Society Archives

Saturday

6 Feb 2010

Portrait of the week | 6 February 2010

Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, said MPs would vote next week on whether a referendum should be held to allow an alternative-vote system in general elections after the next one. The government also came up with new ideas for persecuting smokers, such as driving them from shelter in doorways. Members of the Scottish Parliament passed their own law to make shopkeepers hide cigarettes. During a meeting in Rome with the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, the Pope implicitly criticised the Equality Bill promoted by Miss Harriet Harman. ‘Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity,’ he said. ‘Yet as you have rightly pointed

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 06 February 2010

Tony Blair claimed with almost evangelical fervour that it was ‘right’ to side with America in deciding to attack Iraq and went on: ‘I had to take this decision as Prime Minister. It was a huge responsibility.’ Tony Blair claimed with almost evangelical fervour that it was ‘right’ to side with America in deciding to attack Iraq and went on: ‘I had to take this decision as Prime Minister. It was a huge responsibility.’ Aristotle would have had some questions to ask about this. Aristotle (384-322 bc) raises a major problem in asking how one should lead the good life, and argues that it could be lived only in the

James Forsyth

Young in favour of elected committee chairmen

It is interesting that Sir George Young took the opportunity of his interview with The Times this week to reaffirm the Tory leadership’s support for electing select committee chairmen. In the last fortnight, two Tory MPs who would like to be select committee chairmen in the next parliament have complained to me that the leadership is quietly conspiring against the idea. But Sir George’s words suggest that this is not the case. Select committee chairmen election should mean that we get a chairmen who is determined to hold the executive to account wherever that may lead. But it will be intriguing to see how MPs vote. For instance, will Labour

Fraser Nelson

Rationalism enters the climate change debate

I have been gripped by The Guardian’s climate change investigation and reporting these last few days. We do like to tease George Monbiot but he was one of the first to denounce spinning of the data and science by the University of East Anglia’s climate unit. It’s a mark of his professionalism and seriousness: global warming is a cause important to him, and he resents attempts to misrepresent things by his own side, or by his enemies. The Guardian seems to take the same view, and has sent David Leigh and others out on the investigation trail, and the final in the four-part series is printed today. It shows how

Matt Ridley

The global warming guerrillas

Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources. It was not Private Eye, or the BBC or the News of the World, but a retired electrical engineer in Northampton, David Holland, whose freedom-of-information requests caused the Climategate scientists to break the

Richard Orange

Story of a sinking land

You couldn’t hope for a more perfect climate change victim than Ajay Patra, the head man of Ghoramara — the island in India’s Sunderban chain that is next in line to be submerged beneath the rising sea. You couldn’t hope for a more perfect climate change victim than Ajay Patra, the head man of Ghoramara — the island in India’s Sunderban chain that is next in line to be submerged beneath the rising sea. The hungry tide had already claimed all but seven of the 100 hectares his family had once owned, Ajay told me. Each year, he directs his villagers to pile felled trees onto the mud, in the

Rod Liddle

Is it really racist to want an English-speaking cab driver?

Rod Liddle says that the outrage directed at a taxi firm for advertising ‘English spoken here’ serves only to strengthen white working-class resentment — and the BNP ‘Rraaaaaaaacissst!’ — that Pavlovian whine of complaint, almost always from a white person, an idle and meaningless howl of outrage where once, when uttered by a black or Asian person who had suffered discrimination, it had a point and a potency. ‘Raaacisst’ — a new definition; a word which, as soon as it is uttered, can cause debate to cease, people to be punished, argument to be subverted, the Old Bill to get involved. ‘Raaaaacccissst!’ — a lie, a mischief, the last redoubt

Christopher Hitchens

Washington Notebook

Call me blasé if you will, but of all the clapped-out forms of instant publishing, I had concluded that the ‘campaign book’ was the most dire. Call me blasé if you will, but of all the clapped-out forms of instant publishing, I had concluded that the ‘campaign book’ was the most dire. I also generally think that any use of sporting metaphors to describe politics is an infallible sign of an exhausted hack. But Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin is so invigoratingly revealing — in the best and nastiest sense of that word — that it gripped me and held me tight. Senator John McCain shouts the

Leah McLaren

There’s nothing cute about a Canuck

Next week, when the Winter Olympics come to Vancouver, the eyes of the world will be on Canada, the sprawling, frigid nation of my birth. It doesn’t happen often, so when the international spotlight swivels our way, we Canadians do our best to hog it. We don’t go in for patriotism and self-belief like our American cousins, but like the shy wallflower who ends up closing the karaoke bar with a lampshade on her head, Canadians are compelled to make fools of ourselves if we are flattered into thinking anyone might notice. So brace yourself in the coming weeks, Britain, for a gushing torrent of maple-flavoured praise for all things

James Delingpole

I hate weddings; funerals are almost invariably better in every way

If I’d written the film it would have been called Four Funerals and a Wedding, because personally I find funerals much more fun. Not all funerals, obviously. But the funeral of someone who’s not a close relative and who’s had a good innings can be a very splendid occasion — as I was reminded the other week when I went to Tisbury, Wiltshire, to bid farewell to my old friend John Clanwilliam. John, you may remember, was the earl I killed last summer during a game of human Cluedo. At Christmas, he died for real and though I shall miss him dearly I don’t think anyone could be too unhappy

Hugo Rifkind

The things we thought Cameron thought — does he really think them after all?

Am I the only person who hears David Cameron say ‘Burglars leave their human rights at the door’ and thinks immediately of Pulp Fiction? Am I the only person who imagines Cameron and, say, George Osborne as two American hick security guards who capture burglars and punish them in a sort of Tarantino-esque manner I couldn’t possibly describe in The Spectator but which does, and not in a good way, involve oranges? And am I the only person who can imagine Cameron saying ‘Fetch the gimp’ and Osborne saying ‘The gimp’s asleep’ and Cameron saying ‘So wake him up then’, and then a figure being led out, clad toe to

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 6 February 2010

In Competition 2632 you were invited to supply the wording of the classified ad that is least likely to elicit a response. Thanks to John Papworth, who suggested this challenge, and to W.J. Webster, who drew my attention to the winning entry in a similar competition that appeared in another publication some decades ago: ‘Halitosis? Acne? Dandruff? Send s.a.e. for free samples.’ Memorable stuff but yours were equally impressive. Inspired, perhaps, by the proximity of Valentine’s Day, many competitors submitted lonely-hearts ads of the alarmingly deluded ‘unattractive ageing loser seeks extremely attractive, much younger female’ variety. Funny to a point, but I preferred Basil Ransome-Davies’s more subtle but somehow equally

Roger Alton

The towering Inferno

When you sit down next weekend (13 February) to watch the first competitors blast through the starting gate of the men’s downhill, the blue riband event of this year’s Winter Olympics in Whistler, I hope you will spare a moment to think back to a clear but windy day in Switzerland more than 80 years ago. It was in the early morning of 29 January 1928 that a group of passionate British skiers, 13 men and four women, and all members of the illustrious ski racing club, the Kandahar, set out from the village of Murren in the Bernese Oberland. Their target was the 10,000 foot summit of the Schilthorn,

Friday

5 Feb 2010

Martin Bright

Smoking Guns and the Morality of Parliamentary Privilege

The MPs’ expenses scandal has taken another extraordinary turn. Jim Devine, David Chaytor and Elliott Morley were already humbled and now they face criminal charges. With political scandals there are rarely any smoking guns. Cash for Honours was the last police investigation to come close. But this time it doesn’t look good for the miserable threesome. The search for the criminal smoking gun is a poor substitute for the exercise of moral judgement. The present crisis is a sign that the political class has simply forgotten that it is possible to act according to a personal ethical code without reference to whether something is legal or not. One senior opposition

James Forsyth

John Terry and politics<br />

John Terry’s sacking as England captain tells us something interesting about what is considered a sackable offence in today’s world and what is not. When the story was just about Terry allegedly cuckolding a team mate his position as captain seemed safe. As Danny Finkelstein argued on the Today Programme, modern society is reluctant to have people lose their jobs because of sexual indiscretions—politicians don’t have to resign as soon as they are caught having affairs these days. But as soon as there started to be stories alleging financial impropriety—the claim that an associate of his was hawking out the Wembley box that Terry was entitled to through his position

Peter Hoskin

The Tories need to push the fiscal case for public service reform

Andrew Haldenby’s article in the Telegraph this morning got me thinking: when was the last time the Tories really pushed the fiscal case for public service reform; that the government can indeed deliver better services while spending less money? By my count, you’d have to go back around six months to George Osborne’s speech on progressive politics at Demos. There, the shadow chancellor said this kind of thing: “Indeed, I would argue that our commitment to fiscal responsibility in the face of mounting national debt is not at odds with progressive politics, but fundamentally aligned to it – as politicians on the left from Bill Clinton to former Canadian Prime

Peter Hoskin

Practice – not pay – may be the key to public sector workforce savings

Great article from my former boss, Andrew Haldenby of Reform, in today’s Telegraph. He makes the general case that spending less on public services needn’t mean worse public service – far from it, in fact – and is scathing about the political class’s inability to soak up this lesson. But it’s this passage which jumped out at me: “Another path to reform is to get more out of the workforce. Simple changes have tremendous results. If public-sector workers took the same amount of sick leave as those in the private sector, that would save 3 per cent of their wage bill, which adds up to £6 billion per year. If

Rod Liddle

Another blow for the climate change lobby: Prince Charles

This has been an appalling couple of months for the climate change lobby and now there’s been another, sickening, blow – which some of you, undecided in the debate, may well feel is the clincher. Prince Charles has waded into the issue, eviscerating climate change sceptics. “Please be in no doubt that the evidence of long term and potentially irreversible changes to our world is utterly overwhelming,” he said. Hell, you could almost see them, at the IPCC and UEA, cringing, banging their heads against their computers upon which they were, at that very moment, making things up. Just what you need, the support of Prince Charles. It came on

Thursday

4 Feb 2010

James Forsyth

The Old Lady is becoming more pessimistic

Faisal Islam, Channel 4’s economic correspondent, is one of the journalists who best understands what the Bank of England’s institutional view is. So it is interesting to see him writing this today: “I’m convinced that at Threadneedle Street, they were shocked by the limpness of Britain’s exit from recession. They have been running their big computer model in the past weeks. When it reveals new economic forecasts next Wednesday, we are likely to see a marked downgrade to Britain’s economic prospects.” Politically this could have an impact as Labour’s, to put it charitably, extremely optimistic growth forecasts are what allow it to claim that it will cut the deficit in

Peter Hoskin

Mandelson’s video diary

We all know that Peter Mandelson enjoys the limelight, but this – from Kevin Maguire’s column in the New Statesman – is taking things to a whole new level: “Set your videos for Mandy: the Movie. I hear that the resurrected Prince of Darkness is to star in a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Eager to share his transformation from Labour outcast to potential saviour, the shy and retiring Lord of All-He-Surveys is being followed everywhere by a camerawoman. Visitors to an eighth-floor lair in the Department for Biz are surprised to be co-opted as extras, while Mandy is permanently wearing a microphone. The great panjandrum maintains that no deal has been signed