Society

Wednesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I have come up with a way of disrupting all these mad employment tribunals

Rod Liddle says the case of Fata Lemes — a Muslim woman who claimed her dignity had been ‘violated’ by the dress she had to wear in a cocktail bar — is sadly typical of a crazy institutional structure that kowtows to every conceivable outraged sensibility A Bosnian Muslim woman, Fata Lemes, has just won £3,000 from an employment tribunal because the Mayfair cocktail bar in which she worked required her to wear a red dress in the summer months. She said this was humiliating and made her feel ‘like a prostitute’ and ‘violated her dignity’ and therefore she refused to wear the dress. She complained and won her appeal.

Lucy Beckett

Cardinal values

As Machiavelli knew well, nothing succeeds like success. ‘Good King Harry’; ‘Good Queen Bess’; ‘Bloody Mary’: until very recently the smoke from the burning of Protestants in Mary Tudor’s brief reign has coloured not only common tags but the vision of most Tudor historians, who have regarded her five years on the throne as a cruel, incompetent and futile attempt to halt the progress of England towards Elizabeth I’s Protestant nation-state. Eamon Duffy, particularly in The Stripping of the Altars (1992), has done more than anyone to dispel the conventional view of traditional Catholic life — better lost than saved — in England before the Reformation. Now, in a short,

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Reporting from Iran

The New York Times’ excellent Iran blog flags up the fact that the Iranian government are now clamping down on reporters: “Iranian authorities are restricting all journalists working for foreign media from firsthand reporting on the streets. The rules cover all journalists, including Iranians working for foreign media. It blocks images and eyewitness descriptions of the protests and violence that has followed last week’s disputed elections. The order issued Tuesday limits journalists for foreign media to work only from their offices, conducting telephone interviews and monitoring official sources such as state television.” This is, obviously, not a surprising move. But it is something worth bearing in mind as you watch

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Departures and arrivals on Downing Street

Yet another one of Gordon Brown’s ‘octet’ – the eight advisers named in The Spectator three years ago – is moving on. Michael Ellam is finally on his way back to HM Treasury and I wonder why. Has he just got fed up, like Tom Watson? Or is he being sent to HMT as Brown’s enforcer, to make sure it doesn’t put up a fight when No10 instructs it to spew out more dodgy figures? After all, the newly confident Alistair Darling is up for telling hard truths, and that’s something No10 won’t appreciate. But I suspect that, finally, Ellam is no longer in the mood for No10. He always

Matthew Dancona

The new chief of MI6

So MI6 is to have a new chief: Sir John Sawers, presently our man at the UN, is going back to the service he worked for in his early years, replacing the estimable Sir John Scarlett in November. Scarlett, who flickered on to the public stage much against his wishes during the Hutton Inquiry, was an SIS chief of the old school and the best school who understood that, whatever the threat – Soviet communism or al-Qaeda – and whatever the improvements in technology, there was nothing to beat recruiting and managing agents on the ground. He will depart with honour. His replacement was one of three shortlisted, one of

Peter Hoskin

The Speaker should become a more public figure

Although I can’t say I agree with his choice, Steve Richards makes a strong case* for John Bercow becoming the next Speaker in today’s Independent.  The passage that struck me the most, though, was this: “The next Speaker should do away with the costumes and the rituals, make the language and the proceedings more straightforward, give media interviews when Parliament itself is the issue, put the case for politics and the Commons around the country and by personifying a modern approach put pressure on the party leaders to make their moves too. I have never understood why the Speaker should not give interviews, an elusiveness that makes the Commons seem

Peter Hoskin

A dividing line that’s dividing government

Rachel Sylvester writes a fascinating portrait of the Brown-Balls-Mandelson relationship in the Times today, suggesting that Mandelson is on the opposite site of the spending cut fence from his two colleagues: “The Business Secretary has always shied away from class war – he wants to appeal to posh and poor. He is instinctively suspicious of fighting another election on ‘investment versus cuts’ – a rehash of Labour’s past two campaigns, which took place in a very different economic climate. An interesting alliance has formed in Cabinet between Lord Mandelson and Alistair Darling, who argue that the Government has to be honest with the voters that there will be spending cuts

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Police Brutality in Nottingham

Meanwhile, in dear old Britain the paramilitarisation of our police continues. The Home Office has announced an extra £8m to help provide police forces in England with Tasers. It’s only a matter of time before someone is killed by one of these weapons. Watch this footage of a police arrest in Nottingham and tell me if you think the police actions are appropriate and proportionate. Granted, some context is missing from this film. The BBC reports that the man being tasered had, it is said, assaulted a police officer. Nonetheless, when he is tasered he is a) lying on the ground and b) there are two and then four police

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Is this 1989 in Poland or 1989 in China?

That’s a gross simplification, of course, but it’s also, in the broadest terms, the question. Or one of them, anyway*. The death – no, murder – of a protestor increases the stakes still further. Meanwhile, what’s happening in the provinces? Photo: AFP/Getty Images Iranians carry a wounded protestor after gunmen opened fire during an opposition rally in Tehran on June 15, 2009. One protestor was shot dead and several were wounded during a rally in Tehran staged by hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a local Iranian photographer told AFP. The incident occurred in front of a local base of the Basij volunteer

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The claim that Labour won’t cut spending is just Balls

When Gordon Brown sends ministers out to lie about his spending plans, he can only really depend on Ed Balls to do it effortlessly. Some, like Andy Burnham, don’t understand his elaborate scam – and tie themselves in knots trying to. But Liam Byrne is a former businessman who does understand a balance sheet (and understands the concept of cooking the books). Yet he was instructed to hold a press conference today on Cameron’s cuts. Sadly, I wasn’t invited* but Byrne was ably grilled by the hacks who were present – and the following exchange with Nick Watt of The Guardian (which he has blogged) is worth repeating here. In

Susie Squire

Housing our political representatives

The country has been rocked by recent revelations over MPs expenses. Politicians of all stripes are up to their neck in it – they have been claiming for everything from bath plugs to moat cleaning and the public are rightly hopping mad. But the era of outlandish claims will, hopefully pretty soon, come to an end. MPs voted a short while ago to make their expense claims almost totally transparent, therefore having public scrutiny as a powerful deterrent to stop them from engaging in this sort of greedy behaviour in future. One area that has proved even worse than the luxury items and services claimed on expenses is the question

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Re-vote rumblings from Iran<br />

The New York Times is running an excellent rolling news blog on the situation in Iran; I’d recommend it to everyone. Interestingly, Moussavi—the defeated candidate—is saying he would accept a re-vote: ‘In his first public appearance since the elections three days ago, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the defeated presidential candidate, told supporters at the rally in Tehran on Monday that he would take part if new elections were called. “The vote of the people is more important than Moussavi or any other person,” he said’ The blog also reports that Press TV, the state-backed news channel, is saying that Moussavi’s rally against the announced results drew “hundreds of thousands of people”.

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’  Wall, 15 June – 21 June

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – provided your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’ – which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write – so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game – from political stories in your local

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is McBride back?

An email lands in my inbox, directing me to this story in yesterday’s Scotland on Sunday: “Just weeks after McBride was forced to resign after writing an e-mail suggesting that Conservative leaders be smeared, insiders say the former special adviser is actively working for ministers again. Downing Street last night insisted McBride had not returned. But one respected party figure said that while the former adviser was not working at Number 10, he was engaged in informal briefings once again.” Now, this story isn’t conclusive. But the next time Brown or Balls do a broadcast interview, it would be well worth asking them when the last time they spoke to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Osborne’s milestone article

George Osborne’s article today is a breakthrough in the public debate about cuts. I argued in the NotW yesterday that, so far, no party is telling the whole truth because the Tories have been using phrases like “spending restraint,” which is hardly commensurate with the cuts in prospect. That point is now out of date. As Osborne puts it: “Even we – like Labour politicians – have fought shy of using the “c” word” – cuts. We’ve all been tip-toeing around one of those discredited Gordon Brown dividing lines for too long. The real dividing line is not ‘cuts versus investment’ but honesty versus dishonesty.” This is what we have

Peter Hoskin

The Tories start to level with the public on cuts

Isn’t it funny how things work?  Andrew Lansley gaffes in a radio interview last Wednesday and, as a direct result, George Osborne today writes the kind of article on public spending that he should have written months ago.  Rather than shying away from the idea of cuts, he actively pushes them as a necessary measure to tackle Brown’s debt crisis – an obvious point, I know, but one that the Tories wouldn’t have made so bluntly even just a few weeks back.  Here’s the key passage: “We’ve all been tip-toeing around one of those discredited Gordon Brown dividing lines for too long. The real dividing line is not ‘cut versus

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Case for Independence

After the jump, the best case for Scottish independence. Oh yes. I especially like Big Jock’s assertion that anyone living south of Edinburgh is, whether they ken it or no’, actually English. That’s a sentiment he might think about keeping to himself, should he ever find himself in these parts. Granted, all political parties attract unwelcome support from loonies such as this but, though exaggerated, there are a good number of nationalist politicians at Holyrood who’d agree, in broad terms, with Big Jock’s list of grievances even if, one trusts, they wouldn’t endorse his claim that the English are just waiting for an opportunity to commit genocide in Scotland… Anyhoo,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Mandelson solution, just keep taking the pills

Peter Mandelson dominates the Sunday newspaper; it seems that everyone has a long profile of him. But the best anecdote is in Jonathan Oliver’s Sunday Times piece:  One aide recalls the recent humiliation of a junior member of the cabinet: “We were called into Mandelson’s huge office. Peter said to my minister, ‘You look dreadful, poppet, take one of these’. Peter produced a bottle of painkillers and gave [the minister] two pills. He meekly swallowed them with a glass of water provided by Peter. It was all about asserting psychological control.” This tells you so much about the current state of the government and the extent to which Mandelson is

Peter Hoskin

The meeting that counts?

What happens when tragedy has already slipped into farce, and the farce requires new material?  Gordon Brown creates another government committee, that’s what.  As the Sunday Telegraph reports, the latest Committee for Rescuing Labour and Thereby Gordon’s Premiership is composed of Brown himself along with seven Cabinet ministers: Peter Mandelson, Ed Balls, Alan Johnson, David Miliband, Alastair Darling, Harriet Harman and Jack Straw.  The idea is that they’ll meet every Monday morning to “plot the Government’s future strategy”. And there’s me thinking that they did that sort of thing in normal Cabinet meetings. The papers which have covered this concentrate – rightly – on Brown’s attempt to appear all inclusive,

Peter Hoskin

Clarke clarifies and muddies the Tory position on Europe

One of the questions that – understandably – just won’t go away is what the Tories intend to do about the Lisbon Treaty.  Their constant refrain has been that if it’s not ratified by the time they’re in government, then they’ll hold a referendum on it and campaign for a “No” vote.  But what if it has been ratified?  William Hague recently hinted that they’d hold a referendum anyway, but we’ve heard nothing certain.  Until now.  Speaking on the Politics Show, Ken Clarke has said that a Tory Government won’t “re-open” Lisbon if it’s ratified by Ireland.  Here’s how ConHome report his comments:  “Interviewed by Jon Sopel on BBC1’s Politics