Society

Tuesday

Andrew Neil

London needs a dedicated traffic police

On the way to a birthday party in Bucks on Sunday night we were delayed by a long tailback on the elevated section of the A4 out of London by what turned out to be a broken down van. On his way back to London over an hour later my driver reported that the van was still there, the police had eventually arrived but were doing nothing to move it and the tailback to get past it was now all the way back to the Hogarth roundabout.   Our inconvenience was small in the grand scheme of things: we were 45 minutes late for a party. But think of all

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What other data does Pearson have?

What I love about this government is that they lose no time passing the blame. Just as Darling fingered the TNT courier company for the lost discs, we’re told that Pearson Driving Assessments is the data company (mis)handling the driver license info. Could this be the same Pearson who (as Dizzy pointed out last week) handles UK teacher training application data from their sites in Minnesota? The logo certainly appears to look the same. Dizzy’s FoI requests have shown us that such teacher data is sent daily to Pearson – whose data security credentials are, hilariously, self-assessed. This means they are given a list, tick the boxes and next thing you know

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Pass the sick bag | 17 December 2007

Hillary in Iowa on Sunday: ‘There’s so much we can do together if we work together as a world. Remember that movie Independence Day, where invaders were coming from outer space and the whole world was united against the invasion? Why can’t we be united on behalf of our planet? And that’s what I want to do, to get more and more people to understand that and to be involved to protect our environment.” Oh shut up. Whoever wrote this should be fired. The folks at The Corner are having some fun for once, noting that in Independence Day the First Spouse, er, dies. Mark Steyn also points out that:

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Hitchens on Huckabee

Hitch gets in touch with his inner Mencken today: However, what Article VI does not do, and was never intended to do, is deny me the right to say, as loudly as I may choose, that I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate but who does not have the elementary intelligence to recognize the fact that this is what he is. My right to say and believe that is already guaranteed to me by the First Amendment. And the right of Huckabee to win the election and fill the White House with morons like himself is unaffected by

Alex Massie Alex Massie

No One likes Us, We Don’t Care

National Review’s Andy McCarthy on a foreign policy difference between John McCain and Rudy Giuliani: McCain is business as usual — even though there is no good reason why the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians should be a priority, much less that we should intensify our commitment to a settlement in the absence of Palestinian fitness for statehood. Giuliani says we can talk about it after the Palestinians grow up. That’s rather a large difference, and it’s far from the only one.  McCain, for example, would perpetuate the State Department way of doing things (as part of restoring our allegedly tarnished image in the world) while Giuliani

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Put the L plates on this government

Following on from the child benefit data loss fiasco, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency has—through an American contractor—lost the details of three million learner drivers. Now, admittedly the lost information doesn’t contain bank details or national insurance numbers. But The frequency with which the government is mislaying  personal data is surely killing off the prospects of ID cards.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A double-edged compliment

Bob Kerrey, a maverick former Democratic senator, was out stumping for Hillary Clinton in Iowa yesterday and had this to say about Barack Obama: “I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims and I think that experience is a big deal.” Now, maybe Kerrey—who is generally regarded as a decent guy—was being genuine. (The full context of his remarks lends support to that theory) But considering how the Clinton campaign had to stand down a campaign co-chair in New Hampshire for speculating about whether

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What we’re leaving behind in Basra

In macabre contrast to James’ post about the effects of the US surge, The Guardian splashes on the mayhem in Basra left by Britain’s shameful under-commitment to the provinces under our care. It’s mainly an interview with Major General Jalil Khalaf, the head of the Basra police, who says he can’t control the militias and (as we blogged last week) that women are getting killed for un-Islamic behaviour. Its website also offers a superb, chilling six-minute online video about what’s happening in Basra in an interview with Khalaf. “ The British did not mean to create a mess here in Basra. The chaos came from the way they set up

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Democratic VP candidate in 2000 endorses a Republican for president

The news that Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee in 2000, is to endorse John McCain, a Republican, for the presidency today, raises the question: has anyone who was on one of the main party’s tickets endorsed a presidential candidate from the other party within just eight years, before? Lieberman’s decision to endorse McCain now means—oddly enough—that he’ll face less criticism from Democrats than if he had waited. If Lieberman’s support for McCain is known it will have less impact in a general election if McCain is the Republican nominee. While if McCain misses out on the nomination and Lieberman returns to the Democratic fold it will be a newsworthy

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The surge has given Iraq hope again

The remarkable military success of the US surge in Iraq has been the most important international story of the year. As Tim Hames writes this morning, the prospects for Iraq look brighter than they have for a long time. “First, the country will now have the time to establish itself. A year ago it seemed as if American forces would have been withdrawn in ignominious fashion either well before the end of the Bush Administration or, at best, days after the next president came to office. This will not now happen. The self-evident success of the surge has obliged the Democrats to start talking about almost anything else and the

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Downing Street and The Bank of England at odds

It is rare to have a news story by Irwin Stelzer, he normally writes excellent columns for The Spectator and The Sunday Times. But today’s splash in The Sunday Times jumps out for more reasons than the byline. He reveals what I have only heard whispered: that there is paralysis at the very apex of our financial system. There is a dysfunctional relationship between the top three figures: Mervyn King (pictured), the governor of the Bank of England, The Chancellor and the Prime Minister.  Stelzer reveals that Brown is refusing to act to repair the regulatory structure he set up in 1997. It didn’t work then, as Eddie George told

Saturday

Alex James

The price is right

The Christmas tree is big enough for the children to climb. The small ones could get lost inside somewhere. Every year that guy gets it exactly right. His expertise is one of the most pleasing things about the run-up to Christmas. The top is an inch from the ceiling. He has an eye for these things. He grows them and he knows them, brings one round on a lorry with bits of rope for lashing it off the banisters. I am a knot man myself, but his tying skills are in a different league, special Christmas-tree knots that fly the thing plumb perpendicular up the festive feng shui leylines. He’s

Melissa Kite

Right of passage

I realise that I have for some time been approaching my life with all the flexibility of an Orangeman. Every day I march my traditional route to a well-known sandwich shop. I buy the same sandwich and march back. Anyone who gets in my way is treated with the sort of courtesy that a member of the Orange Lodge might muster to deal with a group of Catholic residents on the Garvaghy Road. ‘Stand aside, I must walk over this precise piece of pavement because that is the way it has always been.’ Tourists taking photographs are given particularly short shrift — I must figure in literally thousands of smiling

Jeremy Clarke

On the buses

There was a bus shelter, but it had no sides and the icy wind was blowing the rain horizontally at us. We huddled together, all eyes on the bus-driver. A bus-driver with an ounce of compassion would have opened the doors and let us on to get warm. This one sat and insolently contemplated us from the warm, dry fastness of his driver’s seat. Yes, it was another general-public-loathing bus-driver, for whom keeping his contempt within certain well-defined bounds was probably the hardest part of his job. Company rules prohibited his telling us exactly what he thought of us. Accelerating past bus stops giving waiting passengers the raised finger was

Taki

Joining the hypocrites

It is that time of year again. The time for peace and goodwill to all men. Mind you, goodwill towards all men is getting harder by the minute, what with those psychopathic murderers in the Sudan and in Zimbabwe. When I look back and remember the rubbish that was written by phoneys like Christopher Hitchens against the great Ian Smith, it is hard to have Christian thoughts. Some might say it served poor Smithy right. He fought for a country which then turned against him and did its utmost to squeeze the life out of his regime. Today’s Zimbabwe is the result, and those who howled abuse against Rhodesia are

Robin Oakley

Speaking out

Upper Lambourn trainer Charlie Mann, who was forcibly retired as a jockey in 1989 by breaking his neck after riding around 150 winners, lists his hobby as ‘having fun’. His idea of doing just that included returning to the saddle in 1994, with a licence he printed for himself (a misdemeanour which cost him a £1,000 fine) to ride his horse It’s a Snip in the Pardubicka cross-country chase in the Czech Republic, a marathon test which includes crossing ploughed fields, banks and stone walls. They were second that year: the next year they won it. Charlie’s mother was a Yorkshire showjumper who sold ponies. He never wanted to be

Ursula Buchan

Botanical exactitude

As I spend much of my life in a flower bed, bottom up, I rarely consciously make the connection between the flowers that I grow in my garden and their more elevated associations, in particular their role in Christian art. Only when I visit art galleries or churches am I forcibly reminded that gardens and wild flowers appear again and again in paintings, as well as featuring prominently in the plastic and applied arts. This is hardly surprising, since flowers were both comprehensible and universal symbols in preliterate times, and have remained enduring signs of Man’s appreciation of the beauty and variety of God’s creation. This was brought home to

Alan Judd

Speeding questions

‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ John Maynard Keynes retorted to a critic. A pity he’s not here to ask the same question of the Department for Transport (DfT) when they lecture us on road deaths this Christmas. Four years ago The Spectator (22 November 2003) helped to initiate the wider debate about speed cameras, hitherto primarily a concern of the specialist motoring press and the RAC Foundation. The article attracted considerable attention, partly because of the figures it quoted for cameras, drivers caught, revenue raised and the fact that, of 419 Somerset police officers caught in one year, only one was prosecuted.

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 15 December 2007

Those who indulge in the ‘infuriating genteelism’ of saying Christmas lunch must be castigated, a reader from Leicester, Mr Clifford Dunkley, tells me. Castigate them, do. But they won’t stay castigated. Yet it must be Christmas dinner, for the phrase is fossilised, as much as ‘God save the Queen’ is fossilised in preserving the subjunctive. Christmas dinner is unusual because the thing is fossilised as well as the name. The new online Oxford English Dictionary preserves the definition of dinner that it gave in June 1896: ‘The chief meal of the day, eaten originally, and still by the majority of people, about the middle of the day (cf. Ger. Mittagsessen),

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 15 December 2007

Since our parish newsletter does not have a wide circulation, I feel I am justified in plagiarising an article in the latest issue by its nature correspondent (my wife). She provides useful, or anyway, interesting information for Christmas decoration, with the preface that unless you wait until Christmas Eve before hanging up your greenery and be sure to take it down by Epiphany, every leaf will spawn a goblin: I. Holly. Tradition holds that if the holly you bring in is smooth-leaved, the woman of the house will dominate. If it is prickly, the man will be in charge. The botanical fact, though, is that all berried holly is female.