Society

Saturday

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 31 January 2009

What is simplicity? And is it desirable, on principle? A good question. My recent essay on the origins of the universe, arguing that the simple explanation, its creation by an omni-potent God, is more plausible than its sudden emergence as a result of infinitely complex (and disputed) events, angered some readers. They took the view that only the simple-minded see virtue in simplicity, and that a love of complexity is the mark of intellectual maturity. So, returning to the subject, let us look at complexity, and what promotes it. There seem to be three main factors. The first is constructive knowledge. Human beings are clever creatures and delight in their

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 31 January 2009

I was walking along Limehouse Causeway, a narrow street running close to the Thames in East London. It was about half past eight in the morning, I was short of sleep and feeling temporarily annoyed with, oh, nothing in particular — just everything. Approaching a junction I saw from some distance that the pedestrian railings hugging this corner were a mass of flowers and paper. That irritated me. Presumably a memorial to somebody who had died nearby. Sad, no doubt, but we never used to make roadside shrines like this in England and the habit has always struck me as mawkish and somehow pagan. Getting closer, it became clear that

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The BBC was absolutely right about the unbalanced Gaza charity ad

The Corporation has performed admirably during the conflict, says Rod Liddle. It is to Mark Thompson’s credit that he did not cave in to pressure on all sides to air the charity appeal Forgive me for turning into Dr Pangloss all of a sudden, but doesn’t the furore created over the BBC’s decision not to run the film begging for charitable donations for Gaza sort of justify its original decision, at least in part? The most voluble protestors have been drawn, in the main, from the anti-Israeli far left. On the radio phone-in shows the many callers demanding the BBC reverse its decision almost always gave the game away by

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Smoky notes of the islands: a Burns Night dinner

A wintry London night and the haunting note of the bagpipes summoned us to Burns supper at Boisdale of Belgravia. In the doorway Pipe Major Willie Cochrane paused for breath and shook my hand. ‘Are they giving you a nip of something later?’ I asked. ‘I’ve got one right there,’ he said, pointing to a glass of Johnny Walker tucked beneath the Boisdale pavement sign. ‘It’s good stuff. But don’t tell anyone.’ ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘my lips are sealed.’ Taxis arrived and a succession of notorious characters appeared. Lorraine Kelly, Kirsty Wark, Dougray Scott, Duncan Bannatyne and others, all nominees for Boisdale’s inaugural ‘Great Scot’ award. I passed through the

The Spectator

Back on the beat

When an institution is plagued by internal feuds, a loss of public trust and a muddled sense of mission, the elevation of an internal candidate to its helm is rarely a matter for celebration. But the appointment of Sir Paul Stephenson to be the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is an exception to this generality. Unlike his predecessor, Sir Ian Blair, and his chief rival for the job, Sir Hugh Orde — head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland — Stephenson is not a politician in uniform. The new commissioner, who still commutes from his home in rural Lancashire, should bring a much-needed dose of common sense to the

Friday

Daniel Korski

Why Karzai is worried

The appointment of the hard-charging Richard Holbrooke as Afghan envoy has not been universally welcomed. One person who is particularly concerned about it is Hamid Karzai, the current Afghan president, who will probably win re-election later this year. Their first, secret meeting was apparently quite frosty. What has really riled Karzai is Holbrooke’s fraternization with Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister and presumed presidential candidate. When I briefly advised Lord Ashdown in the run-up to his non-appointment as the UN’s special envoy in Kabul, Karzai was extremely paranoid that Ashdown and Ghani were somehow colluding or that the former was merely a tool for the latter’s leadership ambitions. Long after

The Spectator

The week that was | 30 January 2009

Here are some of the posts made over the past week on Spectator.co.uk: Fraser Nelson reveals how Brown’s fiscal stimulus will destroy jobs, and writes on the neglected war. James Forsyth reports on Brown’s cry for help, and analyses the latest opinion polls. Peter Hoskin picks up on an air of uncertainty at the IFS Green Budget launch, and surveys the prospects for Lib-Lab-love. Alex Massie wonders about reforming the Lords. Melanie Phillips highlights the Middle East appeasement process. Clive Davis looks back on ye olde Fleet Street. Trading Floor says the government is subsidising the wrong industry. And Americano asks whether Barack Obama’s Middle Eastern public diplomacy.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Lessons from Tyler

At an Economist roundtable, Tyler Cowen makes a bold suggestion: First, to the extent that the real problem is fear, this militates in favour of placebo policies. By that I mean initiatives which appear bold and have great symbolic value, but which don’t necessarily cost us very much. I haven’t seen us make a major attempt to identify such proposals, but it is unlikely that an $800 billion stimulus fits the bill…The reality is that we don’t actually know what will work, precisely because the problem goes beyond just stimulating aggregate demand.  I’m no expert on these matters but this seems plausible to me. And he also has this effective

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories are right to be thinking about how to buy time once they are in government

The incoming Tory government are going to inherit a mighty mess. Not only will the economy still be in bad shape but the military will have been running hot for seven years without adequate funding, the country will be on the verge of an energy crisis as soon as the economy starts growing again and all the problems of the broken society will still exist. The Tories will have to hit the ground running if they are going to have a hope of a successful first term. It is extremely unlikely that the Tories will have a Blair-style honeymoon; the situation that they will inherit is too dire and there

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Segolene Show Runs and Runs

The old line de mortuis nil nisi bonum has been joined, these days, by a convention that vanquished politicians respect the verdict of the electorate and mumble something nice about the victor while wishing them all the best and so on. Happily they do things differently in France. Segolene Royal has a new book out and it’s fair to say that she’s still miffed, and surprised, that she was defeated by Nicolas Sarkozy. Which, while distressing for Madame Royal, is good news for the rest of us. Here’s her appraisal of Sarko: What bothers me most about him is his immorality. ..He does not hide his greed, his bulimia for

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The government doesn’t know what to do about the Muslim Council of Britain’s boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day

On Monday, The Guardian reported that the Muslim Council of Britain has boycotted the “Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in protest at the Israeli offensive in Gaza this month”. This was a big deal as the government had made clear that attendance at Holocaust Memorial Day was a “significant factor” in the government’s view as to whether the MCB had become more moderate or not. On Monday lunchtime, I called the Department of Communities and Local Government and asked for a comment. On Tuesday morning, I received this statement: “Officials here are due to meet representatives of the Muslim Council of Britain in the coming days. At that meeting the issue

Peter Hoskin

A roadblock to even more debt?

A snippet from the Times report on Brown’s “building programme” for council houses: Mr Brown has the support of Margaret Beckett, the Housing Minister, in pushing through new regulations, according to government sources, but Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, is said to be resisting proposals that could add billions of pounds to public debt. If you remember, there were numerous reports of tension between PM and Chancellor over debt ’round PBR time.  Of course, nothing may come of it – and it certainly hasn’t done much to restrain our eye-watering levels of public debt – but the idea that Darling is in some way a roadblock to Brown’s plans will surely fuel the ‘Cable for Chancellor’

Peter Hoskin

Olympic tax burden to skyrocket?

In an interview in today’s Independent, John Armitage, the chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), admits taxpayers may shoulder a greater burden for the 2012 Games as private finance options dry up.  Here’s how the Indy puts it in an accompanying article: John Armitt said it was possible that no private sector money would be found for the £1bn Olympic village in the heart of the park, the most high-profile victim of the global downturn which has already cost the taxpayer £326m more than was planned for. The authority has already given up hope of securing funding for the £355m international media centre, which will now be paid for

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Illinois Senate tries to end the embarrassment, convicts Blagojevich

Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor accused of trying to auction off Barack Obama’s old Senate seat, has been convicted in a unanimous vote of the Illinois Senate in his impeachment trial. Blagojevich has come up with a string of increasingly bizarre and amusing defences, for more see Alex’s post from last Friday, and his closing argument (video here) was no disappointment on this front.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Talk Radio Governance?

Arizona’s John Kyl had this to say about the Republican attitude to the stimulus package: “They can cram down a stimulus package without Republican support,” said Kyl, “but if that happens, then when, as we believe, in six months or so, when the American people say, ‘Wait a minute, we’re not better off. In fact, we’re worse off than we were six months ago. Who is responsible for this and what can be done to fix it?’ Republicans then are going to be in a position to say, ‘We didn’t have the input in this and that’s why it didn’t work.'” To which Andrew Sullivan responds “Ugh” complaining that this

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Heathrow hilarity

The contortions that Labour and its supporters are going through over the third runway at Heathrow are increasingly comic. The attraction of backing a third runway was all political to Brown central. It hoped that it would show Labour as pro-business, prepared to take the ‘tough decisions’ that the Tories duck and, above all, split the Tories between the greens and the ‘pro-business’ wing. But this has all blown up in Brown’s face which, perhaps, was why he was reportedly so emotional as he tried to persuade Labour rebels to back the measure. It failed to factor in that those who oppose the third runway do so with such ferocity

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Budget Holyrood

Alex has an intriguing post on the failure of the SNP to get its budget through at Holyrood. Here’s his view on what will happen next: “Will there be an election? I hae ma doots as we say up here, not least because I doubt any of the parties can truly afford a fresh campaign right now. But having tried an failed Salmond and Swinney are now in a markedly weaker position. If the opposition parties have any sense they will increase their demands, knowing that the Nats are playing a weak hand. It’s always tough when your bluff is called. For all that the Nats blame the Greens for

William Blackstock

If Wikipedia doesn’t remain true to its principles, another site will

Amid the excitement of a new President’s inauguration, it seems natural enough that the deaths of veteran American senators Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy were missed by the mainstream media. Fortunate, then, that the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia carried the news. Only, of course, neither man was dead – it was a wiki-screw up and Wikipedia’s founder and “benevolent dictator”, Jimmy Wales (pictured), is furious about it. Though this sort of mistake happens often enough in newspapers (remember Mark Twain’s famous response to reading his obituary: “the report of my death was an exaggeration”) Wales has decided that anonymous editing of the site is to blame, and he has suggested restrictions

Peter Hoskin

Lib-Lab-love?

Sunder Katwala, General Secretary of the Fabian Society, makes the case for a pre-election Lib-Lab coaltion in this week’s New Statesman.  His central points are that it could save Labour from electoral wipeout and would enable the two parties to outflank the Tories on “progressive” policy.  This paragraph pretty much sums it up: “The coalition would not mean guaranteed re-election but – going into it with a majority of over 150 – it would have more than a decent shot. A Tory majority government could be well beyond Cameron’s grasp and the centre of gravity would shift away from the right in a campaign where two progressive ­parties challenge Cameron’s