Society

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Guinness is Good For You; Government Is Not

In the past nine months four pubs in Selkirk, my home town, have closed. It would be simplistic to presume that the liberty-quashing smoking ban was the sole cause of this regrettable trend; it would be idiotic to suppose it didn’t play a part. Still, that’s only one part of legislators’ attempts to run publicans out of town. Consider this latest wheeze, for instance, as told by the Southern Reporter: Pub licensees, who currently pay £172 for a three-year licence to sell alcohol, will have to fork out up to £1,600 just to register their premises under the new [licensing] system. An annual fee on top of that has yet

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Who says the culture wars are over?

This is probably the dumbest thing Barack Obama has said all year. “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” That Obama was speaking at

The Spectator

Tread the Trading Floor

Head over to Trading Floor for the latest on the credit crunch, including: Fraser Nelson on the UK’s shaky economic framework. And Michael Millar on why it’s not all doom-and-gloom in the housing markets.

Peter Hoskin

Give Balls a kicking

Some computer-whizz at CCHQ has knocked up a Jack Straw vs Ed Balls online fighting game.  It hardly spells the end to “punch and judy politics”, but it might help CoffeeHousers while away a Friday afternoon.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Essential viewing on Iraq

This episode of Charlie Rose with John Burns and Dexter Filkins of The New York Times (full video below) is by far the most informative thing I’ve seen on the Petraeus and Crocker testimony and the whole state of the war in Iraq. Both Burns and Filkins stress that things are precarious but equally they are both sure that things are improving in Iraq and there is a real possibility of a positive outcome although there is a long way to go—as Filkins puts it, it is ‘the bottom of the third innings’ in a nine innings game. Notably, Burns sees the recent events in Basra as a net positive

Peter Hoskin

Surveillance society

There’s a worrying story in the papers this morning – Poole borough council has used anti-terror powers to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form. It crystallises the idea that cracking-down on terrorism could mean cracking-down on personal freedom. And with the debate over detention times still raging, incidents like this are hardly going to help the Government’s cause.

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Read All About It: Readers Resist Porridge

Glenn Greenwald, elitist scourge of the modern media’s cosy elitism, has been on a tear lately. He complains that the media focuses too much on trivial froth and not enough on serious issues. Why, he asks, does the media, ignore (relatively speaking) John Yoo’s now-infamous (and rightly so) “Torture Memo” while devoting acres and hours of attention to Barack Obama going ten-pin bowling in Pennsylvania? The crux of Greenwald’s argument is: And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Stuff Readers Like

Further to this post on the media and What Readers Want, it’s always useful to have a gander at the New York Times’s most emailed stories. For sure, this is no infallible guide but it is a useful snapshot of reader opinion in as much as it’s a list of the stories readers most frequently recommend to their friends. Here’s today’s list. In Shift to Digital, More Repeat Mammograms Latest College Reading Lists: Menus With Pho and Lobster Equestrians’ Deaths Spread Unease in Sport Magazine Preview: The Aria of Chris Matthews Findings: And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw Maureen Dowd: Toil and Trouble Well: Keeping Priorities Straight, Even

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Will borrowers be spared?

Don’t breathe easily. Apart from the lucky minority with mortgages linked to Bank of England’s base rates, today’s rate cut won’t alleviate the mortgage industry misery. The city expected this cut and many expected a larger one, so the all important Libor interbank lending rate remains sky high. As Anatole Kaletsky says today, the pain is just starting. For the mortgage brokers take on today’s cut, read here. For more business news and analysis head over to Trading Floor.

Peter Hoskin

Fractured relations

There’s a shocking finding in today’s Times, and one that could permanently undermine relations between Britain and Iraq. The reason British troops weren’t involved in the early stages of the recent Basra offensive? It wasn’t because Iraqi forces could “cope on their own”. Instead, it was down to a deliberate snub on the part of Iraqi officials: “The Times has learnt … that when Britain’s most senior officer in Basra, Brigadier Julian Free, commander of 4 Mechanised Brigade, flew into the city to find out what was going on, Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, who was orchestrating the attacks on militia strongholds, declined to see him. Brigadier Free flew

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

How can all be lost? Wisden has arrived.

One of the great annual treats is upon us: yes, the 2008 edition of Wisden arrived this morning. As always, the obituaries provide some of the best reading. To wit, Mike Brearley’s father, Horace who died last August aged 94. He was: A batsman who played once for Yorkshire before the war, and twice for Middlesex afterwards…Mike himself tells the story of his father’s only game for Yorkshire, which was against Middlesex: “He batted an No. 5, and faced a side that contained three leg-spinners. Horace had never, or almost never, been confronted by a googly bowler, and here were three all at once. But he was a typical Yorkshireman,

The Skimmer

A tale of two wives

The Skimmer is genuinely puzzled and needs the help of Coffee Housers. A story appeared on 5th April about a Scottish Muslim called Mohammed Anwar who was clocked doing 64mph in a 30-mile zone in Glasgow — but kept his licence because he said he needed to be able to continue driving to visit his TWO wives, who lived some miles apart, on alternative nights.   At first, The Skimmer thought this was an April Fool — and a jolly good one. Then it was noticed that the dateline was 5th April — and that several papers carried it. Nor has a google search found any retractions/corrections.   So assuming

Michael Millar

Lies, Darling lies and statistics

Alistair Darling’s stubborn refusal to accept the economic statistics in front of him is getting a bit silly. Now anyone can prove something with stats – two out of three people know that – but Mr Darling’s insistence that the UK economy will grow by up to 2.25% in 2008 in the face of what everyone else is saying is not bolstering the government, just undermining its credibility. The IMF says the economy can hope to grow by 1.6% this year (revised down from 2.3% in October so watch out for further revisions) and 1.6% in 2009. The Chancellor still thinks we could get up to 2.75% next year. The

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Olympic outrage

There has been understandable outrage about the role that those blue-tracksuited heavies played as the Olympic torch made its ignominious way round London. But now The Independent is reporting that these guards are members of the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary force that has played a brutal role in putting down the recent protests in Tibet. The government need to urgently tell the public what powers these goons were given, what visas they were on and what background checks were made to ensure that those directly responsible for gross abuses of human rights were not allowed to run around London’s streets. Holding the Olympics in China is one thing, allowing

Matthew Dancona

The Ministry of Silly Talks?

Hugo has a terrific lead item in his Times column: namely that John Cleese is offering his speech-writing services to Barack Obama. Having had the amazing opportunity to co-write a short script with the great man years ago, I can heartily recommend him to the Senator for Illinois. And one can only wonder where such a collaboration might lead. Imagine how Basily Fawlty would have dealt with the Jeremiah Wright furore: “Don’t mention the pastor – I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it!” Or, more probably, a discourse on the Audacity of Despair. And is it too much to ask that the Democrat contender would

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 9 April 2008

Whenever I return to England from abroad, which is often, a very troubling question comes insistently into mind: why are the people here so ugly? I do not mean by this that I think all foreigners are handsome or beautiful, far from it. One of the tricks that Stepmother Nature has played on humanity is to give it an idea of beauty in its own kind, and then deny the thing itself to so large a proportion of the race. Still, there is something special about English ugliness. It is not of the face alone, but of the soul. As Sir Thomas Browne put it (and he must have known,

Matthew Dancona

‘We have been wimpish about defending our ideas’

Salman Rushdie tells Matthew d’Ancona that the idea at the heart of his new novel set in 16th-century Florence and India is that universal values exist and require robust champions The last time I interviewed Salman Rushdie was, as he remarks, a lifetime ago. That was in February 1993, in a safe house in north London guarded by Special Branch officers, only four years after Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced him to death for the alleged blasphemy of The Satanic Verses. On that occasion, quite understandably, the novelist seemed shrunken: not only spiritually subdued, but physically compressed by the ordeal of the fatwa. Fifteen years on, we meet in very different circumstances

Peter Oborne

In Zimbabwe, hope has turned to silent terror

On the night after the presidential elections 12 days ago, a British diplomat, Philip Barclay, witnessed the count at the little outpost of Bikisa deep in rural Masvingo. This part of Zimbabwe is Zanu PF heartland. In all five presidential elections since independence in 1981 the people of Bikisa had voted solidly for Robert Mugabe — and there was little expectation of anything different this time. Barclay reports feeling faint with sheer amazement when it became clear that the largest pile of votes was for Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Just 44 people in Bikisa voted for President Mugabe, against an overwhelming 167 for Tsvangirai.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Mad Men are taking over the world. And that’s no bad thing

Inspired by the new American hit TV show, Rory Sutherland — The Spectator’s own ‘Wiki Man’ — says that the capture of the Brown government and almost everything else by advertisers and marketers could be a great leap forward. Persuasion is better than legislation As an adman myself, I am always delighted when I see one of my colleagues off to work in No. 10, or to advise a political party — even though I’m a little worried that, after working with Sir Martin Sorrell for a few years, David Muir may find it hard to cope with Gordon Brown’s relatively chilled management style and his breezy, hands-off approach to