Society

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 5 December 2009

In Competition 2624 you were invited to submit a poem in the style of the legendary William Topaz McGonagall on an issue of contemporary relevance to the Scots. Hailed by the TLS as ‘the only truly memorable bad poet in our language’, McGonagall built his reputation on appalling yet beguiling works of inadvertent comic genius. Neither plagued by a lack of self-belief nor hampered by self-awareness, the handloom weaver from Dundee forged ahead with his art in the face of universal mockery and derision. He has had the last laugh, though: his star burns brightly still more than a century after his death. The sincerity of the original voice (which

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 5 December 2009

I read Dennis Sewell’s article on the damaging influence of eugenics on the welfare state with interest and mostly agree with his views. I read Dennis Sewell’s article on the damaging influence of eugenics on the welfare state with interest and mostly agree with his views. Even in my most right-wing moments, I don’t want to open my Spectator to find articles proposing a selective breeding programme (though, come to think of it, this may have been the idea behind the Spectator Editors’ Dinner — I left around 11, so never got the chance to find out). All the same, his attack on eugenics, as with many anti-Darwin assaults, seems

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Time wasting

I had to transfer some money into my Polish builder’s bank account the other day, so I rang up the Lloyds TSB Execmaster Super VIP service helpline. I had to transfer some money into my Polish builder’s bank account the other day, so I rang up the Lloyds TSB Execmaster Super VIP service helpline. As usual, I wasn’t permitted just to make my transaction and get on with my life. First, the helpful person at the other end impressed on me, I would really need to sort out my bank accounts. Currently, he had noticed, I held my money in a Greyman Ordinaire Current account and a Crapmeister Lo-Interest Saver

Robin Oakley

Twelve to follow

Advice should always be received cautiously. I have in mind the two hunters in the American woods. One fell to the ground, his eyes rolling in his head. His companion called the emergency services by cellphone: ‘I think my friend is dead. What do I do?’ The operator cautiously urged him, ‘Now, sir, let’s stay calm. Let’s first of all make sure your friend is dead.’ The line goes quiet. Then there is the sound of a shot before the caller comes back on the line to the operator, ‘OK. Now what?’ Do not cash all your premium bonds to invest on the dozen horses I am now advising for

Jeremy Clarke

Taken for a ride

Everything had gone wrong for him lately, said Mr Beaumont. He was going blind. His prostate trouble had worsened. His dear wife of 60 years had passed away just a fortnight before, following a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. And the day before she’d died, she’d fallen on him, breaking his leg. We were standing in the tidy living room of his bungalow. He was leaning heavily on his stick with both hands and telling me all this because I was about to have a look at his car, with a view to buying it. His point, presumably, being that it was this succession of disasters, rather than any fault

Friday

Daniel Korski

Don’t give us your unwashed masses

Downturns turn people against immigrants. That’s normal. But even according to the statistical average, Britons are particularly unhappy about the state of immigration these days. In a new survey undertaken by the German Marshall Fund, seventy-one percent of Britons polled disapproved of Labour’s immigration policy. Spaniards (64%), Americans (63%), Italians (53%) are also sceptical of government action.  In contrast, 71% of Germans, 59% of Canadians and 50% of French approved of the steps their countries had taken. In fact, Britons are the most sceptical about immigration, with 66% seeing it as more of a problem than an opportunity – a jump of seven percentage points on 2008 figures. Concerns about

David Blackburn

Collective failure exposed

The National Audit Office’s report into the government’s handling of the banking crisis and taxpayers’ continued exposure is a pandora’s box of financial horrors. The NAO estimate that taxpayers are underwriting liabilities exceeding £850bn and, buried in the document, is the revelation that the FSA and the Treasury gave RBS “a clean bill of health” in October 2008, days before the bank nearly collapsed. Details are scarce and I haven’t seen the relevant Treasury document to which the NAO refers; but this disclosure is astonishing, even by the standards of Fred the Shred, the FSA et al. This crisis was caused not by market failure but by systemic incompetence within

Thursday

Mark Bathgate

Risky business | 3 December 2009

With the largest transfer of liabilities in British history – the insurance of the risk of loss on £240 billion of toxic RBS assets by taxpayers – proceeding, there is worryingly little information being given about either what these assets may be or what risks there are to the taxpayer. Rather than the parliamentary enquiry and detailed disclosure Swiss parliamentarians demanded when UBS needed similar assistance, a small press release noting such exotics as “structured credit assets “ has been issued. The spin continues to be that there is nothing to worry about and all this money will come back fine. Bank of England data shows that UK bank exposure

The Spectator

In this week’s Spectator | 3 December 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: As the world gears up for two weeks of hob-nobbing in Copenhagen, it is plain that climate change has mutated from a debate into a catechism. With so much at stake, says Fraser Nelson, can we afford to dispense with rational argument? The Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, continues to deny that Islamist extremism is being taught in state-funded

Wednesday

Lawrence Kay

Politicking on the backs of the poorest

This afternoon Jim Knight MP, the minister for welfare reform, proclaimed that the Government wants to turn the Jobcentre Plus network into a careers service for everyone. He said that welfare advisers, who currently try to help get people on benefits back into work, will start to “provide opportunities for progression” for anyone in a job – no matter whether the person is a banker or a bin man. This is a bad idea for a simple reason: it is far more important to help the unemployed back into work than give assistance to people who already have a job. The longer that someone is out of work, the worse

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Dazed and confused | 2 December 2009

How are you feeling this morning? Muddled and confused? Follow my rule, then: always wait until Thought for the Day has finished before you enjoy your first stiffener of the morning. Lord Stern thinks most of you are muddled and confused, and has said as much. Anyone who doubts man-made climate change is muddled and confused. Stern is the chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. The Grantham Institute is of course named after Leslie Grantham who played Dirty Den in the popular soap opera “Eastenders” but who, in his spare time, made up a long list of figures which proved that the earth was getting

David Blackburn

This small man thinks he’s St. Joan

I sympathise with Alistair Darling and his defence of the City. When he’s not contending with Gordon Brown’s suicidal Tobin tax proposals, Darling has to confront Nicolas Sarkozy’s calculated anti-Anglo popular politics. Yesterday, the Elysees’s Puss-in-Boots delivered a deliberately provocative and economically senseless attack on what he described as the “unconstrained Anglo-Saxon market model.” Sarkozy sees the appointment of Michel Barnier as EU financial regulation supremo as a “victory” for France; he expressed himself in those exact terms: “Do you know what it means for me to see for the first time in 50 years a French European commissioner in charge of the internal market, including financial services, including the

Peter Coleman

Australian Notes | 2 December 2009

I was both right and wrong. When Tony Abbott’s Battlelines came out a few months ago I wrote in these pages that it had many excellent things to say but its thinness on economic policy meant that his Parliamentary colleagues would be unwilling to elect him as their leader. That was wrong. But I added: ‘except in the most extraordinary circumstances’ — and that turned out to be right. The Liberal party is lucky to have had him to fall back on. The rage of the Left shows that it knows it now has a fight on its hands. John Howard will be both the guest of honour at the

Interconnect

Man-made global warming is real. The solutions being touted are not

The pledges many countries will make on greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen are pure fantasy, says Bjørn Lomborg. We must pursue other options Judging by the opinion polls, those gathering at the Copenhagen climate change summit have a lot of persuading to do. Just two in five Brits think that global warming is taking place and is man-made. Only one third of Americans think that humans are responsible for climate change. The number of Australians who deem global warming a ‘serious and pressing problem’ has dropped sharply. The urgency which grips politicians around the world seems not to be shared by the general public — to the frustration of people

Stephen J Dubner

A solution that dare not speak its name

Imagine for a moment that a terrible, unforeseen threat to humankind had suddenly arisen, one so grave that it endangered the very future of the planet. Two teams of respected scientists immediately set to work, trying to find a way to prevent the impending disaster. The first set of scientists returned with a potential solution, but it had some shortcomings. It was expensive, with a price tag in the trillions of dollars. It also required nearly every human being on the planet to change his or her behaviour in fundamental ways. And even if the scientists’ scheme worked, it would take decades for the benefits to be felt. The second

Paul Reiter

The inconvenient truth about malaria

Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a masterpiece. Like an elder brother to all humanity, he patiently explained the familiar litany of disasters — droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise and the rest — spiced with heartrending personal stories: his baby son’s near-fatal accident, the agony of losing a sister to lung cancer. It was a science lecture crafted by Hollywood. In his book — the version for adults, not the one for schoolchildren — he even included a colour photograph of a corpse, a young man, floating face downward, drowned by Hurricane Katrina. I wonder whether the dead boy’s family were consulted. I am a scientist, not a climatologist,

Rupert Darwall

Why Marx would have been a denier

Make no mistake, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would have given short shrift to global warming and environmentalism in some of their most colourful prose. As Sherlock Holmes explained to the Scotland Yard detective, there is the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. But the dog did nothing. ‘That,’ Holmes replied, ‘was the curious incident.’ Who heard the Marxist bark? In the history of global warming, that dog was classical Marxism, a Promethean doctrine that argued for the strengthening of man’s power over nature. It is hard to conceive of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union being a party to global carbon emissions treaties on ideological grounds, let alone during

Robert O-Mendelsohn

Calm down, dear. There’s plenty of time

The Stern Review is four years old but remains a vital tool for Copenhagen’s policy-makers. It shows them exactly what not to do, says Robert O. Mendelsohn Across the West, we hear the increasingly shrill prophesies that climate change will destroy the earth. The solution proposed is to adopt a new world order with regulations that will dramatically change the global economy. Against this backdrop, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen in a few days’ time to discuss whether such upheaval can be justified. And it is a subject on which economists have plenty to say. Simply put, the costs of ‘abatement’ — the carbon reduction plans being advocated in

Maurizio Morabito

The CIA’s ‘global cooling’ files

A high-priority government report warns of climate change that will lead to floods and starvation. ‘Leading climatologists’ speak of a ‘detrimental global climatic change’, threatening ‘the stability of most nations’. The scenario is eerily familiar although the document — never made public before — dates from 1974. But here’s the difference: it was written to respond to the threat of global cooling, not warming. And yes, it even mentions a ‘consensus’ among scientists. ‘A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems’, written by the CIA for ‘internal planning purposes’ in August 1974, goes a little way towards explaining why some people over a certain age experience a

Rachel Johnson

Come on, girls — have a crack!

When I was asked recently whether I wanted to go shooting, I felt torn. It’s clearly very fashionable at the moment, as Charles Moore’s story about Cherie Blair and Lord Mandelson at the Rothschilds shows. But shooting is unutterably bloody, if you’re a woman. It starts with a long drive to a big house, encumbered by a vast array of boots, hats, gloves, jackets and thermal underwear, as well as sparkly evening outfits. You spend the night carousing, and in the morning the men — henceforth to be referred to only as ‘guns’ — wake early and pad about in heavy, Scott-of-the-Antarctic tweeds that smell of gun oil, reeking breeks,