Society

Saturday

7 Feb 2009

The Spectator’s Notes | 7 February 2009

Watching white workers protesting in the snow, I cast my mind back 30 years to the Winter of Discontent. The year 1978/79 is the last time I remember being so cold, and taking such keen pleasure in ‘bad’ weather. It is also the last time that one had a prevailing sense that the country was falling apart. Then, as now, a Labour government whose claim to power was a special ability to deal with difficult economic questions was discredited. There are some differences, though. Thirty years ago, the strikers were much more unreasonable and unpopular than the men in the north today who resent being excluded from British jobs which

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 7 February 2009

Monday Am bit confused about Responsible Capitalism. While wanting to Be The Change as always, the new RC guidelines are making the bagel run v complicated. Not sure the little place on the corner fully demonstrates a ‘sense of responsibility and a moral framework’. On the other hand, the only real alternative is the big-chain coffee shop down the road which is clearly engaged in ‘booster capitalism’. And neither of them would appear to have a ‘vision for the country that connects the economy, society and the environment’. Asked Wonky Tom for help but he shouted ‘For f**k’s sake just go and get the bagels!’ It’s all v well him

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 7 February 2009

While my husband was at a conference among the ancient surgical props of Padua, I took Veronica to Venice, to take her mind off the recession and Justin (who embodies it). At station buffets, the Italians have a funny way of making you pay before even ordering the goods (which would have precluded comment on the rock cakes in Brief Encounter). I said: ‘Un croissant’. The woman at the till said: ‘Una brioche’. Well, I have since discovered that there is a word croissant in Italian, and indeed a word cornetto with the same meaning. But she was quite right: they call croissants brioches. This is a deep question of

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 7 February 2009

I welcome Sir Jonathan Porritt’s advice about population control According to Sir Jonathan Porritt, the government’s green guru, couples who have more than two children are being ‘irresponsible’. ‘I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate,’ he says. He recommends contraception and abortion as methods of keeping the population down. If only I had known this before I selfishly and thoughtlessly produced four children. The Optimum Population Trust, a campaign group of which Sir Jonathan is patron, points out that each baby born in Britain will end up burning the carbon equivalent of two-and-a-half acres

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 7 February 2009

Q. A friend and I have been working in the new Eliot Reading Room of the London Library and are very pleased with it (the Ladies’ in particular is very swish) but there is one drawback. A bespectacled man of Chinese appearance is in everyday, chomping his way through packets of gum, and making the most annoying series of clacking and liquid chewing noises as he derives maximum oral satisfaction from his unsightly habit. As he is also plugged into his MP3 player, we assume he is blissfully unaware of the intolerable aural pollution he emits. Obviously we all feel like killing him, but do you have any better suggestions?

James Forsyth

The US is so worried about the UK terrorist threat that the CIA has set up its own spying network in this country

Tim Shipman has an important story in tomorrow’s Sunday Telegraph. Here’s the start of it: “American spy chiefs have told the President that the CIA has launched a vast spying operation in the UK to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being launched from Britain. They believe that a British-born Pakistani extremist entering the US under the visa waiver programme is the most likely source of another terrorist spectacular on American soil. Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5,

James Forsyth

Biden’s message to Europe

Vice-President Biden’s speech today at the Munich Security Conference was meant to spell out the kind of partnership that Obama wants between the United and Europe. The tone was very different from the Bush administration, with a lot of stress on the new beginning and how America wants to listen and the like, but the overall agenda seems similar: America wants Europe to step up in Afghanistan. The remarks on Russia are dominating the headlines. But what grabbed my attention was how explicit Biden was about Afghanistan and Pakistan strategies now being one. As Biden put it: no strategy for Afghanistan, in my humble opinion, can succeed without Pakistan. I

James Forsyth

One account of what was said in the One Show green room

Considering the debate that the whole Carol Thatcher business has generated, it seems worth noting Adrian Chiles’ account of what happened. Chiles writes in The Sun today: ‘Carol was in full flow, talking about who’d win the Australian Open. “You also have to consider the frogs,” she said. “You know, that froggy golliwog guy.” “Ooh,” she added — waving an arm about. “If I was Prince Harry I’d get shot for saying that.” Before I’d worked out what to do, Jo — plainly aghast — leant across and said: “Excuse me, did you just say golliwog?” “Yes, well, he’s half-black,” Carol explained, waving her hand in front of her face.’

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 7 February 2009

What treats await this weekend. An England Test match in the Caribbean; a north London derby in the increasingly fractious Premier League; and, joy of joys, at long last the Six Nations is back with three succulent games. There’s always an extra tang when rugby’s European showcase is also the selection process for a summer Lions’ tour. Long gone are the days when England felt they had a God-given right to the pick of places on any flight to the southern hemisphere — now they might not have a single man in the starting XV against South Africa. All the more reason why the highlight of the coming week will

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 7 February 2009

In Competition No. 2581 you were invited to take a passage from a classic of French literature and recast it in Franglais. The challenge was inspired by Miles Kington’s masterly The Franglais Lieutenant’s Woman and Other Literary Masterpieces, and the standard was top-tiroir. You inflicted mongrel French and English on the literary classics to great comic effect. Here is G.M. Davis’s version of the opening to Rimbaud’s ‘A Season in Hell’: ‘Il y a yonks, si je remember correctement, j’avais it large, avec beaucoup de bons mates and beaucoup de plonk flowing…’ Formidable! There were some unfamiliar names sprinkled among the seasoned veterans. A commendation goes to Jane Robertson, while

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 7 February 2009

I’m a convert to shoe-throwing, and its power. But I bet they ban shoes in public pretty soon Where do we stand, then, on shoe-throwing? Me, I’m in two minds. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, I dunno, I think he carried it off. At least he threw both, and at least he was in the Middle East. Whatever happened next, is my point, at least he didn’t have to hop. At least he didn’t have a clammy sock. I do not yet know the name of the 27-year-old man who lobbed a shoe at Wen Jiabao on Monday, but I do know, from the pictures, that he only threw the one. And, more

Sarah Standing

Standing Room

I’ve recently developed a callous indifference towards the torrent of amateur self-analysis that’s infiltrating our everyday pattern of speech. I’m over ‘issues’. Way too many people have way too many issues for my liking. And too many people I don’t care about feel compelled to ‘share’ their issues with me. Last week people started ‘gathering’, and now I fear gathering is set to become the new big issue. Ever since Kate Winslet dramatically implored herself to ‘gather’ at the Golden Globes (surely ‘get a grip’ would have worked just as well?) I’ve witnessed two perfectly ordinary mates inexplicably ‘gather’ — rather than just admit they’d lost track of what they

The Spectator

Snowbama

As Britain awoke to the stunning snowscapes of Monday morning, the nation could not make its mind up whether it was on the set of a huge Richard Curtis film, congratulating itself on its social cohesion and snowball-throwing geniality — or whether we were all suddenly locked in a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which no amenities worked, no schools were open, the roads were hauntingly empty, and a phalanx of plague-ridden zombies was probably just round the corner. Half of the British mind wanted to make merry; the other half acted as if a natural disaster had occurred on a par with Hurricane Katrina. Mostly, the former instinct prevailed and liberated

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 7 February 2009

The more I see of the intellectual world and its frailties, the more I appreciate the truth of G.K. Chesterton’s saying: ‘When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ It is one of the tragedies of humanity that brain-power is so seldom accompanied by judgment, sceptical moderation or even common sense. The vacuum left by the retreat of formal religion is most commonly filled, today, by forms of pantheism. Zealots devote their lives to ‘saving’ the rainforests, deserts or habitats of endangered species. They believe, passionately, in pseudo-scientific myths like climate change, global warming and the greenhouse effect. Some worship science

Friday

6 Feb 2009

James Forsyth

The London connection to the Somali pirates

The Daily Beast has an absolutely fascinating interview with Andrew Mwangura who fixes the release of ships and sailors captured by the pirates off the coast of Somalia. (He’s currently on trial in Kenya) Do read the whole thing but this section sbout the role of London in the whole business particularly jumped out at me: “But most of that money does not stay in Somalia. These young men carrying guns are just foot soldiers. Their leaders are in Kenya, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and Canada. It is not easy for a common man in Africa to afford a motorboat with an 80-horsepower engine. It takes people out of Somalia

The Spectator

The week that was | 6 February 2009

Fraser Nelson thinks that the Tories’ education policy is transformative, and suggests that we shouldn’t ignore the poverty in our own country. James Forsyth says that the bad war is coming good and the good war is going bad, and gives his take on the Carol Thatcher controversy. Peter Hoskin wonders whether David Miliband has in lost out in the torture row, and thinks Gordon Brown has set a BJ4BW timebomb for the Tories. Alex Massie says choice matters in education. Melanie Phillips argues that rights and wrongs are out of control. Clive Davis gives his take on the Carol Thatcher controversy Trading Floor looks into setting a timetable for reprivatisation. And Americano watches

Peter Hoskin

Some weekend fun

A fun take on the Brown-Sarkozy spat from the ConservativeHome team: Click here to go to the ConservativeHome discussion page.

Peter Hoskin

Will Howard be the next Big Beast to return?

Andrew Grice sets the rumour mill a-whirling with this blog post suggesting that David Cameron might ennoble Michael Howard and draft him into the Cabinet, should the Tories win the next election. It certainly sounds plausible enough. After all, Howard has been a key figure in Cameron’s career; he’s had experience of government already; and has been making some impactful media appearances over the past few weeks. On top of that, the largely successful* return of Ken Clarke has shown the worth of having some Big Beasts around. The worry, though – particularly for current members of the Tory shadow cabinet – is that Cameron’s set to go Big Beast crazy, and overlook the contributions

Peter Hoskin

Grace under pressure | 6 February 2009

The Flight 1549 story – the emergency landing into the Hudson river on 15 January – will never cease to amaze me. And now the FAA releases audio tapes of the event that make it even more astonishing. They’re compelling listening, and I’ve embedded them below for CoffeeHousers to tune into on this weary Friday afternoon. Captain Sullenberger’s terse “We’re gonna be in the Hudson…” (at the 1’57 mark) is just as cool as speech can get:

James Forsyth

A time for choosing for Obama

To my mind, no commentator has better understood Obama and what he represents than David Brooks which makes Brooks’ column today particularly interesting. Here’s the key question that he poses: “Barack Obama is a potentially transformational figure. In political style and intellectual outlook, he is unlike anything that has come before. On matters of policy substance, however, he’s been pretty conventional. The policies he offered during the campaign matched those of just about every other Democrat. So an important question for the Obama presidency is this: Will his transformational style eventually lead to transformational policies, or will his conventional policies eventually force him to shelve his transformational style?” Brooks goes