Society

Saturday

23 Jan 2010

Letters | 23 January 2010

Hastings’s battle Sir: Max Hastings, one of the shrewdest and well-informed writers about defence, is right (‘The military’s last stand’, 16 January). There is a good case for increasing the defence budget, but no British government is likely to do so unless there is a dramatic deterioration in the international situation. Budgets are likely to be cut, but our defence forces can and should continue to be important for our country’s security, reputation and influence. The forces are crying out for a Strategic Defence Review and the longer one is delayed the more will be the uncertainty and wasted defence money. A radical approach is required and a move away

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 23 January 2010

Q. A dear friend invited me to stay. There was a firm notice on the first landing saying ‘no dogs allowed upstairs’ but my little whippet is used to sleeping with me and she is very good. I smuggled her up to my room where, unfortunately, she had an accident within the bed. This is something which has never happened before. She must have had a tummy upset. Mary, I am a single man with no experience of laundry. I was leaving before dawn to go shooting and the help was not due in for a couple of hours. I felt I would be doing the right thing if I

Toby Young

It is in the interests of local authorities to make sure no school becomes outstanding

Why are local authorities so bad at PR? Don’t they realise they are engaged in a political fight for their lives? The nub of the Tories’ education policy — though they don’t express it like this — is to wrest control of state education away from local authorities. Given that educational provision is the chief responsibility of local authorities, they are in danger of losing their raison d’être. The main criticism of local education authorities is that they haven’t done enough to raise standards. As David Cameron pointed out earlier this week, the number of boys at Eton who received three As at A-level last year is greater than the total number

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 23 January 2010

Monday A quick straw poll of the office confirms that only three of us would be clever enough to be a teacher under Dave’s new plans. This shows just how ambitious and brilliant they are! Wonky Tom would qualify, but says he would rather eat his own head than go near a roomful of screaming, obese delinquents with ADD (bit harsh). So basically, if you think about it, what we need is for thousands of very clever people who want a really horrible job that doesn’t pay much to come forward for the sake of their country’s future. Some sort of poster campaign might be in order, perhaps featuring a

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 23 January 2010

In Malaysia, I read, churches have been firebombed after the High Court there ruled that a Catholic paper could continue to use the word Allah for ‘God’ in its Malay-language editions. In Malaysia, I read, churches have been firebombed after the High Court there ruled that a Catholic paper could continue to use the word Allah for ‘God’ in its Malay-language editions. Christians in Borneo have used Allah for ‘God’ for hundreds of years, but the idea has got around among Malaysian Muslims that no non-Muslim should use the word to refer to God. Linguistically it is hard to think the High Court was wrong. I don’t know Arabic

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 23 January 2010

British people donated £23 million through the charities’ Disasters Emergency Committee to help the people of Haiti within six days of the earthquake there; the British government also gave £20 million. British people donated £23 million through the charities’ Disasters Emergency Committee to help the people of Haiti within six days of the earthquake there; the British government also gave £20 million. Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, said in a speech: ‘The coming decade will provide the UK with more middle-class jobs than ever before.’ Cadbury agreed to an £11.5 billion takeover by Kraft; there were fears of job losses. Unemployment unexpectedly fell a smidgen in December to 2.45

The Spectator

Charitable misgivings

The Haiti earthquake story has moved from a straightforward human tragedy to one of recrimination over the delay in channelling humanitarian aid. Reports from the ground suggest that so far only a few trucks carrying food and water have managed to reach the victims. It is deeply frustrating to see emergency supplies and equipment held up through a lack of organisation. There should be nothing surprising, however, in what has happened since the earthquake. Haiti is not a country thrown into anarchy by a natural disaster; it had no functioning government before the tremors struck. It has not been reduced to poverty; it was already the poorest country in the

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 23 January 2010

When natural disasters like the Haiti earthquake struck in the ancient world, the first move was to appeal to the Roman emperor. Smyrna, on the west coast of modern Turkey, was hit with a massive quake in ad 177/8. The letter to the emperor Marcus Aurelius from the local bigwig Aelius Aristides describes ‘dust everywhere, the harbour closed, the magnificent market flattened, fine roads disappeared, sports grounds, men, boys and all, destroyed, ships lying flat or sunk, bodies and ruins piled up, winds blowing over what is now a desert. Everything that is left looks to you…’. When Marcus received the letter, he wept. In such circumstances, all he or

James Forsyth

Will the Gove schools be so successful that the Scots and Welsh adopt them?

When I was writing my column this week on the Tories’ education policy, I realised that there’s a new test for policy: will it be so successful that the devolved administrations end up adopting it. Michael Gove’s plan for a supply side revolution in education – allowing any group of people to step up schools—promises to transform education. But there will be no new Gove schools outside of England because education is a devolved matter. If the Gove schools are obviously working, though, and a clear improvement on what went before, I expect there will be significant pressure from the voters for them to be allowed north and west of

Martin Bright

Mea Culpa: I’m in the Electronic Stocks

I have just received what I hope is the last of a series of letters from the parliamentary commissioner, John Lyon. He has informed me that a complaint against me has finally been resolved, which is something of a relief. When I first heard from him I must say I was irritated. Someone called Mark Pack had pointed out over the summer that I had not updated my entry in the journalists’ register of interests. This is the mechanism whereby members of the lobby, who gain access to parliament thanks to their connection with an individual media organisation, register other paid employment. When I was at the Observer and the New

Claire Berlinski

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Dealing with the aftershocks

By chance, my father and I were together when we heard the news. We had both just flown to Washington DC – he from Paris, I from Istanbul – to care for my grandmother, who¹d had a heart attack. Before the words “major earthquake in Haiti” came over the car radio, we were already under the impression that we were living through a serious family emergency. But after those words filtered through, the family emergency became far, far more serious. My brother Mischa and his wife Cristina have been living in Haiti for nearly three years. Cristina, an Italian lawyer, has been working for the Justice Section of MINUSTAH, the United

Rod Liddle

Would a terrorist really post a warning on Twitter?

This following is definitely in bad taste, isn’t it? I don’t always have a working moral compass when it comes to black humour, but I think this is just the wrong side of the line. Although I’m not sure. A disc jockey from Revolution Radio, in Manchester, played the song ‘Jump’, by Van Halen, as police attempted to coax a suicidal woman down from a nearby motorway bridge. The DJ, Steve Penk, had been inundated by complaints from motorists held up on the road while the police went about their delicate counselling work. Penk did not mention the woman when introducing the song. Somehow the case is not helped by

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 23 January 2010

If shrinks don’t have a term like disproportionate response — you know, getting jailed for clearing the snow off your path or some such madness — then they certainly should have. We need it to do justice to the lunatic levels of hoo-ha, from players, commentators and fans, over Graeme Smith’s referral and phantom snick in the third Test at Johannesburg. As Michael Vaughan, bless, had to point out, it was only a cricket match; nobody had died. It’s pointless bitching that Smith should have walked: I mean, does he look the kind of guy who walks? Mark you, some might think Hashim Amla doesn’t look like the kind of guy who

Patrick Allitt

America the Miserable

Patrick Allitt says that the infuriating but reassuring can-do spirit that once defined the United States is finally dying out. But what will we all do when it’s gone? The first time I went to America, in 1977, I couldn’t believe how cheerful, peppy and purposeful everyone was. The late seventies were bad years by American standards, the Jimmy Carter era of stagflation and malaise, but to someone coming out of Jim Callaghan’s Britain the place seemed almost insanely upbeat. Strangers would greet you enthusiastically, with a ‘How ya doin?’ in New York and a ‘Have you taken Jesus as your personal saviour?’ in small Oklahoma towns, but always with

Richard Villar

Haiti: a week after the earthquake

On Tuesday morning I looked down at the elderly woman lying in the corner of a hotel car park and suspected that my efforts would be futile. She was in a serious condition and obvious pain: intestinal paralysis caused by a broken pelvis and shoulder, the result of being trapped under tons of rubble. Her treatment should have been simple: not surgery necessarily, just careful nursing. But in Port-au-Prince, the hospitals are barely functioning. Wards and operating theatres are cracked and falling down. Most hospital staff are missing, dead, or too grief-stricken to function. My patient had nowhere to go. I could see her abdomen visibly distend. It was so

Stephen Pollard

Why do we kowtow to the MCB?

Last week, the Department for Communities and Local Government announced that it was lifting its ban on Whitehall contact with the Muslim Council of Britain, the self-proclaimed umbrella group of British Muslims. Quite apart from the tactical mistake of such a move — far from being an ally in the fight against extremism, the MCB is part of the problem — the group’s return to the Whitehall fold is a story of breathtaking cynicism and mind-boggling incompetence. In March 2009, the then communities secretary, Hazel Blears, suspended relations with the MCB. The previous month, the body’s deputy secretary-general, Daud Abdullah, had signed the ‘Istanbul Declaration’, a statement by Muslim clerics

Jacob Heilbrunn

Meet the fantastic Mr Fox

Only a year ago the American right was in a state of cataleptic shock as the Democrats won the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency. Conservatism looked as though it was headed for the skids, while the left celebrated its startling comeback. No longer. A populist right-wing revolt against big-government liberalism has sent Obama’s poll ratings plummeting and left the Democrats fearing a battering in the midterm 2010 elections. The Republican Scott Brown’s surprise victory in the race for the late Ted Kennedy’s seat is just the latest blow for poor Obama. How did this all happen so quickly? Look no further than Roger Ailes, the chairman and

Hugo Rifkind

Three tips on how to survive an apocalypse

Looting. I mean, you just would, wouldn’t you? I’d start with a supermarket and a gun shop. Come to think of it, I should probably know where my local gun shop is. Let’s see. Archway? Really? Who knew? Obviously I’m not expecting an earthquake in north London. But who says it has to be an earthquake? Any one of the five modern horsemen of the apocalypse staples would do it, which is to say, nuclear war, natural disaster, disease, zombies and aliens. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the literature — and by the literature I mean Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King, any number of films and that curious

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 23 January 2010

In Competition No. 2630 you were invited to imagine that a literary giant of the pre-television age is guest TV critic on The Spectator, and submit an extract from his or her review. As Emma Woodhouse says, ‘One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.’ So what would the literary greats of the past have thought of 21st-century viewing habits; what, I wonder, would Miss Austen herself have made of a dripping Colin Firth emerging from the lake at Pemberley in a telly adaptation of Pride and Prejudice? In a small but impressive entry, the poets were in fine voice. Here’s a snippet from Frank McDonald

Friday

22 Jan 2010

James Forsyth

Publishing the serious case review in the Edlington case is the best way to prevent more awful mistakes

The Edlington case is shocking and depressing to think about. But I would urge you to watch Gavin Esler’s interview of Ed Balls on Newsnight where he challenged Balls over his reasons for not publishing the full case review. Newsnight, who were leaked a copy of the full case review in the Edlington case, pressed Balls on why the full report was not being published when the summary was misleading and did not highlight some of the biggest problems. Balls, as the government does whenever it is challenged on this point, invoked the support of the NSPC, Lord Laming (whose record, as Iain Martin points out, isn’t that great) and