Society

Saturday

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 19 September 2009

Is ‘progress’  happiness and relationships or philosophical awareness and self-discipline? ‘What is “progress”?’ asks President Sarkozy, and answers ‘happiness and relationships’. One looks forward to his ‘progressive’ policies. The ancients would have thought him mad. Greeks and Romans took the view that, far from things getting better, they were getting worse. The ages of gold, silver and bronze were long gone; they now lived in the age of iron, when (to paraphrase the 7th-century bc farmer-poet Hesiod) there would be no cease from toil and misery; men would hold the law in their fists, disrespectful of parents, family and friends, honouring criminals, abiding by no oaths, while Decency and Moral

Peter Hoskin

Is Osborne worth it?

Fresh from winning GQ’s Politician of the Year award last week, George Osborne now has an accolade he may be even happier with: heavy praise from both Peter Oborne and Matthew Parris.  Both commentators write columns today which dish out the superlatives for Osborne’s response to the fiscal crisis, and suggest he has been vindicated by events.  Here’s the key passage from Oborne’s article, by way of a taster: “Slowly Osborne began to win the argument. First (as I revealed in this column last March), Bank of England governor Mervyn King sent private warnings to the Treasury that he feared extra public spending would damage the official credit ratings that

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Irving Kristol & the Life and Times of Neoconservatism

A few years ago, around the time that Bob Geldof was arguing that George W Bush had done much more for Africa than Bill Clinton ever did, I appeared on a BBC Radio Five show to try and explain this apparently mystifying, confusing, aspect of the Bush presidency. Well, it was mystifying to the BBC. Bush’s faith, much mocked in Britain, explained part of it, I suggested, and so too did the American evangelical community’s enthusiasm. “Ah” pounced our friend the presenter, “so it’s all about the neoconservatives”. It was at this point that I appreciated that the term neoconservative had lost all meaning and that, from now on, it

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The 50 Best Foods in the World

As Ezra Klein says it would be remiss not to give this transparently link-whoring Observer list of The 50 Best Foods in the World and Where to Eat Them the attention it so desperately craves. And like Ezra I’ve only had two of them: the pastrami-on-rye at Katz’s deli in New York and currywurst in Berlin’s Prenzlauerberg. Each was good; each easily replicated elsewhere in their respective cities. Or at home, for that matter.  I don’t eat fish, so I don’t know about the Fish & Chips at the Wee Chippy in Anstruther. My favourite chips, however, are to be had at Leo Burdock’s in Dublin. For that matter, I’m

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 19 September 2009

In a recent issue of the brilliant weekly glossy magazine produced by the French sports paper L’Equipe, there is a picture that tells you all you need to know about modern football. It shows the owner of Manchester City, Sheikh Kaldoon al-Mubarak, leaving the stadium after the home game against Wolves. He is being driven away in his Bentley; all around are the black-suited muscle. To the left are a few fans, pale, slightly plump men and women in light blue replica shirts. They are on the same page, in the same place, but light years apart. And it’s only in the context of this absurd, corrupt, narcissistic world of extremes

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 19 September 2009

In Competition No. 2613 you were invited to submit a cautionary tale for our times, in the style of Hilaire Belloc, about the consequences of too much time spent texting or on social networking sites. The grisly fates of Belloc’s creations — Jim, eaten feet upwards by a lion, and Mathilda, burnt to a crisp — both thrill and appal children. I remember being puzzled, though, by a moral universe in which Algernon, who narrowly fails in his attempt to shoot his sister with a loaded rifle, gets off with a light reprimand; while Rebecca, for the relatively innocuous crime of slamming doors, perishes miserably, flattened by a marble bust

Stephen Bayley

Thank you, Germaine, I’m enjoying all the breasts

Any week beginning with Germaine Greer inviting the nation’s women to crash my website by sending photos of their ‘unsupported breasts’ is bound to be an interesting one. Any week beginning with Germaine Greer inviting the nation’s women to crash my website by sending photos of their ‘unsupported breasts’ is bound to be an interesting one. Greer wrote a page of splenetic ‘comment’ on my new book, Woman as Design, in Monday’s Guardian. Her charge is that, like all knuckle-dragging males still emotionally located in the mastodon era, I fetishise and eroticise the female breast. This is said to be wicked. By offering ‘support’, the bra deforms reality, says Greer,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Stick to buying perfume and forget about kids, Sir Elton

Rod Liddle says that celebrity adoption has become an unsavoury game of Top Trumps, and that the Ukraine would be right to turn down Elton John’s bid for a baby The world may indeed be shrinking and its people becoming an undifferentiated morass, but east of the Oder-Neisse line they are not quite the same as us just yet. There is a certain infelicity when dealing with sensitive social issues, the sort of thing you hear over here only when no one is listening. Take the response from a senior Ukrainian politician to Elton John’s request to adopt a 14-month-old Ukrainian baby called Lev. ‘You won’t be allowed because you’re

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 19 September 2009

Bourneville chocolate with Kraft cheese slices? Not a recipe I’d recommend The £10 billion bid for Cadbury by Kraft Foods, Inc of the US has provoked little protest — other than from the chocolate maker itself, which says it would rather remain a ‘pure-play confectionery business’ than become a component of Kraft’s ‘low-growth conglomerate’. The fight will come down to price, sentimental factors such as history and culture swiftly forgotten. Cadbury, in its model village of Bourneville on the edge of Birmingham, used to be an icon of progressive Quakerism in business. Now, with its workforce shrunken and its ‘Bourneville’ brand made in France, it’s a modern company like any

Alex Brummer

Time to break the fat cats’ cartel

A few months ago I appeared on a panel organised by a leading firm of pay consultants, Hewitt New Bridge. The audience, in the City, was packed with ‘human resources’ directors, pay experts and members of ‘remuneration committees’ — the directors who set pay in leading public companies — among whom there was broad acceptance that the current ‘Great Recession’ might require some kind of temporary pay restraint. But when I suggested that remuneration committees were lazy, easily bullied by powerful chief executives (such as former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin) and too often cosy cartels where directors engaged in mutual back-scratching, the room erupted. The culture

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 19 September 2009

RIP, then, Marcus the sheep. That’s ‘P’ as a plural in this case, obviously. As in ‘pieces’, and lots of them. Are any of the legs still going spare? Mmm. Love a bit of shank. Marcus, as you’ll have doubtless read, was a sheep reared at Lydd Primary School in Romney Marsh who was then sent off, as is the basic idea with sheep, for slaughter and butchery. All sorts of people were very upset about this. Not the children, it must be said, because they had a vote on this, and they did not choose life. Maybe not even Marcus himself, who by all accounts was a rather stoic

James Delingpole James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 19 September 2009

Was Daphne du Maurier responsible for the attempt to cross the ‘bridge too far’? A few months ago I gave a talk at Boy’s prep school on one of the most glorious debacles in British military history — Operation Market Garden — which marks its 65th anniversary this week. To bring it home, I told them that many of the boys from 1st Airborne Division who landed by glider and parachute near Arnhem on that deceptively calm, sunny September weekend weren’t much older than they; and I showed them photographs of the heartbreaking inscriptions at Oosterbeek cemetery, where some of the dwindling band of surviving veterans will be holding their

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 19 September 2009

Flying out of JFK on 11 September was a sombre experience. As I checked out of my hotel the concierge dropped his daily niceties as a mark of respect, and instead gently urged me to ‘have a thoughtful day’. The handful of star-spangled banners that lined Madison Avenue flapped at half-mast and the skies opened as if in dark protest, chucking down apocalyptic rain and causing the traffic to crawl. As someone who suffers from an unfounded yet pathological fear of flying I decided there was only one way to step up to the plate and board my American Airlines flight to Los Angeles: vodka. As soon as I’d gone

Friday

The Spectator

The week that was | 18 September 2009

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week Fraser Nelson asks why the high-priests of climate change alarmism fear debate, and wonders if it wise for the Tories to be more angry about the public finances. James Forsyth thinks Vince Cable doesn’t receive anywhere near enough scrutiny, and sees Peter Mandelson losing his touch. Peter Hoskin believes that all the political parties aren’t facing up to the debt crisis’ severity, and reads a report that should influence welfare reform for years to come. David Blackburn isn’t sure the government’s coffin can take anymore nails, and doubts that an attack on middle class benefits will enable

Peter Hoskin

Will the Tories abolish the RAF?

Over at his new blog for the Wall Street Journal, Iain Martin ups the provocative factor by asking: “Will the Tories axe the RAF?”  Here’s the key passage: “It has long been the dirty little secret of the U.K. defence establishment that a way to streamline the command structure, reduce duplication and slash costs is to close the RAF. There are two options for how it could be done: 1) Abolish the traditional three services and switch to a single marine corps model, with all three services effectively merging under new leadership. Or, 2) Split the RAF’s capacity between the two remaining services, giving the army the lift and delivery

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Public Spending Cuts: The Theory vs The Reality

Everyone agrees that cuts in public spending are necessary. Everyone also agrees that we could do with a better and more candid class of politician. And everyone should agree that we could do with better newspapers too. It’s budget week here in Scotland and that means there’s the chance to preview some of arguments that are going to be had at Westminster next year. So how does the Scottish Daily Mail report the SNP’s budget? With the splash: CUTS AT HOME, CASH FOR AFRICA. How charming. Apparently As SNP budget paves way for savage cuts in housing, transport and education, Salmond finds extra millions for pet foreign aid projects. You

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Of course Obama’s black, but that’s not the problem

Much though I like and respect the chap, isn’t Jonathan Freedland slightly overstating the case? The headline to his Guardian article read: “If Obama can’t defeat the Republican headbangers our planet is doomed.” Later in the piece, Jonny admitted that some might see this assertion as “hyperbolic” or “deranged”. Maybe. My definition of it is high-camp leftist infantilism, for what it’s worth. Freedland’s point was that if Obama can’t push through a few harmless changes to US healthcare without being branded as “an amalgam of Stalin, Hitler and Big Brother” (sic), then what chance does he have of breathing life into Kyoto? Ergo, all the ice will melt, the polar

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Mr Obama, tear down these missile sites

Today Barack Obama publicly tore down the missile installations that George W Bush put up in the Czech Republic and Poland. The system was ostensibly meant to counter threats from Iran, but given the swift creation of missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic in the wake of Russian’s invasion of Georgia, Moscow’s elite never bought into this rationale – and perhaps rightly so. The strength of Russian feeling has always been clear. The latest Russian National Security Strategy states that the “ability to maintain global and regional stability is being significantly aggravated by the elements of the global missile defence system of the US”. So if Obama wanted

David Blackburn

The Good Old Cause

Paul Waugh’s beaten us to it, but Ed Ball’s New Statesman article is a rallying cry to the left. He writes: ‘As we approach the most important general election for a generation, this is no time for introspection or defeatism. There’s never been a moment when Labour’s values and experience have been more relevant or necessary.’ And what are those values? Well, they’re not Blairite: ‘In public-service reform, we sometimes sounded as though private-sector solutions were always more efficient; and who can now doubt that, despite the tougher measures we brought in, financial regulation was not tough enough?’ The most telling statement is that Balls believes markets to be intrinsically

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

A report that should influence welfare reform for years to come

Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice has released a very important report today, and one which should influence the welfare debate for years to come.  At around 350 pages, it’s a weighty enough tome, but I’d recommend that CoffeeHousers give it a flick through. Its subject is how to fix a benefits system which incentivises worklessness.  At the moment, unemployed people are eligible for so many benefits – there are 51 in total – that they can accumulate an income which rivals, or sometimes even exceeds, the wage they’d get by taking a job.  And even if they could get more money in work, the current benefits system still