Society

Sunday

20 Jul 2008

Not aiding the cause

One of the most frequent complaints that you hear from those who have served in Afghanistan is that DFID is simply not fit for purpose. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Stuart Tootal, the commander of 3 Para who recently quit the army, gives a depressing example of how the DFID bureaucracy puts obstacles in the way of necessary projects: “The hospital sheets were filthy and the doctor said they couldn’t wash them,” he explained. “But we said, ‘You have an industrial washing machine sitting there in cellophane.’” The US aid agency that had donated it withdrew when the British arrived so it had never been installed.An engineer with

James Forsyth

Our delayed trains

There’s a depressing piece in The Observer today detailing the horrendous delays that anyone trying to go on holiday in August using various train lines is going to be subjected to. (Full disclosure: I’m planning to go up to the Lake District in August so am going to get caught up in all this). What makes these delays all the more galling is how expensive train travel is. According to The Observer £10 in Britain buys you 27 miles of train travel while in Ireland it gets you 38 and in France 50. The Observer also reports that: On many lines into London from the South East there is no

James Forsyth

Blair’s most unpopular decision is more popular than Labour under Brown

Looking at the numbers from that Independent poll, one thing stands out to me: today, more people agree with Blair’s decision on Iraq than support Labour under Gordon Brown. Labour has support from 24 percent of the electorate while 26 percent disagree with the assertion that “Britain should never have become involved in Iraq”. It says something about how low Labour’s standing currently is that Blair’s supposedly most unpopular decision commands more support than the party does. It makes a mockery of all those Brownites who used to say that Labour could only reconnect with the electorate once Blair and the stigma of Iraq had been removed

James Forsyth

Brown to take a pounding during the summer

There is a lot of debate in Westminster about whether the summer break will be good for Gordon Brown’s standing or not. Labour optimists argue that over the summer, people will drift back to the party. But Iain Martin in The Sunday Telegraph points out one of the flaws in this theory: Here’s a prediction. By the end of August, millions of Britons will be grumbling about the level of the pound, and it will be a live issue as the nation returns from its holidays. It will not top the list of complaints but will feed concern over inflation, the state of the economy and Gordon Brown’s mangling of

Fraser Nelson

Four out of five drug addicts on welfare

A devastating report on how the state unwittingly bankrolls drug addiction, timed to come out with tomorrow’s Green Paper, can now be downloaded from the DWP website. I’m not sure if this is intentional or not, but there we go. It looks at addiction to opiates (heroin) or crack cocaine, the so called Problem Drug Users or PDUs. Until now, official figures show that just 400 people on Jobseekers Allowance were PDUs – just 0.05 percent. The new figures show the real figure is a scandalous 8 percent, or 66,000 souls. And that’s just JSA. Widen it to all out-of-work benefits and the number is a staggering 267,000 out of

Saturday

19 Jul 2008

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 19 July 2008

Whether Muslims want elements of sharia law to have the force of civil law or not (not, it is argued in last week’s Spectator), the principle of different jurisdictional codes existing side by side has been with us for thousands of years. The general principle of private settlement of disputes, on any terms agreeable to all parties, is very ancient. Athenians insisted that an attempt was made at a private settlement before almost any case could be allowed to come to court. In Rome, where the praetors acted rather like chief justices, the praetor peregrinus (apparently) controlled proceedings involving foreigners. If that is so, it suggests that alien cultures somehow

Taki

High Life | 19 July 2008

The sea surface is smooth and mirror-like, and from the deck of Bushido I scan the coastline for the mother and baby porpoises who live inside a blue-green grotto off Assos, the tiny village which clings to a small isthmus between the island and a huge, forested pine hill crowned by a ruined 15th-century fort. It is a bad time of day to meet mother and baby, the sun is straight up and blistering, the air still except for the noise of an occasional motor pest disturbing both the porpoises as well as yours truly. I first made their acquaintance at sunset the day before. My friend Nicola Anouilh, son

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 19 July 2008

I rested my chin on my hand and watched the passing scenery all the way to London. For most of the journey the sky was filled with towering black clouds and from time to time rain smashed against the window. The train seemed to be racing just ahead of a deep, fast-moving depression travelling west to east. Passengers with a raincoat or umbrella stowed on the luggage rack were probably quietly congratulating themselves for their forward thinking. At Paddington station I stepped down from the train and went and stood on smokers’ corner and smoked a fag in violently gusting wind and bright sunshine. I was headed for a rooftop

Melissa Kite

Real Life | 19 July 2008

Have you ever attempted to open the front door to your house by pointing your car key at it? Please say you have. I did it twice this week and what is worse it took me ages to work out why the door was not opening, despite frantic clicking of the Peugeot key in the direction of the Yale lock. I shudder to think that a passing neighbour might have seen me. The reason for my befuddlement, it turns out, is that whatever I happen to be doing, I am not there as I’m doing it. This is all to do with something fantastically new-fangled called ‘being present’. I hadn’t

Joan Collins

Diary – 19 July 2008

We’re back in St Tropez after a whirlwind week in London. The party season is in full swing so I dipped my toes in a couple, and what a difference between two of the most high-profile events that week. One, an exhibition of paintings at a Dover Street Gallery, was given in a large airy room with a wide balcony and pretty garden, in which one could stroll. There was enough space and enough time to chat with groups of friends and acquaintances, who could wander around admiring the great pictures and eat the hors d’œuvres without getting jostled and poked. An affable Michael Winner, Steven Berkoff, Ivor Braka, Frederick

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 July 2008

John Howard, four times Prime Minister of Australia, is one of the great men of our time — direct, amusing, patriotic, moderate but tough-minded. He finally lost an election this year, which had the good effect of giving him some time in London recently. One of the Howard lessons is that when you get into office for the first time you must have a very nasty budget straightaway. Only at the start will you have the moral authority to tackle the vast public spending you have inherited. Mr Howard has been telling this to our own Conservatives. They know he is right, but they do not altogether like hearing it.

The Spectator

Letters | 19 July 2008

Rod for our backs Sir: Each week, Rod Liddle’s column reminds me of the little girl of whom it was written that she hiked up her skirt to show she wasn’t wearing knickers. In the absence of a parent, or in Mr Liddle’s case an editor, one can only look away in embarrassment. So usually I have a quick look at the first paragraph and turn the page. Last week (Liddle Britain, 12 July) he compared a fat woman with ‘26 Ethiopians, if you put them in a blender, added some bleach’ etc… and her food with ‘an approximation of Shami Chakrabarti’s face’. I glanced at his last sentence in

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 19 July 2008

I was told at a very early stage in my writing career never to seek revenge on critics. If you get a poor review, you just have to take it on the chin. To write a letter of complaint to the publication in question — or, worse, punch the critic on the nose — is a terrible faux pas. The correct response when asked about a bad notice is to pretend you have not read it. But what if the boot is on the other foot? Is it acceptable for critics to write about the efforts that have been made to retaliate against them? Or is that a breach

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 19 July 2008

Although I do not smoke, I find my sympathies drawn more and more to persecuted smokers. Outside Victoria station an aggressive notice says: ‘It is against the law to smoke in these premises including under this canopy.’ Never mind that the canopy, really a porte-cochère, is open to the elements, with a broken roof-pane that lets rain pelt the taxi queue, nor that the welcome Sir Nigel Gresley regularly enters the train shed smoking powerfully. What grates is to be bossed about in bad grammar. Including is a participial adjective. In neither of the ways that it is used can it qualify an adverbial phrase such as ‘under this canopy’.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 19 July 2008

Q. I have edited a selection of letters which is to be published later this summer. It is more than likely that, as part of the promotion process, I shall be asked to sign a copy here and there. However, it is not really my book, but that of the distinguished and, alas, departed correspondent. What is the protocol, Mary? Name and address withheld A. There is no need for you to feel so modest. You have had all the work of deciphering the letters, putting them into context, writing the footnotes. The book is your creation in that you are its midwife. It would be correct for you to

James Forsyth

Labour’s latest record low

John Rentoul breaks the news of the latest ComRes poll for The Independent over at Open House, the Tories are on 45 and Labour on 24—the lowest the pollster has ever had Labour, and the Lib Dems 16. 68 percent of voters agreed with the statement that Labour will lose next time round regardless of who is the leader. However, among Labour supporters that number dropped to 38 percent. It would be interesting to see whether those who voter Labour in 2005 think the party would have a better chance of winning with someone other than Brown in charge. Rentoul is impressed by the fact that a plurality of voters

Fraser Nelson

A guide to Glasgow East

That wee film I presented about Glasgow East – just over 3 minutes long – is now up on YouTube (you can watch it after the jump), It’s based on my political column from a couple of weeks ago and was broadcast last Friday and commissioned by Robbie Gibb, editor of the BBC’s Daily Politics. The BBC team assembled a powerful collection of images, which tell their own story (just as well, as the narration is a bit dodgy). Here it is with my wee guide beneath. 1) Grey skies in the intro (0’40) – We shot this scene at the end, a race against the rain. We had to

Matthew Dancona

Brilliantly Dark

The Spectator’s own Wiki Man, Rory Sutherland, and I spent yesterday evening at the BFI Imax near Waterloo watching a preview of The Dark Knight. Very rarely is it genuinely true to say that a movie is astonishing. But no other word will do justice to this film. To describe The Dark Knight as the latest in the (famously uneven) Batman franchise simply does not explain what this film aspires to be and to do. If the splendid Iron Man was a pitch perfect blend of high camp and high tech – the superhero flick at its best – this is something altogether different. Christopher Nolan uses every technique available

James Forsyth

Not all right Jack

Peter Oborne in his Mail column conducts a telling thought experiment: “Yesterday morning witnessed a summit in Whitehall between Cabinet ministers and the country’s biggest union barons. Top of the agenda was a series of arrogant demands from the unions for control over government policy in return for funding a bankrupt Labour Party through the next General Election. Some of these demands are breathtakingly audacious: abandonment of the public sector pay policy, reintroduction of secondary strike action and the end of private sector involvement in public services. Yesterday’s meeting signalled a blatant return to the kind of old-fashioned stitch-up between union bosses and Labour politicians that dominated British politics in

James Forsyth

It’s bad out there, Darling

Alistair Darling’s interview with The Times this morning marks the start of a new chapter in British politics. Darling makes no attempt to sugar-coat the economic situation. He is frank that “the economic news is going to be difficult for quite some time.” He also does not try and pretend that the economy will have recovered by the next election. Instead, he argues that the election will be a choice about who can best get Britain out of the current mess. (Realistically, it is hard to see how Labour can win unless the economy improves.) Darling tells Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson that he has informed his Cabinet colleagues that