are weak. These are often guns-for-hire provided by local warlords who prey on ordinary

Irwin Stelzer

Do not resuscitate

No one can fault the doctors: they are using every tool available to them to save their very ill patient. But they will probably fail in their efforts to save the euro in its current form. And this will be because the regimen they originally prescribed did more harm than good. Economists were almost unanimous in warning that it is beyond the wisdom of man to set an interest rate that suits 16 countries without also unifying fiscal policy, creating income transfer mechanisms, and a common language to reduce barriers to labour mobility. So we have Ireland, a country that devised a low-tax path to prosperity. Rather than raising interest

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man Christmas e-cheer

Unsure what to buy for your loved ones this Christmas? Here are two ideas. For diehard smokers, try buying an electronic cigarette, currently causing controversy in California, where an attempt to prevent their sale was recently vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. The devices cause debate for a host of reasons — not least because there is a near unanimous consensus among health professionals that they present a potential source of enjoyment. Some claim they will act as a gateway drug, causing those ‘smoking’ them (‘vaping’ is the current word, since the devices produce nicotine-infused vapour, not smoke) to move to harder drugs — on that same inevitable path by which youthful

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Major to Minor

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2673 you were invited to submit a pompous leader on a trivial subject. Among the topics that unleashed your inner Thunderer were the abuse of the ‘eight items or less’ lane in supermarkets (to say nothing of the lamentable confusion between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’) and the plague of rubber bands visited on us by the Post Office. There is space only to congratulate Brian Murdoch, who gets £30. His fellow winners get £25 each. Most will pass in silence over the 40th anniversary next year of a blow struck — and still felt — at the very heart of the culture

Aidan Hartley

Pride of Somalia

When the Sun ran a story saying that a council in London’s East End will investigate whether a Somali immigrant, Dahir Kadiye, scammed on his housing benefits, the point did not seem particularly newsworthy. That this was the same immigrant who had helped secure the release of Paul and Rachel Chandler after 388 days of being held hostage by pirates in Somalia — now that certainly strikes me as news. Britain’s 300,000 or so Somalis are a particularly unpopular Muslim community. Somalis are often seen as a drain on the state. They form the hardest inner-city gangs. They mistreat their women. They chew the drug qat. Two of those who attempted

Susannah Jowitt

Citizen’s arrest

My husband foiled a theft at the Saatchi Gallery – and was rewarded with a night in the cells Back in October, in the same week that David Cameron was trying to persuade his party conference of the merits of the Big Society, my husband Anthony did what the Prime Minister urged and tried to help someone in need. As a result, he spent a night behind bars. Here’s what happened. We were guests at the glitzy preview night of a new art charity show called The Art of Giving at the Saatchi Gallery on King’s Road in London. Towards the close of the evening, amid the hubbub and the

Ed Smith

Ashes to Ashes

Australian cricket’s fearsome tradition of toughness may be coming to an end This is not wise. In fact, it is madness. For me, as a former professional cricketer, it is a hostage to fortune. For England, with the Ashes fast approaching, it could be worse: I am tempting fate and inviting revenge. It would be risky to whisper it at dinner, let alone spell it out in print. The timing is abysmal and I am not even sure I am right. But the idea will not leave me alone. A sneaking question keeps coming into my head: are Australia losing their cricketing edge? And I don’t just mean the Ashes.

Alistair Horne

A portrait of the Lady

Aung San Suu Kyi is free, but has the ruling junta won the battle for Burma’s future? Aung San Suu Kyi’s late husband, Michael Aris, was a good friend of mine at St Antony’s, Oxford. The gentlest of gentle academics, he helped establish a centre in Tibetan studies at Oxford, and converted to Buddhism. In 1972, he married Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he had met while they were both studying in Oxford. They had two young sons, Alexander and Kim, and for a while settled into the quiet life of north Oxford. But as we all know, in 1988, Suu Kyi returned to Burma to tend her ailing mother

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The Twitter martyrs are true subversives

‘Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high.’ — Paul Chambers, on Twitter. ‘Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death. I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing.’ — Gareth Compton, on Twitter. ‘Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high.’ — Paul Chambers, on Twitter. ‘Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death. I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing.’ — Gareth Compton, on Twitter.

Charles Spencer

The nostalgia business

The extraordinary thing about rock’n’roll is its longevity. The extraordinary thing about rock’n’roll is its longevity. When the Rolling Stones started out in the early Sixties, they can hardly have imagined that they would be doing much the same thing, though on a far larger scale, almost half a century later. If you’re Keith Richards, of course, you are also astonished that you have survived at all. His new autobiography, Life, deserves the plaudits it has received. The honesty, the humour and the man’s passionate love of the music come shining through on almost every page, while his attacks on the vanity and controlling instincts of Mick Jagger often made

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 20 November 2010

Caught between EU politicking and market sharks, the Irish deserve sympathy not scorn My sympathies are with the Irish as they find themselves being shoved towards an EU bailout which they regard as a loss of hard-won sovereignty — and it’s pointless to go on scoffing at their earlier eagerness to enjoy the low euro interest rates and fountains of Brussels subsidy that fuelled the grotesque real-estate boom which ended in spectacular bust. Unlike the Greeks, the Irish accepted the need for severe austerity measures without rioting or recrimination. But their tiny economy, one fifteenth the size of Britain’s, is now a pawn in a double game. On one hand,

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Questions to Which the Answer is Yes

John Rentoul may have cornered the market in Questions to which the Answer is No but there’s an opening for Questions to Which the Answer is Yes. Clearly, this is a niche market. Nevertheless, Iain Dale asks numbers one and two this evening. Or, rather, the topics for his LBC radio show invite pithy responses: 8pm McCoppers: Should we be using private companies to pay for police officers to patrol city centres to control alcohol fuelled violence? 9pm Should Camilla be Queen when the time comes? Yes and Yes. A thid question  – “Don’t we want politicians to speak their minds?” is out of order as I think it wants

The Spectator

The week that was | 19 November 2010

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week. Fraser Nelson wonders if Cameron was being more than wryly ironic when ribbing Ian Gilmour. James Forsyth notes that Tuesday was a very good day to bury bad news, and says that Tim Farron is one to watch and not just for his rapping. Peter Hoskin notes that Tuesday was a day on which to bury good news, and argues that Ireland’s nightmare has been Europe’s problem. Martin Bright charts the chilling effect of the Woolas case. Rod Liddle has braced himself for months of vapid, pointless shit. Alex Massie aids the defence of the euro. And

David Blackburn

Lord Young resigns

Yet another GOAT fails to stay the course. Sky News reports that the gaffe-prone peer, Lord Young, has resigned, following his ill-considered comments about the ‘so-called recession’. As the morning progressed, there was a growing sense of inevitability that he would resign. Once again, the government has been unable to steer a communications strategy through a brief and not very serious crisis: after all, Young was chatting idly to a journalist, not expounding government policy. I don’t think his position was totally untenable: if Nick Clegg can hold forth on the legality of the Iraq war, why are the loose private opinions of an underling so unacceptable? However, his comments were politically crass, regardless of some

David Blackburn

You’ve never had it so good

As Michael Gove said at the launch of the Conservative Party manifesto: “Britain in 2010 is a great place to live in many ways” (4:12 in on this video). Lord Young, The Spectator’s Peer of the Year, agrees: for many of us, we’ve never had it so good. He told the Telegraph: ‘For the vast majority of people in the country today, they have never had it so good ever since this recession – this so-called recession – started…Most people with a mortgage who were paying a lot of money each month, suddenly started paying very little each month. That could make three, four, five, six hundred pounds a month

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Trickle-Down Torture

Yes, it’s from the Daily Record but if there’s one thing the Record does well it’s cover gangland Glasgow: Scots gangsters are using “waterboarding” terror tactics to torture rivals. Hardened crooks have copied the CIA-style interrogation technique where water is poured on to a cloth covering the victim’s mouth and nose to simulate drowning. We can reveal that a leading member of one of Scotland’s most notorious crime clans was tortured by a rival gang using the shock tactics last week. Drug dealer John Fox was terrorised after being snatched off the street by four thugs during a row over stolen drugs. Associates of Fox said he was taken to