Vive La France!
This one’s for my French friends and readers. Here’s Yves Montand singing Les Feuilles Mortes. Wonderful stuff.
Society
Monday
Vive la France
Bastille Day always reminds me of how jealous I am of the French national anthem. La Marseillaise is a splendidly, rousing song. There is nothing quite like hearing a crowd belting it out with passion. This scene in Casablanca when Victor Lazlo leads Rick’s Cafe Americain in a stirring rendition of it is, to my mind, one of the finest scenes in cinema.
Don’t be fooled by Brown’s smokescreen
Before every European Union summit the British government briefs the press on a set of red-lines which it promises to stand firm on. These are self-imposed tests which the government knows it will pass but as the summit goes on, the line is spun that the red line are under attack. But it always works out in the end and the Prime Minister returns to reassure the nation that no ground has been given. All this is designed as a smokescreen to distract attention from the myriad of other issues where the government has given way. I suspect much the same is going on with Gordon Brown and the Unions.
Railing against the system
Train travel in this country can be pretty awful, especially on the weekends. But it is still shocking to read Andrew Gilligan’s account in today’s Evening Standard of his journey from Birmingham to London: “I was physically assaulted, called a f***ing c*** and a prick, and left stranded after the last train back to London had gone. The person who did all this was not a mugger or a hooligan, or even one of my political enemies, but a member of staff of Virgin Trains.” Gilligan had caused such a ruckus by trying to take his bike on the train without a specific reservation, hardly a hanging offence and something
Who does Cameron want sitting round the Cabinet table?
Considering the amount of chatter there is about a possible Tory reshuffle, Philip Johnston’s Telegraph column is a good reminder that the skills that make someone a good opposition spokesman are quite different from those that make a good Cabinet Minister. As Johnston points out only one of the shadow Cabinet have been in an actual Cabinet—William Hague as Welsh Secretary—so it is hard to know who might or might not make a good minister. But considering this is probably the last planned reshuffle, Cameron will do before the next election he is bound to be thinking about this. One move that might be prompted by this thought is shuffling
Protecting free speech
The American press is significantly freer than the British one because of the free speech guarantee enshrined in the First Amendment. In the US unlike in the UK, the burden of proof in libel cases is on the plaintiff not the defendant; making it far harder for the powerful to use the threat of libel actions to silence the media. However, there has been an increasing trend for people to indulge in so-called ‘libel tourism’, suing American authors and journalists in English courts. Senators Specter and Lieberman are proposing a legislative remedy to this problem: “Our bill bars U.S. courts from enforcing libel judgments issued in foreign courts against U.S.
In case you missed them | 14 July 2008
Here are some of the posts made over the weekend: The Russian and Chinese veto of sanctions on Zimbabwe is a result of the UN not being designed to be a moral body, argued James Forsyth. Fraser Nelson explained why he and so many of his friends are marrying foreigners. Americano noted a poll that shows Obama’s lead down to three points. Clive Davis wondered if people should be refused citizenship on the grounds that their religious beliefs are incompatible with the state’s values.
Inflation the highest it has been since 1992
Last week, the Bank of England held interest rates at 5 percent because inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, was 3.3 percent—above the Bank’s 2 percent target. Today’s Daily Mirror reports that the CPI will rise to 3.6 percent—the highest it has been since 1992—when new figures are announced on Tuesday. The Mirror also claims that its own Cost of Living Index shows that the ‘real rate’ of inflation is 18.53 percent. One can question the economic accuracy of the Mirror’s number. But there’s no doubt that the rise in prices has been dramatic. The Mirror notes a 30 percent rise in fuel costs, a 14 percent increase
CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 14 July – 20 July
Welcome to this week’s Wall, as always this is your space to write and chat about what you want. Do let us know if there are things you would like to see us cover on Coffee House. If you’d like to add photos or videos to the Wall, email phoskin @ spectator.co.uk
Sunday
Obama talks God
Obama supporters hope that his comfort in talking publicly about his religious beliefs will both help Obama bridge some of the cultural gap that separates him from large chunks of the electorate and help him make inroads into the evangelical vote. This strategy suffered a huge blow with the Revered Wright affair which tied Obama’s faith up with a divisive, racialist world view; the new Newsweek poll shows that almost a third of voters state that Wright might stop them from supporting Obama. However, the Obama campaign clearly believes that talking about religion is still sensible politics. In this week’s Newsweek, Obama talks about how often he prays, his Bible
The two sides to fighting crime
‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ is one of the great political soundbites. Sadly, though, Tony Blair’s government never managed to put both parts of into action. Any long term solution to the current spate of violence is going to require us to do both simultaneously. I’d urge all Coffee Housers to read Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times, who deals with the later part, and Alasdair Palmer in The Sunday Telegraph, who addresses the former. Minette Marrin makes the essential point that the social contract breaks down when people feel that they have no stake in society: “Morality depends on having something to lose. It isn’t
The US, Israel and Iran
There has been a lot of speculation in recent weeks that Israel was stepping up its preparations to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. But Jim Hoagland, The Washington Posts’s foreign affairs commentator, suggests that the Americans have persuaded the Israelis to back away from the military option to give coercive diplomacy another chance: “The most significant indication of that change comes from strong U.S. public and private pressure on Israel to forgo military strikes while Washington seeks new U.N. economic and travel sanctions against Tehran. Neither government will confirm that such pressure was exerted. Bush hates to say no to Israel, and he and Olmert do not want Iran to think
Another big Tory poll lead
The latest YouGov poll for The Sunday Times shows no change in the Labour and Tory numbers—the Tories are still 22 points ahead, 47 to 25. The good news for the Tories is that the longer this lead remains stable, the more voters will adjust to the idea of a Tory government. The leadership speculation is relatively muted this weekend. In his Telegraph column, Matt pours some cold water over the idea that Brown might face a serious challenge soon: “To return to the PM’s question: what does his survival tell us? First, that the Labour party are a bunch of wimps. Boy, they all talk the talk about getting
Loving the trend
I’m in Austria for a wedding this weekend, as yet another one of my friends has got hitched to a European. It’s becoming a trend. Of the five closest friends I had when I was 21, four of us – including yours truly – started a cross-border relationship which ended in marriage. This has to do, of course, with love – but also, if I may be so nerdy, with technology and economic trends. My generation, born in the mid-70s, was perhaps the first to be able to enter long-distance relationships armed with the new tools of communication and transport. The old narrative of a long-distance relationship was meeting up
Saturday
Slow Life | 12 July 2008
I wasn’t planning to take the family on holiday. We live on a farm and there’s always something happening. It gets harder and harder to drag oneself away. Claire got quite indignant about having missed the strawberries when we arrived home today. There were only a few soggy ones left. ‘If it’s not the strawberries it’s something else. We were always going to skip something. Try a redcurrant,’ I said cheerfully, spitting out a pip, but she ignored me. I even managed to find her some mulberries later, but I could tell she was still filled with loss. She’s pregnant and she needs strawberries. The year before last we went
Low life | 12 July 2008
I’ve not been to Pamplona’s famous week-long ‘running of the bulls’ and bullfighting fair of Saint Fermin since 2002; but every year since, on 6 July, at midday, when the town council lets off the rocket signalling the start of the festivities, I’ve felt a pang of regret that I’ve once again failed to manage my life sufficiently well to be there with the thousands who have. I first went ten years ago, after reading Hemingway’s bullfighting encyclopedia Death in the Afternoon. After half a dozen chapters of meticulous description of the Spanish corrida, Hemingway admits that it is beyond even his powers of description to convey fully the effect
High life | 12 July 2008
I’m afraid that Pug’s Club ‘Turd of the Year’ award went unanimously to the ghastly Andy Murray, he of the centre court primal screams and primate fist pumping. Perhaps his mother, who looks straight out of central casting of a Hollywood stage mum, and then some, should file his teeth down a bit and make him look less like Dracula. Better yet, he should be forced to watch Federer in action and learn a thing or two about behaviour on court (100 hours of videos, and then 100 more). I know the hucksters who now run sport require announcers to be cheerleaders, but praising someone for acting like a bloodthirsty
The turf | 12 July 2008
I heard from a Nato general not long ago the story of two hot air balloonists in the US who got lost. They descended to check their bearings from visible landmarks and found themselves above a massive and curiously shaped building. Seeing a man crossing the car park one balloonist shouted, ‘Where are we?’ ‘In a balloon,’ the man yelled back. At which the other man in the basket stoked up the hot air and took them back up through the clouds. When his companion queried his action, arguing that their informant had been useless, he replied, ‘Oh, no. The information was short, accurate and no bloody use to anyone.
Letters | 12 July 2008
A pariah writes Sir: I dealt for 30 years with hundreds of Muslims, at first in Mr Doyle’s organisation, so I am not ‘ignorant’ of Islam (as he claims, Letters, 5 July), which seeks to conquer this world, not the next, politically. If he disagrees, he should consult Islam’s most ‘moderate’ authorities like Yusuf Qaradawi, all of whom boast that (as Doyle writes I noted), ‘Islam… is trying to take over the globe.’ As one could not be a Muslim absent this goal, the distinction Ms McCartney draws between ‘fundamentalist’ and moderate Muslims is absurd: history shows what all Muslims endorse. As I wrote: ‘After his [Mohammed’s] death in 632,
Diary – 12 July 2008
Rebecca Newman gives a rundown of her week Rarely in my life have I enjoyed running. A tubby child and then a sickly teen, I spent games lessons hiding behind a piano with a book. Odd then, that this week I completed (half of) one of the toughest marathons in the world. Stranger still, I enjoyed it. The Lewa Marathon is a unique event, a challenge I was romantic and bloody-minded enough not to turn down. It snakes through the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in north-east Kenya, presenting a testing combination of dry heat, steep inclines and shingle descents. To top it off, Lewa is at 6,000 ft above sea level. But I