Society

Saturday

Tamzin Lightwater

New Year resolutions

Tamzin Lightwater’s New Year resolutions Seal the Deal Goodness knows why, but the polls are still suggesting that a few strange voters are not yet 101 per cent sure they want Dave for PM. This sounds wacky, but we have to take it seriously and do everything we can to address that last tiny bit of doubt. As such we will be monitoring Dave’s parting 24/7 to make sure it doesn’t creep up into a quiff. Be Less Posh I’ve just spent five hours going through shadow Cabinet biographies on Wiki erasing public school references. Painstaking work but the sort of dedication that is going to be needed if we

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 2 January 2010

I haven’t been to see Avatar and I don’t suppose I shall, but I have just learnt how to say ‘Hello’ to a Na’vi in his own language. It is Kaltxì. The difficult bit is the consonant spelled tx, which is an ejective. I don’t want to go on about phonetics, because it is fearfully confusing without hearing the sounds. The much-derided Wikipedia has useful little recordings of the sound made by an ejective p, t, k, q and s. Anyway, ejective consonants, pronounced with a closed glottis, are not to be confused with clicks or indeed implosives. In learning a new language, sounds such as these are jolly well

Conrad Black

Diary – 2 January 2010

There was something about the spectacle of the Queen grimly, and Tony Blair cheerfully, holding hands as they sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the Millennium Dome at the end of 1999 that could have alerted us that the decade ahead would not be a good one. Who could then have imagined that the United States, so overwhelmingly successful after its almost bloodless victory over its only rival, would accelerate the pursuit of the most imprudent economic policy of any serious democracy since Britain under Old Labour? The Americans borrowed trillions of dollars from China and Japan, to buy trillions of dollars of non-essential goods from China and Japan while officially

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 02 January 2010

The Chilcot enquiry into the Iraq war raises the old question of what constitutes a ‘just’ war. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are the authorities here, but they have their eyes on their predecessors. The Chilcot enquiry into the Iraq war raises the old question of what constitutes a ‘just’ war. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are the authorities here, but they have their eyes on their predecessors. Ancient Greeks had little to say about the concept but, contrary to received opinion, they were not (for the most part) committed warmongers. Just over one third of the Iliad is taken up with battle scenes (about 300 encounters), but Ares the war god

David Blackburn

Why profiling is essential

It is a truth, yet to be universally acknowledged, that the overwhelming majority of global terrorism is committed by radical Muslims. However, the Guardian reports that Whitehall has reached that conclusion and passenger profiling is “in the mix” of the latest airport security review. Thank God, sense prevails at last. The previous airport review, conducted in the aftermath of the liquid bomb plot, decided against profiling. What followed was a fatuous politically correct concoction. Even pilots’ toothpaste was examined; one pilot commented: “If I want to kill everyone (on board) I don’t faff around with plastic explosives, I point the nose at the ground”. Such determined absurdity should be behind us. Alas, not everyone gets

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Thomas the Tank Engine is merciless and bigoted — that’s why kids love it

It is very difficult, watching a Thomas the Tank Engine dvd with your young children, to escape the suspicion that the Reverend Wilbert Awdry was anything other than a thoroughly vindictive and authoritarian old scrote, with a spiteful streak the width of the Fat Controller’s stomach. You would not leave your kids with him in person. The errant rolling stock are subjected to ghastly punishments and humiliations — including one engine being bricked up in a tunnel for months on end while the others laugh at him. As the Canadian academic Shauna Wilton pointed out recently, the programme does indeed ‘promote(s) a rigid class system that stifles self-expression’, as well

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 2 January 2010

In Competition 2627 you were invited to submit a rhyming prophecy for 2010. The entry was short on optimism but bursting with wit and ingenuity. Hats off to Mae Scanlan, a more-or-less lone Pollyanna in a sea of Cassandras, who foresees global peace and economic prosperity. She narrowly missed out on joining the winners, printed below. It’s £25 each and an extra £5 to Noel Petty. Happy New Year! January opens sunny, Bankers vote for parsimony, BBC sacks Ross (‘not funny’), Burmese colonels all resign. Waving fields of green shoots sighted, City overtake United, Ferguson says ‘Great! Delighted!’, Climate change declared benign.   GDP continues palmy, Scientists turn back tsunami,

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 2 January 2010

At an airport recently I saw a sign for the public telephones; it was a symbol showing a round telephone dial with a receiver across the top. Nothing odd about this, you may think — that is if, like me, you are over 40. If you are under 20, on the other hand, it may be incomprehensible, for at no time in your life has your telephone looked even remotely like this. At the very least, the symbol must seem absurdly anachronistic, like those twee signs you get on loo doors where the man and woman are wearing Edwardian costume. The change is not confined to the phone’s shape, either.

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Fact of the day

the National Security Agency alone now gathers four times more data each day than is contained in the Library of Congress. From David Brooks’s column in the NYT today

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A failure to act

The last two months have seen two terrorist incidents in the US. In one case, the father of the terrorists had alerted US officials to the dangers posed by his son. In the other, the perpetrator had made his extremist views known to a roomful of army physicians. It is a remarkable social and, as John Stokes says, system failure that nothing was done with the information in either case.   There is a detailed piece in today’s Washington Post on the various clues offered up by Nidal Hasan, the man who opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. I was aware that Hasan had given a presentation

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Here’s to a boozy New Year

Happy New Year – and have a drink! That’s the message from the new year issue of The Spectator, where Leah McLaren has written a superb piece answering the Liam Donaldsons of this world. Here she is, in full flow: “Almost all of this country’s most famous names been unapologetic boozers. From Kate Moss to Francis Bacon to Christopher Hitchens to the Queen Mum, Brits have a great tradition of not letting their functional alcoholism drag them down. Without it, arguably, we would not have punk rock, romantic poetry or basic democratic freedoms — for as Churchill urged us to remember, he ‘took more out of alcohol’ than alcohol took

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories must make the public understand just how much damage Brown has done to the nation’s finances

The mission for the Tories in the New Year is to communicate to the electorate just how bad a state the public finances are in. The Tories need to hammer this message home until the proverbial man on the street knows the numbers. Only when people realise that we were first in and last out of recession of the major economies and that, as Rosemary Righter points out in The Times today, the deficit is roughly twice as large in real terms than it was when Healey was forced to go to the IMF will Brown’s standing collapse as much as it should by rights. Brown’s defenders will say that

Peter Hoskin

The year in cuts

As we’re still in that period of the year for looking back as well as forward, I thought I’d share with CoffeeHousers a political timeline I put together. It’s not everything which happened in the political year, mind – but rather the important events in the debate over spending cuts. This debate has, at very least, been in the background to almost every political discussion in 2009, and it will dominate the years ahead – so this kind of exercise probably has some posterity value. But, aside from that, you can also draw a couple of conclusions from the timeline (and I do so below). Anyway, here it is, starting a bit before

David Blackburn

Ministers should always be ultimately accountable

Bob Ainsworth’s response to the Nimrod inquiry features one extraordinary omission: ministers do not appear to be directly accountable in the event of another tragedy. The reforms establish the MAA, the military aviation authority, which is independent from the MoD, but will not have responsibility for releasing aircraft to service – assistant chiefs of staff have that responsibility – however there the buck apparently stops. Here is the relevant section in Hansard:   ‘The single service chiefs of staff must retain responsibility for determining that our aircraft can be safely released into service. The MAA will provide full assurance, but it will not carry out this release-to-service role directly. For

John Stokes

The failures of American intelligence

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 succeeded because US intelligence failed to bring the various pieces of information together to prevent them. The attempted terrorist attack on a North West Airlines plane headed for Detroit almost succeeded because US intelligence failed to bring different pieces of information together that would have prevented the bomber getting on the plane. Between 2001 and today, the US has spent around $40 billion on counter terrorist improvements and even more on trying to improve intelligence. And yet, nothing much seems to have changed. In the current case, there was intelligence that the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda was using a ‘Nigerian’ as a bomber. There

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Qualified Defence of Security Theatre

What is the point of airport security? It’s most important job, it seems to me, is not to deter or even prevent terrorism but to remind the public that there is a terrorist threat. If this was true before the Knicker-Bomber it’s even more clearly the case now. That’s not just because Mr Abdulmutallab was able to board his flight to Detroit but because it’s apparent, if this was ever in doubt, that just three things have improved airline security since 9/11: reinforced cockpit doors, the increased vigilance of other passengers and the incompetence shown by at least some of the would-be bombers. The rest is just security theatre. (See

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The NYT: The Detroit bomber was radicalised in London

It is a depressing fact that the Detroit bomber appears to have been radicalised in London. Today, the New York Times takes an extensive look at the bomber’s radicalisation in London. As the paper, which is not prone to hyperbole, says: “Investigators are now, in fact, turning a sharper and retrospective eye to the passage in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s life that began immediately after his summer in Sana, Yemen, in 2005, when he enrolled as a $25,000-a-year mechanical engineering student at University College London. In recent days, officials in Washington and London have said they are focusing on the possibility that his London years, including his possible contacts with radical Muslim

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Swann’s Way*

Graeme Swann and Ian Bell combine to dismiss Ashwell Prince for 16 runs: Swann would finish with nine wickets in the match. Photo: Paul Gilham/Getty Images. With his long-sleeved shirt and buttoned-collar there’s something appeallingly old-fashioned about Graeme Swann. True, the sunglasses he often favours add a modern touch but, at bottom, Swann’s the kind of chirpy Englishman familiar from so many classic Second World War movies. You can easily imagine him serving under Noel Coward aboard the Torrin in David Lean’s In Which We Serve. He is, without doubt, England’s cricketer of the year and I expect Wisden will ratify this come the spring when it the venerable almanack

Daniel Korski

2010: my predictions and yours

It’s that time of year – TV and radio are packed with special editions of Dr Who, news reviews and numerous best-ofs. So let me add to the cacophony with a look ahead to next year. Here are thirteen (and a bit) predictions for 2010: 1. The Taliban will mount a Tet-like attack on an Afghan town centre, such as Laskar Gar, prompting the Lib Dems to call for a British withdrawal from Afghanistan. 2. Iran’s regime will arrest and condemn to death one of the contenders in the 2009 presidential election. 3. Brazil will win the World Cup in South Africa. 4. The Pakistani president will be forced from

David Blackburn

For all his faults, Gradgrind was right

The next time your four year old nephew smears chocolate over your trousers you are to congratulate him. According to government guidance, soon to be issued to nurseries by Dawn Primarolo, the glibly smirking illiterate would have been writing.  Yesterday’s Independent reported that in response to evidence that the gender gap between children under the age of five has widened in writing, problem-solving and personal development, the government believe that boys should work harder.  This seemingly impossible task will be eased by ‘making learning fun’: boys will be allowed to graffiti any given surface with chocolate and coloured sand.   What a way to begin the new decade: by creating