Society

Friday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Stats and climate change – a response to Jim Ryan

I find it genuinely difficult to debate with people who deny my right to debate; this is the case with the climate change lobby. The danger, if you don’t watch out, is that the arrogance and certitude of the AGW lobby pushes one towards an ever more antithetical position. This is a flawed, human, response – very similar to the flaws exhibited by those climate change monkeys sending dodgy emails to one another. If you work for, and are paid by, an institution which accepts climate change as a fact, then you will be disinclined to accept scientific evidence to the contrary. You hold climate change as an article of

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

You’re my bes mate

Appppareny if you raished the pricxe of alcocoholby 40 p  people wouldn’t die of it. What? Shuttuip. I thhink its 40p. Mightv been 60. I don’tnkow. Shome doctor said, and evrbody on Queston Time agreeed that the pricxe should go up to stop people dyinmg, even Mel. I know cos Iwatched it, just now bunch of condec condescn conddiscdn bunch of middle class twats. They can haveit, buut dontlet the poor have any drink, holierthen thou crap allwrrappped up as consern. They want a ******* slap, espeshly that Brogistocke, a good slapin the face. Copme here ansd Ill doi it myself. Nah, nah, not for me had enough mate, but

Thursday

David Blackburn

Smoking guns and missing memos

Sir Christopher Meyer gave evidence to the Chilcot inquiry this morning. He spoke with characteristic flamboyance, awash with elegant witticisms and indiscretions calculated to amuse. Amid this tour de force, Meyer released one potential weapon of mass destruction. Hans Blix was given too little time to conduct a satisfactory inspection. Courtesy of Andrew Sparrow, here is the relevant transcript: ‘The real problem, which I did draw several times to the attention of London, was that the contingency military timetable had been decided before the UN inspectors went in under Hans Blix. So you found yourself in a situation in the autumn of 2002 where you could not synchronise the military

The Spectator

In this week’s Spectator | 26 November 2009

The latest issue of the Spectator is released today. If you are a subscriber you can view it here. If you have not subscribed, but would like to view this week’s content, you can subscribe online now. Six articles from the latest issue are available for free online to all website users: Prepare for a lost decade. Fraser Nelson and Mark Bathgate believe that zombie banks and high unemployment look set to curse our economy as they did Japan’s. A Conservative government could avoid disaster, but only if it is prepared to face the painful reality.   A century ago, leading leftwing thinkers such as George Bernard Shaw subscribed to

Peter Hoskin

Byrne draws a dividing line over decentralisation

Good work by the Guardian, who have got their hands on leaked sections of a government report into downscaling Whitehall.  At first glance, it all looks kinda promising.  There are provisions to reduce the cost of senior civil servants, to cut the numbers of quangos, and to make it more difficult to establish new quangos.  Surely, these are measures which will be necessary to fix our broken public finances. But it’s the headline idea which could give you cause for concern: namely, that the government “wants a review” into relocating around 200,000 civil servants and other public sector workers away from London and the South-East.  It’s meant to strengthen localism

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

The man who hopes to unseat Harman

The papers have been stuffed with articles recently about the current crop of Tory party candidates – but few have been as readable, or as encouraging, as Rachel Williams’ profile of Andy Stranack in today’s Guardian.  Stranack is the Tory PPC in Camberwell and Peckham – Harriet Harman’s seat – and his background is really quite remarkable: “In 2001, Stranack ignored the concerns of his family (‘They thought I was mad’), gave up his £30,000 a year council policy officer job in Croydon, south London, sold his maisonette, and moved to the borough’s deprived Monks Hill estate. He stayed there, living on the poverty line and doing church-backed community work,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Remain sceptical at all times

I’ve been trawling through the emails hacked from the Hadley Centre’s Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, and very boring most of them are too. It’s a good story, though, if you leave aside the obvious illegality of the hacking. Certainly, three or four (out of 7,000) of the emails seem to imply that there was a certain amount of chicanery when compiling some statistics, a reluctance to allow the public to see raw data which had not been tampered with (on occasion) and a typically belligerant and arrogant attitude towards the people they have marked down as climate change deniers. At the least it suggests that sometimes the

Mark Bathgate

Saving the world | 25 November 2009

Today’s revised GDP data confirms that the UK remained alone of the world’s major economies in recession in the third quarter of this year*. The fact that the UK remains mired in recession long after most economies have recovered makes clear how uniquely badly positioned the UK economy was to handle a downturn.  While some investment banks continue to argue that this performance reflects the inability of the Office of National Statistics to calculate the data correctly, there is good reason to believe that this huge underperformance is grounded in reality. Economic history teaches that bank crises are amongst the worst things that can ever hit an economy. The collapse

Alex Massie Alex Massie

How to Save Test Cricket?

Test cricket in crisis! Again! That’s the headline you could draw from an MCC survey that finds just 7% of Indian cricket fans prefer Test cricket to other, lesser, forms of the game. On the face of it this is indeed a troubling , dispiriting, finding. The survey, which was conducted by TNS Sport, sought, via the internet, the opinions of 1500 fans in India, New Zealand and South Africa to try and discover why Test match attendances have been falling and what might be done to reverse that trend. Peter Roebuck, always a gloomy bugger, summarised the findings thus: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there” and worried

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Prepare for a Japanese-style lost decade

Zombie banks and high unemployment look set to curse our economy as they did Japan’s, say Fraser Nelson and Mark Bathgate. A Conservative government could avoid disaster, but only if it is prepared to face the painful reality To say a country is turning Japanese has a very special meaning to economists. It means entering recession and never properly escaping it. It means entering a world of zombie banks that are being kept alive by taxpayers’ money. It means year after year of huge government deficits: profligacy masked as Keynesian medicine. It means year after year of false dawns, high unemployment and lapses back into recession. It is an acute

Andrew Gilligan

Yanks are from Mars, Brits are from Venus

MoD documents leaked to Andrew Gilligan show that the ‘special relationship’ in Iraq was more like a bad marriage: riven with misunderstanding, irritation and hurt feelings It may have made it into such pillars of the zeitgeist as The Simpsons, the film Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Geri Halliwell’s single ‘Bag It Up’. But it is still, perhaps, a little surprising that that seminal work of cod psychology, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, should have infiltrated a secret Ministry of Defence report into the war on Iraq. Let me tell you, the average MoD leaked document is hard going: thickets of bureaucratic bindweed wrapped tightly

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Scrap Ofsted and get 5,000 new teachers for our schools

Rod Liddle says that Ofsted’s attempt to rank schools according to their SATS scores is, like so many of its other ideas, not just unhelpful but counterproductive Fancy a job as head of Ofsted? The post apparently pays not far short of half a million quid per year, and I can’t imagine that there’s much work involved. The problem, I suppose, is that one never knows precisely what they’re looking for when these unelected sinecures at quangocratic bureaucracies are up for grabs, so it’s bloody difficult to prepare for the interview. What qualifies Catherine Ashton, for example, to be the foreign minister for the continent of Europe? She’s worked for

Matthew Dennison

Dog days for British breeds

Imagine the scenario. You are a military man who retires at 40. Able-bodied, cushioned by a small army pension and the income from a rural estate in west Wales, you turn your back on soldiering. You remain through and through a sportsman. Across your peaceful acres foxes, badgers and otters carve their busy paths. In barns and hedgerows rats and rabbits run amok. How to rout out so much quarry? Only one way presents itself to the resourceful mid-Victorian landowner: breed your own terrier. It is 1848. Meet Captain John Tucker Edwardes. Edwardes knew what he wanted: a sporting little dog, low to the ground, tenacious, brave and mostly white

Sam Kiley

‘We’ve been spreading the Marmite too thin’

Lance corporal Jay Bateman and Jeff Doherty slumped to the ground. They were killed instantly in the first swarm of bullets from an enemy ambush. Their comrades dragged their bodies along irrigation ditches and across burning fields under intense fire. Rocket-propelled grenades skidded and cartwheeled through the poppy stubble, exploded and showered them in dirt and shrapnel. The only helicopter available to evacuate the bodies was called away to pick up a another soldier wounded in a battle up the Musa Qala wadi. So the dead were pushed clear of the fighting in wheelbarrows; until a sniper team commandeered a saloon car to carry them back to Forward Operating Base

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The billion-pound hole where Chelsea Barracks used to be

Ross Clark says it’s not so much the Prince of Wales who has put the mockers on this controversial Qatari-backed development, but the grim economics of the credit crunch Gordon Brown is well known for his bad timing in selling off half the nation’s gold reserves at the bottom of the market in 1999. But with the sale of the Chelsea Barracks site in 2007 the government could not have timed it better, picking up nearly £1 billion at the peak of the property boom, just before the credit crunch and before the intervention of the Prince of Wales sent the scheme into a tailspin of litigation and anti-royal fury.

Richard Northedge

A lost decade in the London stock market

Richard Northedge says the FTSE’s dismal performance since the millennium will deter a generation of investors The familiar fallback for fund managers when shares falter is that investment is for the long term. But how long is long? December marks the tenth anniversary of a stockmarket peak that has never been seen again. Money invested in the 1990s will be showing a loss more than a decade later. How long must investors wait for equities to come right in the long term? In fact, the FTSE 100, the index of leading UK shares, is lower this week than in 1997, shortly after New Labour came to office. The long bull

John Howkins

Farewell to the glory days

Are recessions good for the arts? Admissions to Britain’s free public museums and galleries were up 2 per cent in 2008, and most have reported increases of over 10 per cent in 2009. Are recessions good for the arts? Admissions to Britain’s free public museums and galleries were up 2 per cent in 2008, and most have reported increases of over 10 per cent in 2009. Tickets for the big touring shows are selling well. West End theatre box-office revenues were up 3.5 per cent in the first six months of this year. This winter we can enjoy a multitude of entertainments as wonderful or as wacky as ever. So

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Will Chilcot be any different?

The Chilcot inquiry’s precedents don’t auger well. It’s unfair to describe the Hutton and Butler inquiries as ‘whitewashes’, but their colour was certainly off-white. That said, the condemnatory characterisation of Sir John and his panel as ‘establishment figures’ is redolent of a lower-sixth common room circa 1968. Who else could conduct this inquiry? Mohammed al-Fayed? Pete Doherty? The Bishop of Bath and Wells? The Iraq controversy has not abated and a panel of angels would not be pure enough for some. But it’s absurd to suggest that anyone besides officials and foreign policy experts, with an intricate knowledge of the practices and issues concerned, should or can decide such matters.

David Blackburn

Carry on Karzai

The New York Times reports that 15 Afghan ministers, past and present, are under investigation on suspicion of corruption. Obama’s and Brown’s unequivocal stance on the Mk.3 Karzai government leaves the president with no choice but to sacrifice a few lambs. However, if ever there’s a bolthole Karzai will scamper through it. Corruption is Afghanistan’s chief political currency and Karzai’s authority, such as it is, rests on backhanders. Oligarchic Afghan law decrees that ministers must be prosecuted by a specially convened court, and guess who controls judicial patronage? It’s an ingenious constitutional contrivance for seeming to do something but actually doing nothing. The recent history of Afghan special courts is