Society

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

American beauty | 30 April 2008

The American Scene The British Museum Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s Dulwich Picture Gallery Although the potent influence of all things American has had a pernicious not to say deleterious influence on street culture and social attitudes in Britain, American art of the last century has offered a stimulus to many and certainly a yardstick to measure up against. Our art has not simply been made in the shadow of the American achievement (whatever Clement Greenberg might have wanted to think), but the extent and richness of the experimental territory covered by American painters (and to a lesser degree sculptors) between 1850 and 1950 remain a lasting

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

This Austrian horror gnaws at our fears about how we treat our own children

Josef Fritzl’s unspeakable crimes against his daughter not only sicken us, says Rod Liddle. They sharpen our confusion about day-to-day parenting in the modern world You may, by now, be losing track of Austrian nutters who lock women in basements. The latest is Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter Elisabeth imprisoned in a dungeon for more than 20 years and fathered a total of seven children with her. The last nutter you read about, meanwhile, was Wolfgang Priklopil, who abducted a young woman, Natascha Kampusch, and kept her beneath a manhole cover in his garage for eight years. Both crimes are, of course, beyond appalling: it takes a lot to

Caroline-Reid

For Formula One, sex sells; but not the way Max likes it

Christian Sylt and Caroline Reid say the motorsport industry is in turmoil — and could lose millions in sponsorship — as a result of Max Mosley’s tabloid embarrassment Few sports have a sexier brand image than Formula One. Race-cars snaking through the streets of Monaco past grandstands full of the world’s most glamorous women; grid girls in tight T-shirts; top models such as Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum hanging off the arms of the team bosses: F1 has always used glamour to boost its global appeal. But in the past month the sport has gained an association more akin to Soho than St Tropez. Its mystique has been shattered and

Tony Curzon-Price

Say farewell to gentlemanly capitalism

Ever since social arrangements became complex enough to write into laws, we have regulated the behaviours that have the potential to mess up our common lives. Look at the Book of Deuteronomy. It’s all there: health and safety (diet and hygiene), taxation, bankruptcy, neighbourly envy, sexual conduct… and finance too. The Old Testament is pretty draconian: no lending for interest within the tribe — but as much as you like outside the tribe. Lawmakers understood even then that easy credit, with its potential to exploit gullible optimism and generate bubbles, could rock a society to its core. The 21st century’s first credit crisis is not over, but the acute phase

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rating the Presidents

Shamelessly plundering the idea from Norm, it’s time for an exciting new development here at Debatable Land HQ: Polling! Yes, indeed… And given that this is a Presidential election year in the United States, what better way to begin than by conducting a Presidential poll? We are familiar with polls in which historians rank US Presidents in order of greatness in which the same names – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and so on – always finish at the top. So let’s attempt something a little different. The Debatable Land polling organisation wants you to nominate your choices for the Most Over-Rated and Most Under-Rated Presidents in American history. The rules are

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Starboard Enterprise

Understatement of the Day: Learning a valuable lesson from his predecessors, Friedman is an incrementalist. “I want to talk about what to do this year, not how to colonize the galaxy…There aren’t that many people who are wiling to drop their lives and move to the ocean.” The always-estimable Katherine Mangu-Ward has much more on what you need to know about Seasteading…

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Your Obesity Epidemic Explained

This paragraph tells you most of what you need to know: The Scottish Government wants all primary schools to offer two hours of physical activity for all children each week – but figures from 2005 show that 5% of primary schools were meeting the provision. I suppose the situation may be better in secondary schools but to the extent that childhood obesity is a problem, you’re likely to have more success exercising the brutes than trying to monitor and control the sort of junk with which they stuff their faces. Plus, there are other benefits from sport too. But no, it’s more sensible to sell off the playing fields…

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Future is Specialised

Matt Yglesias is absolutely right: The newspaper, as an institution, is an odd one — an enormous bundle of disparate kinds of content whose rationale for existing has to do with the economics of printing and distributing cheap paper and ink on a daily basis. In an online world, the economics are different and argue in favor of specialization and niches. And this is also almost certainly better for editorial quality. It would be extremely odd for one person to be well-qualified to supervise coverage of all the different things The New York Times tries to cover. Why not get political news from a political news outlet, movie reviews from

The Spectator

Listen Live: Has America lost its moral authority?

Few questions have divided opinion as much as this one in recent years, Tonight, Spectator.co.uk broadcasts a debate on this topic featuring an all star set of speakers. Arguing for the motion are Matthew Parris, Will Self and John Gray. Opposing it are Simon Schama, Howard Jacobson and Martin Amis. You can listen to it live from 6.45pm, by clicking here.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Mervyn King reveals truth behind Treasury spin

Remember when Alistair Darling “announced” the £50 billion loan package to banks? That time he summoned banks to a meeting saying he wanted better fixed-rate deals and mortgage holidays “in return” for this scheme? He was talking through his hat. He has this morning been rumbled by Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, who gave it straight to the Treasury Select Committee. This so-called Special Liquidity Scheme (SLS) is “a central bank scheme,” King said. The BoE, not any minister, proposed it. There are no conditions, no strings attached, no requirements for banks to ‘pass on’ Bank of England base rate. It is a facility there to provide

Peter Hoskin

Fuelling conflict

Jerusalem, Israel Forget Scotland – the fuel crisis we’ve really got to keep our eyes on is in the Gaza Strip. Israel stopped supplying fuel to the Hamas-controlled region a few days ago, in retaliation to an attack by Palestinian militants. The resultant shortages are causing many Gazan services – including bakeries and farms – to cease operating. And there’s a worry that Israel isn’t meeting its obligations to the territory that it withdrew from in 2005. It’s a crisis that brings the traditional Gazan balancing act into stark relief. Both sides – Hamas and Israel – are weighing different priorities against each other, and hoping that the scales will

Peter Hoskin

What’s the deal with Syria?

Jerusalem, Israel Syria received top-billing in our meeting with the Israeli prime minster’s spokesman – Mark Regev – in Jerusalem this morning. Sadly, though, he was tight-lipped about that intriguing Israeli strike on a Syrian nuclear facility. How much did the Americans know? “No comment”. Was there a risk of wider conflict? “No comment”. Wha…? “No comment”. What he did say, however, was revealing. Israel is so keen to enter meaningful dialogue with Damascus – and to come to some sort of peace agreement – that they’re going to avoid upsetting the apple-cart in public. As Regev put it: “If there is going to be progress [with Syria], then it won’t

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

War Minus the Shooting is Not Actually War

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the pundit seeking heft to support his argument must eventually turn to George Orwell. This is, for sure, often a wise decision since much the most remarkable aspect of Orwell’s writing is how much of it remains vivid and even valid today. But not all of it since Eric Blair was as capable of talking through his hat as the next intellectual. Thus John Quiggin, writing about the Olympic torch’s travels across Australia, cites Orwell’s view that: Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Evolution of a Politician

Mike Crowley highlights Hillary Clinton’s changing style: April, 1993: “We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility   and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable   questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how   we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”  April, 2008: [E]very speech she gave in Indiana on Friday and Saturday had the same topic sentence. “My campaign is about jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs,” she said, always to thunderous applause.

Matthew Dancona

Massaging the story

Further to James’s observations about the Mail on Sunday’s coverage of Lord Levy’s book: I was struck, to say the least, by the disclosure that His Lordship was deputed by the Blair inner circle to have a word with the then PM about the lengthy massages he was receiving from Carole Caplin. The account of the two men’s embarrassment during this exchange is intrinsically hilarious, of course. But it also shows that the controversy which quickly became known as ‘Cheriegate’ – flats bought through convicted conman Peter Foster, his eccentric girlfriend Caplin, her Svengali-like role as style guru to Cherie – could so easily have been ‘Tony-gate’. As it was,

Saturday

Kelvin MacKenzie

Why I’m standing to be a local councillor

It was a strange place for the red mist to descend. A railway car park in the snooty Surrey town of Weybridge. I was putting my £3.50 into the ticket machine when I spotted a notice from Elmbridge Borough Council which told those of us who had the temerity to pay for our parking spot rather than leave our car for free in the street that there was to be an increase from 1 April. My bet was that a 10 per cent rise would be the top whack. In a climate where customers were lending money to banks to keep them solvent and where new-builds in Bury could be

The Spectator

Letters | 26 April 2008

United State of Europe Sir: Your musings (‘England Rides Again’, 19 April) upon the complexity of being English, Scottish or British have, I fear, the relevance of the archangels upon the proverbial pinhead. This is because we are all being ineluctibly subsumed into the coming United State of Europe. This process will accelerate impressively after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, aka the EU Constitution. That is the whole point of the exercise; if you do not believe me, read the text. The rise and rise of the European State must be matched by the decline and decline of its natural and deadly foe, the Nation State; whether that be

Melissa Kite

Driving me crazy

If television bosses ever get really desperate for cheap viewing, they could always follow me with a hand-held camera as I pigheadedly attempt to drive my car around London. This once simple act now generates an unfeasibly high number of dramatic incidents which would make for excellent prime-time entertainment. I’ve thought long and hard about why this should be so and it seems to me that my enmeshment in chav-esque motoring dramas bears a direct correlation to Labour assuming power in the capital. I can only conclude that, as a subversive who has defied massive financial penalties to continue driving, I have been singled out by agents of the state

Jeremy Clarke

Up the garden path

Every day that I can, I take an elderly, obese, arthritic collie called Joe for a walk. I take him out because he’s a likeable old chap, and his owner, Margery, is too frail and bent with arthritis to take him out herself. Margery lives in a house on top of a 300-foot-high cliff and depends on her home help, Edna, who has even worse arthritis, for everything. Edna says that Margery is driving her ‘slowly round the bend’. When I knocked on the door to collect Joe last week, Edna had gone home and Margery eventually answered it. She was wearing a grey ‘hoodie’ with the words ‘Air Patrol.

Taki

Living faith

New York It obviously came from above — the order, that is — because I have never seen such perfect temperatures and clearer skies than for the Pope’s visit. And this wonderful Pope, who believes in the strictest doctrine for the Church, was greeted by the faithful like a rock star, cheered and applauded everywhere, with people yelling ‘Wilkommen’ in Brooklyn accents and thousands upon thousands waving yellow-and-white Vatican flags. His Holiness stayed in an upper east side house, one block away from mine, and watching tough and burly Noo Yawk cops tear up whenever he passed by was a sight to remember. It goes to show that faith is