Society

Saturday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 11 April 2009

I had been expecting it for weeks: the announcement of the first Google Street View divorce. A lawyer speaking anonymously to the Sun now claims to have been briefed to start proceedings after his client was browsing the Google site and spotted her husband’s car parked outside another woman’s house. Although the Street View software automatically blurs car number-plates (as well as most human faces), the lawyer believes the photograph offers sufficient proof of identity since the man had customised his Range Rover with distinctive wheel trim (grounds enough in itself, you’d think). If you have never used Google Street View, you can take a look at the Spectator’s front

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 11 April 2009

In Competition No. 2590 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of a form of asceticism. But first, a revision to the brief for last week’s competition no. 2592. I meant to ask for a poem in which each line contains an anagram of the name of a well-known poet. It would be unfair on those brave souls who have already entered to change the comp completely, so instead it will be split into two categories, with three winners in each. Those who wish to stick to the original brief may do so (but beware: one veteran competitor’s entry was accompanied by a note describing the experience as

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Politics | 11 April 2009

The old wartime poster ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ has been reprinted recently and is turning up in the strangest places around Westminster. I have seen it on an MP’s desk and emblazoned on the cufflinks of a Treasury civil servant. It certainly captures the sense that we are undergoing an economic blitz, and acknowledges implicitly the temptation to panic. But at a time when Cabinet members are describing International Monetary Fund bailouts — quite extraordinarily — as ‘a kind of spa’, the case for keeping calm looks increasingly flimsy. The main question at the heart of the Budget on 22 April is not who will receive what, but how close

The Spectator

An expense we cannot afford

The naming and shaming of MPs who are abusing the expenses system is becoming a Sunday ritual. Each week the papers carry a fresh set of revelations; each week public cynicism about our elected representatives becomes more deeply entrenched. This would be bad enough if the MPs involved in these scandals were merely time-serving backbenchers. But the culprits include the holders of some of the great offices of state. Worst of all, the guilty seem incapable of seeing what is wrong with their presumption that the public should pay for everything from their bath plugs to their holiday homes. The real scandal is not that the Home Secretary’s husband is

The Spectator

Nostradarling

As Oscar Wilde quipped of Little Nell’s death, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. On 24 November, Alistair Darling told the Commons: ‘I, too, am forecasting that output will continue to fall in the UK, for the first two quarters of [2009]. But then, because of decisions taken in this Pre-Budget Report, I expect it to start to recover.’ This prophecy seemed preposterous enough at the time, as we pointed out immediately on our Coffee House blog. Four and half months later, it is downright surreal that the custodian of the nation’s finances felt able to make such an obviously bonkers prediction to the

Charles Clover

A granny in the front line against New Labour

Elizabeth Pascoe, a granny in her sixties with a fondness for pink cardigans, is an unlikely heroine, but she is one to me. For when Liverpool city council and a government agency told her, four years ago, that they wanted to compulsorily purchase and demolish her fine Victorian home in the Edge Lane area for no particularly good reason, Ms Pascoe chose to fight. Sitting in her cardigan, surrounded by piles of paper, Elizabeth fought two public inquiries and two high court actions against compulsory purchase orders (CPOs), which are the battering ram of the Pathfinder regeneration schemes, the 1960s-style urban clearances reinvented by John Prescott. These still, astonishingly, grind

Harry Mount

I half expected to see Welles run towards me

Harry Mount celebrates the 60th anniversary of Carol Reed’s masterly film The Third Man with a tour of Harry Lime’s postwar Vienna — the true star of the movie Vienna Six times a week, the Burg Kino cinema in Vienna shows The Third Man in its small Studio Theatre. ‘It’s best that you book,’ said the polite young man behind the counter in perfect English, when I came along in the morning to see if there were any tickets for the 10.45 p.m. show on Friday night. ‘We sometimes get tour parties and the place is packed out.’ I needn’t have booked after all. Though I was there in honour

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 11 April 2009

What came over me? I’m not a natural lawbreaker and was never a rebel as a youth. I deplore poll-tax rioters, eco-rioters and every lawless protest against supposed injustice, and read with awe of Charles Moore’s defiant stand against the TV licence people, wondering at the desperado our one-time Spectator editor has in later years become. But it was with two other editors of this magazine very present in my imagination, that my (to me) astonishing moment of criminal madness occurred. I was coming back from dinner in Chelsea with Virginia Johnson, Frank Johnson’s widow. I loved Frank, the last-but-one editor of this magazine. It was he who wrote, early

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Are texting and emailing making us incapable of normal human interaction?

In his New Yorker blog, George Packer relays a thought-provoking conversation with his roofer: “It turned out that cell phones had become a major headache in his work. Customers called him all the time, expecting him to hear every little complaint even while he was wrestling with a roof hatch. Meanwhile, they were more and more unreliable, not answering their phones, missing scheduled appointments. Even worse: they had no common sense any more. They called him about a leak in the first-floor ceiling—two stories below the roof—without bothering to check the second-floor radiator, which he discovered to be standing in a pool of water. It had all begun in the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Russia indicates it is ready to take a tougher line on Iran

It is encouraging that President Medvdev is prepared to concede to Obama that American “assessments have been more right than ours” about Iran’s nuclear programme. If Russian really is prepared to acknowledge (trust but verify and all that) that Iran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons it brings into play the prospect of far tougher UN sanctions on Iran. As an Obama administration source told Fox News, “We have laid the basis for much more severe consequences”. But time is running out, as the administration source conceded. Iran will reach a nuclear weapons capability within the next year or two. So, the diplomacy needs to be speeded up so we can

Peter Hoskin

A call for reformation

There’s an incredibly important comment piece by Dr Taj Hargey in today’s Times.  Hargey is chair of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford and the Imam of the Summertown Islamic Congregration, and describes the “McCarthyite” campaign which the “Muslim heirarchy in Britain” have waged against him.  In the face of fundamentalism and Wahhabism, he calls for a reformation of Islam: “We need a reformation that saves Islam from foreign-inspired zealots. That reformation is already under way, with Muslims going back to the pristine teaching of the transcendent Koran, not taking on trust the hadith (a compilation of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad recorded some 250 years after his death by

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Richards’ law

In The Independent today, Steve Richards sets out a fundamental truth about public services: “In order to measure the effectiveness of big public institutions it is necessary to ask only two questions: To whom is the organisation accountable? To whom are its leaders accountable within the organisation? If the answers are clear, the organisation and its leadership will almost certainly be robust. But if the answers to those questions begin with the words, “Well it’s all a bit complicated…” you know for certain that the organisation and its leaders are in trouble.” This ambiguity allows institutions to believe that they accountable only to themselves. As Steve says you can see

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Gathering Storm of Same-Sex Marriage

My crack that same-sex marriage hadn’t caused the sky to fall in any of the places where it has been established prompted a socially-conservative friend to suggest this was a “lame” argument since “no historical event literally causes pure chaos”. He had a point. It was a cheap line. Nonetheless, homosexuals are going to have to move some if they’re to inflict as much damage upon the institution of marriage as heterosexuals. And of course, in terms of wider society, it is heterosexual marriage that is vastly more important. So it does seem to me that the argument over gay marriage is in some senses a sideshow as far as

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

A risky forecast

Uh-oh.  Are the Government about to make an official forecast they might regret?  Speaking to the Standard, the Treasury minister Stephen Timms strongly hints that a 2009 recovery may be pencilled into the Budget.  Here’s what he said: “I wouldn’t rule [growth this year] out. The question is when in the second half of the year and we will be a bit clearer about what we expect when we publish the Budget forecast” Now, this isn’t quite as outlandish as the forecasts in the PBR.  But it’s still towards the optimistic end of the spectrum, and you’d have thought the government would play it safe rather than risk backtracking once

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Were the G20 protestors also to blame for the attack on Ian Tomlinson?

Iain Martin suggests that amidst the justified hoopla over the death of Ian Tomlinson we shouldn’t forget the role the G20 protestors played too. They, he says, are “just as much to blame as the police”. And for the police it was a long and stressful day, mistakes happen you know, they’d been insulted and taunted all day, everything was very confusing, etc etc. I’m afraid this won’t quite do. As I argued yesterday, the only reason anyone is paying any attention to this assault is that poor Mr Tomlinson subsequently collapsed and died from a heart attack. That and the fact it was filmed. It is the very ordinary

Peter Hoskin

Balls in the dock?

Is Ed Balls in line for a kicking?  Today’s papers report that the heads of school sixth forms and colleges are considering suing the government over the terrible blunder which led to their budgets being unexpectedly cut.  Good on them.  They have a right to know exactly what went wrong here, and to hold Balls and his department to account.  Sure, whatever embarrassing revelations come out of this, I doubt Balls will ever accept responsibility.  As the exam marking fiasco revealed last year, that’s just not his style.  But he – and Brown – might be given plenty of cause to squirm.

Peter Hoskin

Bob Quick quits

It’s just been confirmed that Bob Quick has resigned from his role as a Met assistant commissioner.  He will be replaced by John Yates.  You felt it was coming after Quick’s horrendous blunder outside No.10 yesterday, although he’s certainly courted controversy and embarrassment before then.  With this happening in the wake of the Ian Tomlinson tragedy, the Met now faces a titanic task to restore its battered reputation.

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The productive and the unproductive

Camilla Cavendish’s column in The Times today contains a message that the right urgently needs to get across before the cuts debate kicks off in earnest: “There are two public sectors in Britain today: the “front line” that does jobs the public understands, often for low to middling wages, and the “back room” that is firmly on the gravy train. The back-room boys are using the front line as human shields in a battle for self-preservation.” This might be a bit simplistic but it contains a lot of truth and, politically, makes it far harder for the left to scream blue murder at any suggested cut. P.S. This is an

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Robert Gates does the Royal Navy a favour

TNR asks defence analysts Who Won and Who Lost in Bob Gates’s realignment of Pentagon spending priorities? One party that doesn’t get a mention is the Royal Navy, yet the curtailment of the F-22 fighter programme and the allocation of increased resources to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter must be considered good news for the Navy and the Royal Air Force. Given the (intolerable) pressures on the MoD budget the sooner (and the cheaper) the F-35 is developed past a point of no return, the better. Granted, it seems unlikely (in the present climate) that Britain will really buy as many as 150 of the aircraft, but the development of