Society

Friday

The Skimmer

The Beeb’s anti-Thatcherism

What is it with the BBC and Margaret Thatcher? Britain’s leading public-service broadcaster never seems to miss an opportunity to do her down, especially in its dramatic depictions, which regularly demean and disparage her and her record. Not content with having a library full of anti-Thatcher footage, the excellent First Post Daily website reports that the Beeb is producing another two dramatic tilts at her. The first is called simply “Margaret”. According to First Post Daily “it portrays Lady T, who is now 82, as a humourless obsessive.” The second film, called “Mrs Thatcher, The Long Walk to Finchley”, deals with her early life. According to First Post Daily “the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A nuclear Syria?

Perhaps, the oddest event of 2007 was the non-reaction to Israel’s strike on Syria. One would have thought that Israel bombing a target deep inside Syria would have sparked off a major international incident. But it did not. As The Spectator reported at the time the Israelis, the Syrians and the Americans all wanted to draw a veil over the affair. Finally, though, the Bush administration has released some details about what happened. It seems that what the Israelis hit was a nuclear reactor that had been constructed with North Korean help—you can see the declassified evidence for this claim here. The Americans say that they were unaware of this facility’s

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Striking out

I have just ran into the striking teachers, placards aloft as they try to extort even more money from the taxpayer by closing a third of English schools today. Three things struck me. 1. One placard said “2.4%=Balls. 10%=NUT”. I wonder which of those two pay rise figures the public would consider more reasonable? 2. Their chant was a demand for “fair pay”. Yet the gap between teachers’ pay and the (lower) figure of the average worker has soared under this government to record highs. One may argue the pupils have lost out from the last ten years of Labour government. But not teachers. 3. Another placard read “tell the

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Public to Hillary and Barack: Put Us Out of Our Misery

I’m actually watching the Washington Capitals-Philadelphia Flyers ice hockey game* (hurrah for NASN!) but this Marc Ambinder post on the Pennsylvania primary was enough to raise an eyebrow: High Turnout Officials project a turnout of between 52% and 55% of the Democratic primary electorate; turnout is especially high in Philadelphia; Hmmm. That’s a high turnout? Now, sure Democrats may be more excited and enthused than Republicans. But this has been a month long campaign in a single state and it’s still the case almost half of all registered Democrats aren’t voting? Perhaps the public is just actually fed up with it all and wishes it was over? Bonus alternative explanation:

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Cry Heffer for England and St George…

Happy St George’s day, English readers. To mark the occasion, the Telegraph offers us Simon Heffer, the would-be John Wilkes of our times, to declare the Union “as good as over”. And this, according to Heffer, is a fine thing since it ensures that England can finally be free from Tartan oppression. Apparently there’s been a conspiracy to to prevent the English from being, well, English: St     Patrick’s, St David’s and St Andrew’s days were decreed as the moments when the oppressed proclaimed their identity and possibly even their liberation. The only thing the English could possibly do on St George’s  Day was to reflect upon their centuries

Peter Hoskin

Introducing The Spectator 180th anniversary blog

We’ve just launched a blog celebrating the 180th anniversary of the Spectator. You can check it out here. At the moment, there are two posts up – an introduction and a look back at the 1711 Spectator – and there’s plenty more to come over the next few weeks.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Obama needs to knock Hillary out — and quick

Hillary Clinton did not have to wait until 3 a.m. for the call telling her that she had won the Pennsylvania primary. Within an hour of the polls closing, the news networks had declared her the winner and by the end of the night she had secured a double-digit lead, handily beating the spread set for her by the media. Pennsylvania was always going to be Hillary’s kind of state; its demographics play to her strengths. There are a smaller percentage of the groups with whom Barack Obama is strongest — blacks and college graduates — and an above average number of over 65s, with whom Clinton generally does well.

Simon Hoggart

Farewell, Foyle

So it’s goodbye to Foyle’s War (Sunday, ITV), for the time being at least. The series seems to have been cancelled not because it was no good; it was, for a TV ’tec drama, superb. Nor because it had poor ratings — they were huge for today’s crowded television schedules. The reason seems to be that it had the wrong kind of viewers, people who remembered the war or, increasingly these days, people who were born to people who remembered the war. It is a given of marketing that the young are the only target advertisers should bother to attract, since they are deemed to flit from brand to brand

Andrew Linklater

A masterpiece of boyhood recalled

In his take on the Caledonian antisyzygy — that preference of Scots writers for the sweet/sour conjunction of incompatible ingredients — Hugh MacDiarmid declared himself ‘For harsh, positive masculinity, /The creative treatment of actuality, — /And to blazes with all the sweetie-wives /And colourful confectionery.’ Until his latest novel, you could have said that this was James Kelman’s mantra too. In the quarter of a century since his first book, Not Not While the Giro, he has created a fiction of harsh actuality around the experiences of working-class Glasgow men. Unlike MacDiarmid’s positive masculinity, however, Kelman’s has always been negative, a self-absorbed, combative, beaten consciousness that reacts like an exposed

Neil Barnett

Tantamount to financial terrorism

You sport a huge beard and a towel on your head and in the name of Allah you try to bring down the computer infrastructure on which the world depends. You are, in contemporary argot, a ‘cyber-terrorist’. You wear a button-down shirt and chinos, and in the name of turning a profit you deliberately set out to wreck a pillar of the financial system, or a country’s economy. In this case you are, it appears, a ‘market manipulator’. Can you spot the difference? Aside from motive, little separates the two: one wants to create a global caliphate, the other to make billions, but neither employs violence and both are indifferent

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Italy: Screwed-up but not as screwed as you think

Matt Yglesias writes: For such a nice country, Italy’s politics seem weirdly screwed up. There’s the famous instability of the governments, of course. And then there’s the fact that their main right-of-center party is led by the legendarily corrupt Silvio Berlusconi. And then there’s the fact that despite the broadly discreditable nature of Berlusconi, the left-of-center bloc can never seem to stop him from coming back to power. Well, yes and, as is so often the case, no. I don’t know what correlation there is between a country’s niceness and the screwyness of its politics, but itt’s true that foreigners of all stripes enjoy their occasional surveys of Italian politics.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

H is for Hard Decisions (And Some Easy Ones)

After  Armstrong, Benaud, Constantine, Dexter,  Edrich,  Fry and Gower it is clearly time for Len Hutton’s lads to take the field. This, I submit, is a pretty strong ‘H’ XI. It would have been posted three days ago had I not been paralysed by indecision brought on by the difficulty of selecting the man to bat at 6. 1. Jack Hobbs (ENG)2. Len Hutton (ENG) (Capt)3. Wally Hammond (ENG)4. George Headley (WI)5. Neil Harvey (AUS)6. Clem Hill (AUS)7. Richard Hadlee (NZ)8. Ian Healy (AUS) (Wkt)9. Michael Holding (WI)10. Wes Hall (WI)11. Harbhajan Singh (IND) Country representation in the series so far: England 34, Australia 16, West Indies 12, India 8,

The Spectator

It’s crunch time

With polls in Pennsylvania having opened – and with everyone expecting a Clinton victory – do check out Americano’s guide to how to interpret her winning margin.

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

China is gaming the Olympic system

The Washington Post has an important story this morning about how China is failing to live up to the promises it made on press freedom when it was awarded the Olympic games. “Wang Wei, executive vice president of the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee, told reporters in 2001 that the news media would have “complete freedom to report on anything when they come to China.”  Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, last year signed temporary regulations to allow foreign journalists to travel domestically without advance permission until the Games are over. Reporters would still need permits to travel to Tibet, officials said, although that was not specifically mentioned in the regulations.  But

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Trail mix

Over on Americano, I’ve just posted some thoughts on when Hillary might decide to drop out and how the Obama campaign practises the ‘old politics’ even while denouncing it. There’s also reaction to Obama saying that McCain would be a better president than Bush.

Saturday

Robin Oakley

Racing demons

In Bucharest recently I encountered some Romanian proverbs. ‘Always eat the end of the bread: your mother-in-law will love you,’ said one. And, more to my liking: ‘Always empty the last drops out of a bottle into your glass: people will like you.’ Sometimes people in racing, facing the strains for our pleasure, find themselves tilting the bottle a little too often. It was sad for Timmy Murphy, for example, after his skilful, patient Grand National-winning ride on Comply or Die that his triumph was clouded by most commentators presenting it as a redemption from the months he spent in prison back in 2002 after drunken behaviour aboard an airliner.

Taki

Remembering two great men

New York Their memorials were held five days apart, each in one of Manhattan’s most hallowed venues, each one attended by more than 2,000 worshipping fans, both attracting A-list mourners as well as the poor and the humble. William Buckley and Norman Mailer had great send-offs, the former, as a devout Catholic, in St Patrick’s Cathedral, on Fifth Avenue, natch; the latter, as a non-practising Jew who called himself an atheist, in Carnegie Hall, where art and imagination have flourished for decades. As both men had been mentors of mine, their families kindly sent reserved-seat tickets, but it was not to be. Death unites the fallen and abjures snobbery and

Jeremy Clarke

Looking for Kate

Kate Moss was due to walk out of the door and into the arrivals lounge at Terminal 5 at any moment, the photographer said. He was ready with his camera and scanning the emerging passengers with a practised eye. He could tell that these people coming out now were just off the LA flight, he said. Kate Moss should be among them. How could he tell they had come from LA? I said. Easy, he said. Look at all the designer suitcases. I decided to hang around and see what Kate looks like in real life. I like Kate Moss. Not that I know her, of course. But I take