Society

Saturday

28 Nov 2009

Public sector employees everywhere treat their clients as barely tolerated irritants

I watched Shadowlands again the other day, Richard Attenborough’s film about C.S. Lewis’s relationship with Joy Gresham, and was struck by one scene in particular. Anthony Hopkins is sitting beside the hospital bed of Debra Winger when suddenly she takes a turn for the worse. He leaps from his chair and runs out into the corridor. ‘Nurse, Nurse!’ he cries and almost instantly a nurse comes running and darts into his wife’s room. Shortly afterwards, a doctor appears and he updates Hopkins on Winger’s condition in a tactful, solicitous manner. For any middle-class person who’s spent time in a hospital recently, this seems laughably out of date. Apparently, there really

The Spectator

Letters | 28 November 2009

Not so special Sir: The only ‘disrespect’ Obama can really be accused of is a degree of indifference to the British delusion of a ‘special relationship’ with the USA (‘A special form of disrespect’, 21 November). One would have thought that after the con-trick of Lend-lease, the wholesale vacuuming-up of British nuclear and aviation technology, Roosevelt’s barely concealed desire to see the British empire dismantled and the Suez fiasco, scales might have dropped from post-Churchillian Britain’s eyes. Despite General McChrystal referring to two British Generals as ‘Jacko’ and ‘Lamby’, there is not and never has been a special relationship unless it suited Washington. Is it ineradicable Francophobia that prevents us

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 28 November 2009

Monday I can’t quite believe what we had a strategy meeting about this morning. My hands are trembling as I type… What if climate change doesn’t exist? It’s too awful to contemplate. But we are being asked to consider: what if the earth is not getting warmer? What if the world is not sleepwalking to ecological disaster?! What if… OMG… what if Lord Lawson is right!?!?!! Gary said we need a fallback position, in case there’s more of this stuff about scientists telling porkies. But Jed said to question our faith in climate change now would be heresy. The lack of proof, he says, is the whole point. ‘If the

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 28 November 2009

Dot’s found a funny thing. Here’s a funny thing. The New Oxford American Dictionary (or Noad, for short) has nominated teabagger as the runner-up for ‘word of the year’. The winning word was unfriend, a piece of jargon used by people who drop so-called friends from popular networking sites such as Facebook. As for teabagger, it is said to refer to someone protesting at ‘President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773)’. In that case, one might think it would be called tea-partying. Perhaps, one might surmise, teabagging had been influenced by sand-bagging,

Alexander Chancellor

Diary – 28 November 2009

The man who invented the breathalyser more than 50 years ago was called Robert Borkenstein, a former policeman who had risen from the ranks to become head of the Department of Forensic Studies at Indiana University. He was very proud of his achievement. ‘If we can make life better simply by controlling alcohol, that’s a very small price to pay,’ he once said. ‘My whole life’s work has been spent trying to make life better for people.’ Well, he didn’t make it better for me. I lost my driving licence in September last year after failing a breath test in Buckinghamshire. Having a flat tyre on my way home from

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 November 2009

Floods swept Cumbria after 12.4 inches of rain fell in 24 hours (at Seathwaite), the most ever recorded in Britain. Main Street in Cockermouth was more than waist deep in water. Some 1,300 houses were affected, and insurance claims were expected to reach £100 million. PC Bill Baker died in the collapse of the Northside bridge at Workington, away from which he was directing traffic. Six bridges were washed away, and all 1,800 in the county were to be checked, with the Calva bridge at Workington being condemned, separating the town by a 20-mile drive. The floods arrived a day after the government announced in the Queen’s Speech that ‘legislation

The Spectator

Think-tank battle

The concept of a ‘Red Tory’ is not an easy one to grasp. T he concept of a ‘Red Tory’ is not an easy one to grasp. Is it someone who believes in huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ for all, or is it an inversion of a champagne socialist: someone who preaches free markets from beneath a flat cap while sipping bitter in a boozer in Bolton? The phrase was invented by Philip Blond, a former lecturer who has attracted a million pounds to set up his own think-tank, ResPublica — launched this week with David Cameron in attendance. His particular beef is with monopolies, and their effect on community spirit.

The Spectator

Troubled waters | 28 November 2009

Amid the wreckage of this week’s floods the most depressing comment came from a government scientist who called for a national register of bridges. If we had a register, he argued, the relevant authorities might in future be better able to predict which bridges are likely to go the same way as Workington’s two went this week. And this — as well as blaming climate change — is how the government machine avoids a glaringly obvious problem. Britain is not short of databases. On the contrary, the taxpayer is groaning under the weight of them. What the country is desperately short of, on the other hand, is decent roads, railways

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 28 November 2009

What do we do about the wealth-producers? Especially foreign ones? Everything in our power to indicate our distaste for them, seems to be the answer. The Greek essayist and soldier Xenophon would wonder what we were playing at. In 355 bc Athens was in desperate financial straits. It was then that Xenophon, whose military career had taken him as far as Persia and who knew a bit about rich foreigners, wrote the pamphlet Poroi (‘Revenues’). It is a programme for economic recovery quite unlike the usual Athenian public spending cuts and taxation schemes. His most bold and original proposal is to establish a state capital fund, with a decent return

David Blackburn

A nation of property owners

An Abu Dhabian official has briefed Reuters that Abu Dhabi will rescue Dubai on a “case-by-case basis”. The official stated: “We will look at Dubai’s commitments and approach them on a case-by-case basis. It does not mean that Abu Dhabi will underwrite all of their debts. “Some of Dubai’s entities are commercial, semi-government ones. Abu Dhabi will pick and choose when and where to assist.” This is potentially bad news for the UK taxpayer, who faces the prospect of provided further cover for British banks, who invested $50bn in the region at the height of the boom. The reason we’re in the firing line? Generous though they are, Abu Dhabi

Hugo Rifkind

Climate change deniers are anti-science and anti-reason — and they terrify me

You know what I don’t believe in? Engineering. Shameless pseudo-science. You want to watch out for those so-called ‘engineers’. See that bridge that fell down in Cumbria the other day? Lordy, they’ll be cashing in on that. Up they’ll pop with their ‘stress points’ and ‘foundations’ and other such insider-ish, clubby mumbo-jumbo. As though any of it actually meant something. As though bridges hadn’t been falling down forever, for no particular reason at all. And medicine? God, that’s even worse. I mean, sure, sometimes you get a fever and somebody gives you some pills and you get better, but is there really a link? I doubt it. Kick up a

James Delingpole

What idiocy it is to regard whiteness as a problem in need of a remedy

‘Oh please let no one call Trevor McDonald a nignog. Oh, please. Oh please!’ It was sometime towards the end of the 1980s (before Britain’s first black newsreader got his knighthood) and my brother, my sister and I were standing on the pavement watching the village carnival go by, each of us offering up the same silent prayer to the heavens. The place was Topsham, a village on the river Exe, a few miles outside Exeter, where our mother had just moved in with a lovely chap named Frank. Trevor was the local celebrity, the carnival guest of honour and also the Only Black Man In The Village. None of

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 28 November 2009

In Competition 2623 you were invited to submit an extract from a novel or a play, of which one letter of the title had been changed, in the style of the original author. It was especially tough this week to whittle a large postbag down to just six. Oh, to have the space to share with readers the delights of The Drapes of Wrath, Finnegans Cake, Wailing for Godot and Lady Chatterley’s Liver. Well done, one and all. D.A. Prince shone with ‘Paradise Post’, but, as I stipulated a novel or a play, she is excluded from the winning line-up. It’s £25 each to the victors, and Alan Millard nabs

Roger Alton

Luck of the Irish

Of all the many incidental pleasures of the Spectator Editors’ Dinner last week, one of the most enjoyable was sharing a main course with Coleraine businessman Ken Belshaw and his wife Iris. Ken, a passionate rugby man, was filling me in on the glories of Irish sport, ironically at exactly the same time as, unknown to us all, Thierry Henry was manhandling Ireland’s football team right out of the World Cup. But Irish friends who were in Paris that night broadly take the Roy Keane line: time to move on. It was clearly a brilliant evening: I watched the game after the dinner and the Irish played out of their

Deborah Ross

Mounting dread

Paranormal Activity 15, Nationwide Paranormal Activity is the horror film which was made for $30,000 and has since gone on to earn $240 million at the box office globally. This is astonishing, just as the size of horror audiences always astonishes me. Who are these people who enjoy being scared to death, and consider it a good night out? I don’t. Indeed, as I said to the critic who initially sat next to me at the screening, ‘I should warn you, I’m not very good at this sort of thing and I may well jump into your lap.’ At this point, he promptly got up and moved. I was, yes,

Aidan Hartley

Bankrupted by paradise

Kiwayu Island, Kenya I came on a holiday to unwind and decompress but I have just been handed the bill and so I think I will have that heart attack after all. We are at Mike’s Camp on the desert island of Kiwayu north of Lamu, my favourite place in the world. This is where Claire and I had our honeymoon ten years ago. Our anniversary coincided with a scare from my doctor, who says that for health reasons I should cut down on several activities that underpin my very identity. The journey to Kiwayu was set about with temptations. We flew to Lamu and lunched at Peponi’s Hotel while

Friday

27 Nov 2009

Alex Massie

The Sins of the Fathers

The least surprising thing about the latest revelations of the Irish Catholic Church’s complicity in thousands of cases of horrific child abuse is that almost none of it is surprising at all. Shocking, yes, but not surprising. Even those of us with an appropriately cynical view of the Chuch, mind you, can only marvel at the breathtaking mendacity displayed by the Church. The Archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary, says he is ” mindful of the perceived hollowness of repeated apologies” and he has a point. Because until they were caught, the Church displayed no remorse whatsoever. Time and time again, as the Murphy Commission’s report makes only too clear, the

The Spectator

The week that was | 27 November 2009

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week. Fraser Nelson wonders if Britain’s economy is turning Japanese. James Forsyth highlights the risk that a hung parliament poses to UK bond market, and makes the case for sending 40,000 troops to Afghanistan. Peter Hoskin spots Lord Mandelson making mischief, and urges caution over the rogue poll. David Blackburn says that President Obama has procrastinated his way to failure over Afghanistan, and asks if the Chilcot inquiry will be any different. Mark Bathgate cries out for the banks to be resolved. Lloyd Evans watches Clegg and Cameron spring a few surprises on Gordon Brown. Daniel Korski wonders

David Blackburn

The coming sandstorm

The FT’s Alphaville blog has published a table detailing foreign banks’ exposure in the UAE. Look away now because it’s horrific. Of course not all of this lending was to Dubai, but those sort of funds are unlikely to be required by Abu Dhabi, with its gigantic oil profits and £900bn wealth fund. If Abu Dhabi doesn’t bail out its ailing partner, you can bet your bottom dollar who will.

Peter Hoskin

Has dead aid taken on a green hue?

We’ve got £800 million to spare, haven’t we? Don’t be so cynical – of course we do. After all, it’s the amount of UK cash that Gordon Brown is prepared to sign over to a new £10 billion climate change fund that he’s proposing. The idea is that the money can be used to encourage poorer countries to move towards greener economies. Brilliant. More seriously, I’d have thought that the money would be better spent on developing those green technologies which could create jobs and clean up the environment, both home and away. Especially as we don’t have much money to spare, and this fund contains so much potential for