Society

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Somali savages update

Here’s a story from today’s Daily Mail, with a cut-out-keep picture, of Somali Muslim savages stoning to a twenty year old woman for the crime of adultery. Last year they killed a thirteen year old girl in a similar fashion; seven Muslim states stone women to death for adultery, and they will even provide the stones for you, which is thoughtful. Eleven will chop your head off if you renounce the Muslim faith. The overwhelming majority of Islamic states will either kill you, send you to work in a labour camp, put you in prison or fine you if you are gay. Bugger someone adulterously in Somalia while calling a

The Spectator

In this week’s Spectator | 19 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. Five articles from the latest issue are available for free online to all website users: Con Coughlin believes that Barack Obama’s increasing disregard for Britain’s views is no way to treat an ally whose troops have fought side by side with America since September 11. Obama has become our absent ally; he is practising a very special form of disrespect. It did not strike Matthew Parris, as he set out for a couple

Wednesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Background has nothing to do with being funny 

There’s a piece by my friend Dominic Lawson in the Independent yesterday, eulogizing the comedian Michael MacIntyre. At last, Dominic suggests, here is a comic who is not afraid to be middle class and nor is he coarse or cruel. Perhaps; but he is not terribly funny, either, whatever class he belongs to. You sometimes smile in recognition of his observations – as Dominic puts it – “of the everyday domestic engagements of bourgeois life.” But you are rarely arrested by what he has to say; pulled up short, gasping with incredulity at the sharpness of the observation, of what it uncovers and what it says about us. And still

Peter Hoskin

Nothing to see here

Blink and you missed it.  After seven minutes, the Queen had rattled through the Government’s legislative agenda for the next few months.  It was all pretty much as expected – although it’s worth noting the “council of financial stability,” made up of the Treasury, the Bank of England and FSA, chaired by the Chancellor, and which was first mooted back in July.  The question is whether any of this will connect with the public.  I rather doubt it. We’ll put footage on Coffee House as soon as it’s available.

David Blackburn

Queen’s Speech Live Blog

Stay tuned for live coverage from 14:30. Here we go. 14:40: Rather a self-deprecating and witty loyal address by self-confessed “dinosaur still living”, Frank Dobson. He gives a wonderful potted political history of his constituency, Holborn and St. Pancras, with particular reference to John Bellingham, who assassinated Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, whose descendant is a Tory MP. Dobson ends by celebrating the House of Commons and parliamentary democracy, though urging its urgent reform and that MPs listen to constituents; and he defends multi-cultural society, pointing towards his own constituency’s solidarity in the face of the 7/7 outrage. 15:00: David Cameron is on his feet, prasing the proposer and seconder of

Mihir Bose

England’s botched bid to stage the 2018 World Cup

To understand how World Cup bids are won, let me take you to the third-floor suite of Dolder Grand hotel overlooking Lake Zurich. The date is May 2004 and the cast as high-powered as you would expect in any political summit. There was Thabo Mbeki, then president of South Africa, and Nelson Mandela, his predecessor. They had come to meet Jack Warner, the Trinidadian vice-president of FIFA — the organisation which controls world football. Warner had been sympathetic to South Africa’s bid for the 2010 World Cup, but had suddenly turned cold — refusing to return any calls to Cape Town. So the South Africans had come to see him.

Tim Shipman

Will MI6 finally come in from the cold?

Sir John Sawers is not the Downing Street stooge some of the old guard say he is, writes Tim Shipman. And the new head of MI6 may focus the spooks’ gaze on the real enemy The man who brought us The Meaning of Tingo is at it again, closer to home. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s previous excursion among unlikely foreign words turned at times into a wild Boojum chase because the meanings claimed for some words softly and silently vanished away once confronted. That was the case with tingo itself, the supposed definition of which was more like a short essay on circumstances in which it might be used. His

Justin Marozzi

Riddle of the sands

Justin Marozzi explains why new archaeological finds from Egypt’s Western Desert show that Herodotus deserves his reputation as the Father of History I couldn’t help it. I whooped uncontrollably into my Jordans Country Crisp with strawberries when I heard the news last week, startling my wife and spilling milk and crispy clusters onto a bemused but grateful dog. An Italian team of archaeologists had made what looked like a hugely important discovery in Egypt’s Western Desert, apparently unearthing remains of the lost army of Cambyses which, according to Herodotus, was swallowed up by a ferocious sandstorm 2,500 years ago. Had they laid to rest one of the world’s greatest archaeological

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The time is ripe to launch Spectator Bank

Bankers are often accused of having such short memories that they are condemned to repeat the errors of their immediate predecessors, only more so. They would certainly need elephantine memories to remember a time when new banks, each with a distinctive mission and marketplace, were coming to life and flourishing everywhere. Indeed it was, in a corporate sense, Britain’s oldest banker — Alexander Hoare, 11th-generation head of C. Hoare & Co of Fleet Street, though himself still only in his forties — who pointed this out to me long before the credit crunch started knocking over high-street lenders like wonky dominoes. ‘It’s a sign of market failure that so many

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 18 November 2009

The Benefit of Farting was published in pamphlet form in 1722, ostensibly by one Don Fartinando Puff-Indorst, Professor of Bumbast at the University of Crackow (a ‘crack’ being 18th-century slang for a fart). The Benefit of Farting was published in pamphlet form in 1722, ostensibly by one Don Fartinando Puff-Indorst, Professor of Bumbast at the University of Crackow (a ‘crack’ being 18th-century slang for a fart). Its real author, however, was Jonathan Swift, though you will search in vain through biographies to find any reference to the fact. That The Benefit of Farting was a real emanation of the Dean of St Patrick’s is hardly to be doubted, since it

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why doesn’t Brown go the whole hog?

Today’s Daily Telegraph reports that: “As a prelude to next week’s announcement Mr Brown will today set out his plans for “a smarter, more efficient and more responsive government.” Among the plans Mr Brown wants 2,000 sets of data up and running and available to the public from January. It would include areas like the road traffic counts from last eight years; all legislation on a database for the first time; property prices listed with stamp duty yield; all motoring offences with the type of offence and the numbers, by county, for the top six offences. Farm survey data would also be available. The Prime Minister will point to the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Grayling goes Dutch

Chris Grayling’s speech tonight to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at KCL is an attempt to set out the intellectual underpinnings behind the Tories’ home affairs policies. To my mind, the two most interesting things in it are how Holland is influencing Grayling thinking and his reassertion of the Tory commitment to elected police commissioners. To deal with the later first, there were murmurings in Westminster that Grayling was not keen on this idea which would transfer significant powers away from the Home Secretary. Indeed, word was that the leadership were becoming frustrated with Grayling’s failure to develop plans for how the implementation of this idea would work.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Health Care Reform is a Zombie Policy

Peter Suderman notes that the Democrats’ health care plans have to play a finesse: on the one hand they promise that everything will get better; on the other they reassure you that most things will stay just the same. Tricky! Worse, much worse, for those of us who hope that Congress passes or kills health care reform – either, don’t care which, just do it sharpish! – is the terrifying prospect that health care reform is the zombie monster of all policy zombie monsters: On a note that’s scary in a different way, the piece quotes Harvard health policy professor Robert Blendon as saying that even if the bill passes,

Mark Bathgate

The gathering storm

The UK inflation rate again “surprised” to the upside today, registering at 1.5%. As the above chart shows, the UK now has by some margin the highest inflation rate in G7. Were it not for the temporary VAT cut – which takes about 1% off the current CPI rate – the rate would be moving quickly above the Bank of England’s target of 2%. It would seem that the deflation threat, used as justification for the Bank of England deciding to finance the Government’s deficit this year through printing money, has not transpired. A severe recession and rise in unemployment has hit the economy, but this seems to be one

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Paul Clarke Update

Remember the outcry after the discovery that Paul Clarke could face five years in prison for the “crime” of finding a sawn-off shotgun in his garden and handing it in to his local police station? No, me neither. Well, blog-land has not been happy about this but, as a reader points out, our friends at newspapers and the BBC have completely ignored it: This story is getting zero coverage. I’ve seen more coverage from American websites than I have from UK sources. I’ve done a search at the Times, the Guardian and the BBC News website and – unless I’m doing something very wrong – none of them seem to

Monday

David Blackburn

Eastern uprising

The spirit of Hereward the Wake is stalking the Fens again. It is very tempting to characterise Elizabeth Truss’ opponents, nicknamed the ‘Turnip Taliban’, as a collection of Rigsbys thwarted in their ambition to find the permissive society on the one hand, and plain reactionaries on the other. Not least because Melissa Kite reveals in today’s Telegraph that the TT’s self-appointed Chief-Mullah, Sir Jeremy Bagge, who has taken to traversing his estates in a Pashtun turban to mark his celebrity, venerates women in the following terms: “I have absolutely nothing against women. Who cooks my lunch? Who cooks my dinner?…Women, you can’t do without them?” One might almost think that

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Second Coming of Sarah Palin

Well, kind of. America’s most famous hockey mom is on Oprah this week, promoting her memoir. There’s going to be an awful lot of Sarah Palin this week. In the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard and his own book, Matt Continetti tries to make the case that Palin is, or rather could be, a populist standard-bearer in the tradition of Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan and Ronald Reagan. Some of Continetti’s argument is easy to mock. When he points out that Palin’s not as unpopular as some people think, the examples of less popular pols he finds are John Edwards (cheated on his cancer-stricken wife) and Nncy Pelosi (who is,

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall 16 November – 22 November

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

Under starter’s orders | 16 November 2009

The parties are limbering up for the longest, and possibly the bitterest, election campaign in living memory. Recent asides and statements indicate that Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech will be the most political that New Labour has delivered.  This morning’s Times and FT give an amuse bouche of the package with which Labour intend to “smoke out the Tories”. The FSA will be furnished with powers to punish those dastardly bankers, including the power to rip up contracts that encourage excessive risk. Also, Labour will provide free home care for 350,000 people; NHS patients will receive free private care if they are not treated within 18 weeks; and pupils will have the opportunity to take free

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

20 Years of the Little Master

The thing about cricket, or one of the things about it, is that the game makes few allowances for ability. The strong are persecuted just as surely as the weak are found out. There is, literally, no hiding place. Indeed, the strongest players may suffer more than the weakest. For with ability comes increased expectation and responsibility. The weak or average player can fail; the strong cannot if his team is to prosper. So not the least of the many wonders of Sachin Tendulkar is that he has withstood the all-but-intolerable burdens that come with being a hero to a billion people. Consider this: instead of the silence you might