Society

Saturday

28 Mar 2009

The Wiki Man | 28 March 2009

The strangest thing happened to me the other day. I went into a branch of PC World and found nothing to buy. I have left PC World empty-handed before, but only through an act of will. Occasionally I would steel myself not to buy anything before I went in, treating the trip as a test of my resolve, rather as Gandhi shared his bed with young women to test his self-control. This time it was different. I simply could not see anything left to want. Usually, we technophiles are obsessed with what’s coming next. Faster, smaller, lighter, thinner. Yet, for all our neophilia, the fact remains that to enjoy 95

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 28 March 2009

In Competition No. 2588 you were invited to submit spiced-up children’s stories or poems. In the interests of good taste, I steered you in the direction of sauciness rather than smut, but perhaps I needn’t have bothered. According to a book by the amateur historian Chris Roberts, sexual wickedness and political subversion lurk behind the innocuous façade of many popular playground rhymes. Children trilling ‘Jack and Jill’ are inadvertently singing about the loss of virginity, he claims; while ‘Oranges and Lemons’ is a rude wedding song. Commendations this week to Shirley Curran for ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bares’, a raunchy reworking of an old favourite, and to Bill Greenwell for

Michael Portillo

Our departure from Iraq ends a dismal period in our military history

‘The past is the past. It is no longer important,’ says Brigadier Billal Saleh Shukur, commander of Iraq’s 21st army brigade now occupying a part of Basra. We have met on a warm March day at the airbase outside the city, at the start of a five-a-side football tournament between teams drawn from the Iraqi and British forces. I had expressed my profound regret that the American-British Coalition, which rightly reveres every one of its own casualties, has always refused to count how many Iraqi citizens have been killed in six years of violence; and indeed has invested considerable effort in discrediting any human rights organisation that estimated the death

The Spectator

Same old rules

A series of selective leaks had suggested that the second edition of the country’s counter-terrorism strategy, released on Tuesday, would see a shift from trying to tackle violent extremism to tackling extremism per se. This would have been a welcome development. Counter-terrorism in Britain has been crippled by a strategic failure to match policy to the reality that terrorism is merely the symptom of a wider problem: namely the hold of extremist Islamism on a small but significant slice of the British population. However, as so often, the spin was misleading. The document is actually deeply cautious — a reflection of the splits in government over this issue. There are

The Spectator

Nineteen Eighty-Four? Yes, please

Jade Goody was propelled to a very strange form of modern stardom by the reality TV show Big Brother, and even learned of the cancer that finally claimed her life last weekend on the Indian version of that programme. The title of the show was Orwellian. But what the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four could never have predicted is that the citizens would subject themselves to the scrutiny of the cameras voluntarily. The deeper threat to human dignity in 2009 is not state surveillance but pathological exhibitionism. In so many respects, what Orwell foretold has come to pass — with the crucial difference that it has been embraced by consumers not imposed

Richard Orange

Rotten oranges and blighted hopes

Ishaq Chowdhary pulled the top off a wooden crate to show oranges fringed with powdery white mould. It was a freezing morning at the fruit market in Srinagar, capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, and market workers, huddling traditional fire-pots beneath their gowns, are sipping tea and starting to unload the day’s deliveries. The previous afternoon, five trucks rumbled into the market carrying oranges, pomegranates, bananas and grapes from Pakistan-administered Kashmir. When the first consignment of Pakistani goods rolled across the Aman Setu bridge, or ‘bridge of peace’, 100 days earlier, they were welcomed by cheering crowds. It wasn’t quite the fall of the Berlin Wall, but

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 28 March 2009

When I was a boy I never really understood strong winds, still less storms. I’m not sure I do now. This was not due to complete ignorance of meteorology. Something of a star pupil at geography (why the weather was geography rather than physics baffled me), I absorbed with interest and some degree of comprehension the explanation of wind. Warm air, heated by the sun, would rise; and cooler air would waft in to take its place. Thus (I appreciated) a light breeze might waft from the cool sea to the warmer land during the day; but, by night, as the land grew cooler than the ocean, the airflow would

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 28 March 2009

Last week I was invited to join Radio 2 to discuss the European parliament’s most recent time-, energy- and money-wasting wheeze Last week I was invited to join Radio 2 to discuss the European parliament’s most recent time-, energy- and money-wasting wheeze: a pamphlet asking staff to refrain from using titles such as Miss or Mrs. Apparently these titles are considered archaic and a hangover from the past, as they ‘indicate’ a woman’s relationship to a man. According to Strasbourg, Ms is the politically correct prefix all us women should adopt; for despite being impossible to pronounce without sounding as though one is impersonating an angry mosquito, using Ms doesn’t

John Cleese

The real reason I had to join The Spectator

Over the past four decades I have received many reviews in The Spectator, all of them mixed (in the technical theatrical sense of ‘extremely bad’). For example, in 1976 The Spectator wrote about Fawlty Towers: I’ve been bellyaching, ever since I started writing this column, about the low standard of the programmes. I have been told by friends and acquaintances, ‘Ah! But have you seen Fawlty Towers? You’ll enjoy that!’… Well, last Sunday I finally watched the bally thing and I am gratified to report that I didn’t laugh once. What is more I found Fawlty Towers, like its predecessor Monty Python, rather nasty… When Cleese is involved I detect

Matthew Dancona

‘In a global era, we need our roots more than ever’

Gordon Brown tells Matthew d’Ancona why he is so preoccupied with national identity. In the modern world, he says, we must be explicit about what being a Briton means ‘The problems will arise if you cannot say to a young person that there’s going to be a job after the training. We’ve got to make sure that we never return to the 1980s, when young people lost hope of ever getting jobs, and you had three-generation unemployment that created a situation where many people did become unemployable.’ The question I have posed to Gordon Brown is this: how does he impress upon a teenager from an ethnic minority, living in

Lloyd Evans

Mishima’s behemoth

Madame de Sade Wyndhams New Boy Trafalgar Studio In the 1960s Mishima wrote a play about the Marquis de Sade. What’s it like? It’s like this. A Greek tragedy consisting entirely of choral speeches performed on the radio. The naughty nobleman’s wife and her family are assembled on stage, along with a pair of sidekicks, one a tart, the other a nun, and through the testimony of these blushing womenfolk we hear the details of his rapacious career. Static, word-heavy and often boring, the play is far from a disaster. That de Sade never appears barely matters. He’s in prison, in court, in hiding, in Sardinia, in a hay-loft, in

Deborah Ross

Sporting marriage

The Damned United 15, Nationwide The Damned United is, I suppose, a football film but if you don’t like football don’t let this put you off. (If you do, I’ll hear about it, and then you’ll be in trouble.) I liked it enormously even though football bores me stiff and I don’t know the first thing about it, although please, please — and I’m begging you here — don’t take this as a cue to get all the condiments out of the cupboard and start explaining the offside rule to me or I shall have to say to you, ‘Put the malt vinegar away, love, before I punch you on

Friday

27 Mar 2009

Martin Bright

A Bad Idea Meets Wikileaks

I’ve become something of a fan of Bad Idea magazine, which promotes the work of young journalists. It’s a sight more lively than most of the dreary material pumped out by the mainstream press as it stumbles lazily into oblivion. People younger than me will have to invent new ways of doing this thing if any of us are going to survive. One approach is the investigative site Wikileaks, which has been responsible for publishing a stream of documents no one else has dared touch. So a Bad Idea article about Wikileaks was something I has to read, especially with the headline: Wikileaks – Protector Of Civil Liberties, Or Utterly Misguided? The article

James Forsyth

Obama’s Afghan strategy wins neo-con plaudits

It has always been Barack Obama’s foreign policy instincts that have worried me most. I worried that he both did not grasp the security challenges facing the United States and that he was unwilling to expend the necessary political capital on foreign policy. Given these reservations, I was definitely encouraged by Obama’s announcement of Afghan / Pakistan strategy today. Rather than going for a purely counter-terrorism approach which would have failed in the medium-term, Obama has gone for a proper counter-insurgency approach. Bob Kagan, whose foreign policy instincts I respect, is most impressed: “Hats off to President Obama for making a gutsy and correct decision on Afghanistan. With many of

James Forsyth

Purnell talks the left’s language

James Purnell’s speech to the ‘Progressive Governance’ conference in Chile is an interesting bit of political positioning. On the one hand, there’s a very Blairite argument that with the recession there is even more need for public sector reform, an acknowledgement that money is not the sole determinant of the quality of a service: “the years of rapidly expanding spending on public services are over. The continuous improvement to public services which we have seen for a decade now cannot stop. But more money will not be its motor force. We will be forced, by sheer weight of necessity, to get more for each pound. That means the debate about

James Forsyth

The rise of the Chinese banks

This FT graphic showing the world’s biggest financial institutions by market cap from 1999 to 2009 is fascinating. In 1999, there were no Chinese banks in the top 20. Now, the top three positions are held by Chinese institutions and there are five of them in the top 20. In 1999, 11 of the 20 biggest institutions were American. Now, three are. Britain has gone from having four representatives–HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Barclays and NatWest–to having just one, HSBC. Obviously, 2009 is a low point for the Western financial sector and size isn’t everything. Also, the Chinese financial sector has its own reckoning coming soon. But it’ll be fascinating to see if this is a permanent shift or not.

The Spectator

Introducing Scoff!

Stuck for ideas on what and where to eat over the weekend? Then Scoff! is here to help. Scoff! is a new, food & drink quarterly pullout in the print edition of The Spectator, although all its content – and more – is available at new.spectator.co.uk/scoff. Head over there to find out how to make a warm lentil salad; read reviews of restaurants across the country; and get advice on choosing a whisky, among other things. The Scoff! editors – Jonathan Ray and Dan Jellinek – have also set up a blog where, as usual, you can leave your own comments. All in all, it’s an ideal web destination for the

Peter Hoskin

The Tories need to wake up to the anti-politician atmosphere

Eric Pickles’ appearance on Question Time last night (excruciating video here) should make the Tories sit up and take notice of the anti-politician mood that’s swirling around the country. When even one of their more popular figures (at least among the grassroots) can receive such a public lashing over his dubious housing arrangements, it’s a clear sign that action needs to be taken – and pretty damn quick. So far, the Lib Dems have led on the issue of second homes, calling for the second home allowance to be abolished for London MPs. But much, much more needs to be done to restore people’s faith in the political class. On that

Daniel Korski

How the Germans can makes themselves useful in Afghanistan

I am in the north of Afghanistan today, visiting the German troops stationed here. Their camp is the most immaculate headquarters I have seen in this dust-covered country. The German office in charge of ISAF’s northern flank, Brigadier Jurg Volmer is focused and knowledgeable. He is keen to impress upon his visitors how much his troops are doing and how their work has made his area of responsibility stable. Militarily, his troops run almost half of all ISAF air operations and guard ISAF’s northern supply route. But it is hard not to doubt Volmer’s claims. His 5,000 troops cover an area half the size of Germany. Out of these, only

James Forsyth

Osborne clamps down on public sector fat cats

There is an important policy announcement from George Osborne in his interview with The Sun today: “He also declared war on public servant fat cats. None will earn more than the PM’s £190,000-a-year.” This is both good politics and good policy. It will strike a chord with a public that is increasingly angry and frustrated at the excesses of the public sector boss class. And, really, can any CoffeeHousers explain why the chief executive of the Carbon Trust has to be paid £262,350 a year? One of the great scandals of Labour’s period in power is how public sector managers are now getting paid private sector salaries but still receiving