Society

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will Darling bite?

There’s a great scene in the BBC’s Margaret when Willie Whitelaw says after Margaret Thatcher has humiliated Geoffrey Howe, ‘Beware the fury of a patient man’. One feels much the same way about Alistair Darling. Darling might, according to Treasury civil servants, be rather out of his depth in the job but he has tried to do his best and has never been less than loyal to the Prime Minister. His reward for this is a constant whispering campaign against him from Number 10, which put him in the job in the first place, and rumours—which flared up again towards the end of last week—that he’ll be replaced by Ed

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 9 March – 15 March

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

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s global focus leaves opportunities for his rivals

This from the BBC website: “Britain will contribute to a new World Bank fund for the poorest countries, Gordon Brown is expected to confirm on Monday. The fund calls on the richest nations to finance it with 0.7% of the money they have used to bail out the banks. The prime minister will address a two-day conference in London a month ahead of the G20 summit of the world’s biggest economies.” The Prime Minister’s constant attention to the international dimension of this crisis – as typified by his trip to America last week, this latest conference, and April’s G20 meeting in London – may well put him in his comfort zone,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Charles Freeman

Appointing Charles Freeman to run the President’s National Intelligence Council is not quite the same thing as asking him to be National Security Advisor or Secretary of State. How many people could name any of Freeman’s predecessors? Clive links to most of the pieces I was planning to mention (though I’d add that Matt Welch makes a good and blessedly un-Israel-related case against Freeman here). Still, most of the loudest objections to Freeman concern his alleged hostility to Israel and, apparently “Jews generally”. Maybe this exists and I confess I don’t think I’d choose to die in the last, or indeed any, ditch to defend Freeman. Nonetheless it is painfully

Peter Hoskin

Standing by an atrocity

Of all the revelations about Saturday’s brutal terrorist attack on Massereene Barracks, Co Antrim, those in today’s Times are among the most unsettling: “Armed security guards employed to protect the military base in Northern Ireland where two soldiers were shot dead did not open fire on the terrorists, even when they stood over the injured men and fired further shots… …Army sources said that it was the first time that the Northern Ireland Security Guard Service (NISGS) had had to deal with a direct attack on a base. The service took over responsibility for security of barracks from soldiers more than ten years ago.” There will now be an investigation

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

An extreme policy failure

The government’s signature policy for dealing with the Islamist challenge inside Britain is the Prevent policy. But Prevent is aimed only at preventing violent extremism. For this reason, it has—as a phenomenally important pamphlet from Policy Exchange, which will be released tomorrow, argues—done little to counter extremism and in a disturbingly large number of cases actually empowered extremists. As the report puts it: “PVE is thus underwriting the very Islamist ideology which spawns an illiberal, intolerant and anti-western world view. Political and theological extremists, acting with the authority conferred by official recognition, are indoctrinating young people with an ideology of hostility to western values. This strategic error on the part

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Peter Hain and the coming collapse in Labour discipline

Peter Hain makes a double-intervention this Sunday: an article in The Independent and an interview in The Sunday Telegraph. Both are couched in terms of trying to be helpful but—as Martin notes—they undoubtedly position Hain to the left of Brown. Hain has no intention of totally burning his bridges, he tells Melissa Kite that if “Gordon wants me to do something that really makes a difference then I would happily do that.” But Hain appears to be putting himself forward as someone who can be a substantial figure in the regeneration of the party, something that is far more likelty to happen in opposition than in government. He notes how Blair and Brown

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Here’s why so many people in this country are on welfare

Why is it Left wing to allow millions to live on benefits, and let children get each other pregnant? Tom Harris asks this question in an excellent article in the Mail on Sunday today. He’s right to get angry about a situation that means one in five UK children are brought up in workless households, the highest in the EU. But the reason is not because our women are lazier than the French and Italians. In my News of the World column today I ask: why do so many choose welfare dependency as a lifestyle? Well, it is because we pay them to. To understand why Britain has such welfare

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Countercyclical Assets

One of my favourite features at Marginal Revolution is Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok’s occasional look at countercyclical assets – ie, products and economic sectors that are doing quite nicely at the moment. They include: Safes, Atlas Shrugged, the Mafia, Economic Disaster Tours, Tinned Soup, Matchmakers, Prayer, Second Life’s economy, Cobblers, Tasers and Alpacas. So there’s the future: Self-sufficient, heavily-armed Randian Alpaca farmers holding out against the Mafia with only the consolation of prayer and the escapism of online fantasies to sustain them as the “real” world collapses and man returns to a Mad Maxian, elemental state of being. Hold on tight folks, it’s going to be one hell of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Labour party and the politics of immigration

There’s an intriguing entry in Chris Mullin’s diaries, this Sunday sees the final part of the Mail on Sunday’s serialisation of them, from January 2004. “To the Parliamentary Party, where there was discussion about the next Queen’s Speech. Ann Cryer [MP] said we needed a managed immigration policy, based on ability to find jobs; not on finding a wife or husband with a British passport, which is putting enormous pressure on young Asians. Jon Owen Jones [MP] told a story about an Algerian who had brought three people into the country by marrying and divorcing three times. It was all a scam, he said, and time we put a stop

Peter Hoskin

A Miliboost?

Reporting this Compass / YouGov poll, the Sunday Telegraph concentrates on the news that Labour members think Peter Mandelson is doing a better job than Harriet Harman.  Yet, to my eyes, there’s a more a striking finding in there.  74 percent of respondents think that David Miliband is doing a good job.  And that after Miliband’s abortive leadership coup; the infamous banana and Heseltine moments; the disastrous trip to India; and his ill-advised ‘War on Terror’ article for the Guardian.  It’s enough to make a Foreign Secretary think he could be party leader after all.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

In Brown’s version of reality he has nothing to apologise for

The story is out. For days there’s been gossip in Westminster that the Prime Minister had a Brown out on the plane to Washington, losing it when journalists asked him if he was going to apologise for the mistakes he had made as Chancellor and Prime Minister which have exacerbated this crisis. Now, Simon Walters in the Mail on Sunday has reported out what actually happened: ‘What is it you think I should be apologising for?’ [Brown] demanded. ‘I have nothing to apologise for. You guys just don’t get it do you?’ When one reporter asked why he had let banks get out of control, Mr Brown leaned towards him

Saturday

Alex James

Slow Life | 7 March 2009

Who knows when the sunshine of the sublime will pop out, which cloud the next wonderful thing is hiding behind? It’s rarely where I think it’s going to be. No. Inspiration never comes when it’s expected. I took Concorde once, expecting an unforgettably seamless, gentle hover in the stratosphere, a finely balanced tête-a-tête with luxury itself. Something really, you know, classy. You know what? It was just like getting on a cross-Channel ferry: great in all kinds of ways but not in the least bit chic or sophisticated. It was raucous, as bling as a billionaire’s barbecue. Everyone was overexcited: grinning and taking photos and saying things such as, ‘I

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 7 March 2009

An oppressively cold, overcast, drizzling sort of day. The headline in the rolled-up Sun newspaper I’m carrying is ‘Ender a Legend’. Next to that is a tribute to Wendy Richard from Jade Goody. ‘Bodmin crematorium please,’ I tell the taxi driver waiting at the station rank. On the short drive up the hill, the taxi driver points out spots on the notorious stretch of road where deaths have occurred lately. ‘Mother and daughter, that one,’ he says, rather pleased, pointing out a sodden bunch of chrysanthemums fastened to a metal fence. When he drops me off, I’m half an hour early. I inspect the wreaths on display outside the chapel

Taki

High Life | 7 March 2009

Gstaad Thirty years ago this week my daughter was three and my son had not been born. I had left Gstaad for gloomy, strike-ridden, non-stop power cuts London, and the mother of my children was peeved at me as I had begun circling the daughter of the Belgian ambassador to the Court of St James. The Speccie was selling 7,000 copies, the New Statesman 70,000, and Jim Callaghan was asking the press what crisis they were banging on about. Oh yes, Jeffrey Bernard’s column followed mine and it was called ‘End Piece’. An appropriate name for England’s oldest and most elegantly written magazine, as it looked like curtains as far

The Spectator

Letters | 7 March 2009

Don’t go Dutch Sir: The Dutch postal service was privatised, you say, ‘with no perceived damage to the services they offer’ (Leading article, 28 February). You would not say that if you lived here. Firstly, deliveries: there is one a day, which arrives at absolutely random times but is usually around 3 p.m. — even here in the centre of the capital. Nobody seems to ever receive any post at all on Mondays. Most weeks I receive items clearly addressed to somebody else. Secondly, prices: we pay 39p, and that’s only up to 20g (Royal Mail: 36p up to 100g). Put more than two pages into your envelope and it will

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 7 March 2009

The country around Down House in Kent was nothing but ‘a congeries of muddy lanes’ according to Darwin’s eldest daughter Henrietta (1843-1927). I realised, shortly after reading this, that I had never uttered the word congeries and hardly knew how. Recourse to the OED alarmed me. Congeries, it stated, is a word of four syllables, stressed on the second, and pronounced cn-JEER-i-eez. That is logical, considering that it comes directly from Latin congeries, ‘a heap or pile’. Its connotation of heterogeneity is often suggested by a preceding qualification, ‘mere’. A related Latin word for the same thing is congestus, and congeries is thus connected with the English congest, not very

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 7 March 2009

As a new member of staff at Vanity Fair in 1995, I was given a list of words it was unacceptable to use in the magazine. A few of these reflected the personal idiosyncrasies of the editor — ‘golfer’, for instance — but most were slang terms like ‘flick’, ‘honcho’ and ‘hooker’. The message was clear: you’re in the drawing room now and you should leave the language of the saloon bar behind. Snobbery is always a hallmark of such lists, the supreme example being Alan Ross’s famous essay in Encounter distinguishing between U and Non-U words. However, sometimes this snobbery is hidden beneath the surface and those who draw up

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 7 March 2009

Q. Ten years ago, at 15, I met the closest friend of my life. We did everything together and she grew so close to my whole family that, when her own rather difficult home life became too much, she even moved in with us. She has always been the person I felt I could turn to. She was one of my few friends, for example, to make the effort to travel to visit my mother when she was recently very ill, and to keep ringing to check I was OK. Here’s the problem: a few years ago she got married — to a woman. I like her wife, who is