Society

Saturday

21 Mar 2009

And Another Thing | 21 March 2009

One of my favourite parts of London, in easy walking distance of my house in Newton Road, is what I call the Ardizzone country. This stretches from the edges of Little Venice into Maida Vale and is, or was until the crunch, in the process of rapid gentrification. I call it after the artist because, from 1920 until his death in 1979, he lived (on and off) at 130 Elgin Avenue, and made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little sketches of its people. He had not much artistic training, apart from a spell under Bernard Meninsky at the Westminster School of Art, but he had an extraordinary skill at doing rapid

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 21 March 2009

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2587 you were invited to submit an opening to an imaginary novel so magnificently bad that it would repel any would-be reader. This is an unashamed rip-off of the hugely popular annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which honours the memory of the 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose novel Paul Clifford features the immortal and much-parodied opening: ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ To parody bad writing successfully takes great skill and I hope that this assignment was as enjoyable to grapple with as it was to judge. The postbag was humming with overwrought prose of inspired awfulness: subject-matter ranged from the spirit-sappingly

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 21 March 2009

Soccer’s suits will be in Nyon, Switzerland on Friday pulling out the balls for the final stages of the European Football competitions and I confess I’m looking forward to it with a nameless sense of dread, as American Psycho Patrick Bateman observed. Soccer’s suits will be in Nyon, Switzerland on Friday pulling out the balls for the final stages of the European Football competitions and I confess I’m looking forward to it with a nameless sense of dread, as American Psycho Patrick Bateman observed. I’ll be hoping that Barcelona and Bayern Munich manage to avoid the same old quartet of English clubs that squat over the later stages of the Champions

Aidan Hartley

Wild Life | 21 March 2009

‘Where’s Ajay?’ My producer Ed and I are making a film about India’s coalfields. ‘Ajay is busy.’ I complain, ‘But he’s our fixer. Why isn’t he out fixing things?’ In the world of journalism, a fixer is employed to arrange things on the ground. Paleologue in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop was a fixer. Others get fixers like Dith Pran in The Killing Fields. But Ajay is one of a kind. ‘Ajay is drinking whisky,’ comes the reply. It’s been like this since Ajay arrived by train from Benares. On day one, he accompanied us to a vast open colliery where hordes of impoverished Dalits were toiling in the dirt. Later he

Matthew Lynn

Green shoots are out there somewhere

Recessions end. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s, about which we have heard so much recently, eventually ran its course, though it took a world war to get business booming again. ‘Thatcher’s wasteland’ of dole queues, urban riots and closed steel mills in the early 1980s gave way swiftly to a world of rampant yuppies and triumphant admen. But when both the British and the world economy finally emerge, dazed and blinking, from the savage recession now upon us, it will look very different. It’s unlikely that hedge fund managers will be raising millions for whizzy new ways of trading derivatives, that property developers will be throwing up glass

David Young

Corporate governance

It all started at one of the Prime Minister’s monthly press conferences. Suddenly, in answer to a question, Gordon Brown named Sir Fred Goodwin, the now notorious former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, as the man who broke the bank. After the conference the press machine of Number 10 must have gone into action, for the next morning’s papers were full of pictures and stories of Fred, naming and shaming him as the father of the credit crunch. The publicity machine continued remorselessly day after day, as time went by and he and the other hapless chairmen and chief executives of failed banks were hauled before Commons committees

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 21 March 2009

Sir Liam Donaldson, Gordon Brown and booze prices. How did that all happen, then? I could find out, probably, but only by asking one of those proper political journalists, you know the ones, who wear shiny suits and mysterious plastic passes, and use the word ‘lobby’ in myriad, self-satisfied ways, as though it were a weapon. ‘You can’t go into the lobby because you’re not in the lobby,’ they’ll say, smugly, before telling you that they spend half their life in the lobby with the lobby, but not lobbying, because only lobbyists lobby. God knows what any of it means. I suppose they’re usually pissed. But anyway. Sir Liam Donaldson,

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 21 March 2009

Last Saturday I was sent a stiff, glossy brochure informing me of imminent changes in my local podiatry services. NHS Westminster plans to invest £540,000 in this pressing ‘service redesign’ and being a taxpayer and local resident they wanted my views. I had a questionnaire to fill out and return. Alongside the requisite ‘Are you male or female?’ boxes to tick, I was asked the following: Do you have a physical or mental health condition that has lasted at least 12 months or is likely to last at least 12 months? Yes or no? Although I quite fail to comprehend the correlation between having some rubber-gloved nurse gouge out a

Rod Liddle

The smoking ban was always going to be the thin end of the wedge

Rod Liddle is appalled by Sir Liam Donaldson’s deployment of statistics in the hope of making it harder to have a drink. A surrealist would struggle to keep up with such campaigns against our human pleasures Iatrogenesis accounts for the deaths of an estimated 72,000 British people every year — or slightly more than the combined numbers of those feckless people dying from smoking, drinking and being very fat. I suppose you could call it the silent killer; there are no government campaigns to educate the public about its lethality. When lists are published showing the top killer diseases it is never present, although it is the third most common

Ross Clark

The G20 summit is lousy value for money. Cancel it

Ross Clark looks ahead to Gordon Brown’s summit at which he will try to revive his own political fortunes, found a new global economic order and stage a Bretton Woods for our times. No chance: the whole thing is an expensive sham It is difficult to look at the photographs of the world’s finance ministers, bank chiefs and assorted hangers-on assembled at a hotel in West Sussex last weekend without thinking of those old BT ads with the slogan, ‘Why not change the way we work?’ Has anything come out of the meeting of G20 finance minsters in Horsham, or will come out of the follow-up heads-of-government summit in Docklands

The Spectator

Marx!

At The Spectator, we are anti-Marxist but pro-musical. So it is with mixed feelings that we learned that Chinese producers in Beijing are to turn Das Kapital into a stage show, complete with big dance numbers and catchy songs. The director, He Nian, told Wen Hui Bao newspaper that ‘the particular performance style we choose is not important, but Marxist theories cannot be distorted’. We disagree. Marx’s theories are wholly discredited, but the style in which musicals are performed is a matter of global importance. Imagine, then, the scene as the two founders of communism perform the duet that will lead to the Russian Revolution and the Cold War. Friedrich

Friday

20 Mar 2009

Daniel Korski

Can you ever beat insurgents?

Counter-insurgency is a complicated thing. It used to be easy to tell whether you were winning a war. Either the enemy was retreating or you were. In counter-insurgency, things are more blurred. Some say you are winning if the insurgents take on asymmetric techniques – road-side bombings, assassinations, suicide bombings. Others argue that counter-insurgency has no “victory”, only containment. Perhaps you win so long as domestic opposition to a war (a normal, perhaps even constant, phenomenon nowadays) does not translate into effective political action i.e. street violence, civil disobedience or just the rout of war-making governments. If people care enough about an issue they will act, as in Iceland and

The Spectator

The week that was | 20 March 2009

Here are some of the posts made during the past week on Spectator.co.uk: Fraser Nelson responds to the latest issue of the New Statesman, and thinks David Cameron got the better of Gordon Brown in PMQS. James Forsyth reports on the government’s debt worries, and says that the Tories are in the same position as Labour were nine months before the 1997 landslide. Peter Hoskin picks up on Brown’s non-apology, and thinks the Tories are ramping up their spending cut rhetoric. Martin Bright watches Whistleblowers United in action. Clive Davis wonders whether bloggers can actually write. Alex Massie tracks the debate between the traditionalists and reformers over the future of

James Forsyth

Obama’s troubled start continues

Last week it was David Brooks and William Galston, this week it is Peggy Noonan. In her column today Noonan, becomes the latest figure sympathetic to Obama to worry that he is getting it seriously wrong. Here’s how she ends her piece: “These are the two great issues, the economic crisis and our safety. In the face of them, what strikes one is the weightlessness of the Obama administration, the jumping from issue to issue and venue to venue from day to day. Isaiah Berlin famously suggested a leader is a fox or a hedgehog. The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In political leadership

Peter Hoskin

Now, this is getting silly

Labour’s Obama-centricity has certainly been grating recently – the hoo-haa surrounding Brown’s trip to the States, for instance, and the name-dropping he’s engaged in since. But now it’s been cranked up to 11, and is all the more disspiriting for it. Exhibit A: the party’s G20 micro-site, which Dizzy highlighted yesterday. It features a picture of Brown and Obama, and calls for users to submit statments to “Prime Minster Brown, President Obama and the G20”. Somehow, I doubt other G20 leaders will be amused at Obama’s elevation from the pack. And, now, Exhibit B: a Labour party leaflet emblazoned with the words “Yes. I want to make a difference” and,

Peter Hoskin

The Tories are in line for a 45p tax headache

Have the Tories fallen into Gordon Brown’s 40p tax trap? Since the measure was announcned in the Pre-Budget Report, they’ve skilfully avoided raising it – after all, an attack on the tax hike could be spun by Labour as a case of the Tories and their “rich friends”; whilst support for it could provoke some ire from the Tory benches. But no longer. The Telegraph extrapolates from David Cameron’s comment yesterday that “the richest in our society must bear a fair share of the burden” to reveal that: “Senior Tory sources believe that the 45p tax rate is now necessary if the party is to fulfil its other pledges to

Alex Massie

The Flower of Scotland Lies Cold in Flanders Clay

Back in the days when the Edinbugh Evening News printed a “Saturday Pink” edition, it used to be said that there were two headlines on hand for whenever Scotland played England for the Calcutta Cup. Occasionally the sub-editors could scream “It’s Bannockburn!”; more often they were left to lament “It’s Flodden”. The latter, as always when the game is played at Twickenham, seems the more probable result tomorrow. Still, talk of ancient battles is merely tabloid hyperbole. Other conflicts loom larger. Frank Keating had a characteristically lovely piece in the Guardian this week, recalling the terror of the First World War and the calamitous toll it took on rugby: The

Peter Hoskin

Why welfare reform will be a vote winner

There’s a school of thought that welfare reform will become less popular as the recession bites deeper, and as more people enter the welfare system. Not so, to my mind – and Alice Thomson adroitly sets out the reasons why in today’s Times. Her central claim is that the main divide in UK labour isn’t between immigrants and non-immigrants – despite Brown’s dangerous BJ4BW sloganeering – but simply between the “active and the idle”. Many of those currently losing their jobs belong to the former group – they are getting made redundant and almost immediately hopping into the queues at Job Centres. The competition for jobs is fierce, but they’re willing

Peter Hoskin

Work-shy Labour?

An eyecatching snippet from the Telegraph: “[Labour chief whip, Nick] Brown said that he was concerned that a hardcore rump of five per cent of Labour MPs were responsible for a quarter of all ‘unauthorised absences’ from the Commons.” Now, I wonder who they might be…

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s wayward sense of priorities

What is it with Gordon Brown and alarm calls? He spent years ignoring the IMF’s warnings about the state of the UK public finances. And now, thanks to a National Audit Office report, we learn that he ignored warnings about the preparedness of the Treasury to deal with a banking collapse. Here’s the relevant passage from that report, with the key part underlined: 31. The Treasury had been aware of potential shortcomings in the arrangements for dealing with a financial institution in difficulty prior to the crisis at Northern Rock. From 2004 the Tripartite Authorities had undertaken exercises to test their response to a range of scenarios. These exercises