Society

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

This is England | 17 April 2008

With St George’s Day fast approaching (it’s on April 23rd), The Spectator has taken the opportunity to release a special issue on England. You’ll find the relevant articles dotted around the website, although I’d recommend you check out Rod Liddle’s excellent piece in particular.   It’s also the perfect chance to hear CoffeeHousers’ thoughts on England and on being English. We’ve already asked various public figures “What is England?” – you can see their answers here. Why not register your own response in the comments section?

Wednesday

George Bridges

Hands off Jerusalem, my family heirloom

George Bridges on the part played by his great-grandfather, Robert Bridges, in the composition of Parry’s music to Blake’s lyric: too precious, he says, to be hijacked by separatists I suspect you had better things to do last Friday evening than stay in to watch the English Democrats’ party political broadcast. I missed it. In fact, I didn’t know the party existed until I was throwing out the newspapers at the weekend, and happened to see the broadcast listed on the TV page. Intrigued, I looked them up online. ‘England: we have a right to be angry. THE ENGLISH HAVE HAD ENOUGH.’ I began to feel as if I had

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Doctor’s dilemma

In those distant days when I used to hang out on Facebook one of my favourite user groups was ‘I hate Catherine Tate and she shouldn’t be in the new series of Doctor Who.’ I don’t remember many of the members’ exchanges being particularly witty or illuminating, but then they didn’t need to be. The group’s name said it all, really. And now she’s arrived just how bad and annoying is she? Well, the good news is: not as bad and annoying as you might have feared. But, given how bad and annoying you feared she would be, I’m not sure that’s going to provide total consolation. I’ll give you

Ian Hay-Davison

How to rescue a bank: be firm, be quick, be quiet

To judge from the media coverage of Northern Rock, one might imagine that the circumstances of a bank collapse have never occurred before — or at least not for 150 years. But this is not the case. There have been several in recent years, including those of Johnson Matthey and Barings. But the closest parallel is one that is less well known: the collapse of National Mortgage Bank (NMB), of which I was appointed chairman in February 1992 to supervise the run-off of its business. The story begins with the collapse of the fraud-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International in 1991. This was not the direct responsibility of the

Clare Asquith

The dying of the light

‘Tenebrae’ is the last office, the final prayer in the ritual day of the Benedictine monk. But there is a double finality to the Tenebrae evoked at the beginning of this book. This is the great cathedral church of Durham, and the date is 31 December 1539. ‘A few hours earlier, the Prior of Durham and his monks had surrendered their monastery to King Henry VIII, just as so many had done before them by then’. These monks are about to disperse, the church’s treasures will be appropriated and the ancient tombs of St Cuthbert and St Bede will be broken up after hundreds of years of continuous tradition. Though

Neil Collins

Lessons for less: affordable excellence

Scroll through the Multimap website to Bosworth Road, London W10, and it reveals that this sad corner of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea boasts three primary schools, two more schools and a college, all within a couple of hundred yards of each other. No need for any other seats of learning, you might think — yet there’s another primary school in this street that the site doesn’t show, which is so oversubscribed that it has just registered its first pre-birth application from desperate parents. Maple Walk is a fee-paying school, but quite unlike other prep schools in the capital. Where they boast of the quality of their facilities,

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

What Goes Up Should Come Down

A splendid piece on elevators – yes, lifts – in this week’s New Yorker. Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Tuesday Linkage

Mr Eugenides has a delightful item about everyone’s favourite “Viewspaper”, The Independent Matt Zeitlin points out a couple of elementary truths to the Weekly Standard It’s April 15th, so it’s time for Megan’s tax plan to get another airing. Stephen Colbert on the candidates. Plus! Who’s the real Irishman, Colbert or Bill O’Reilly? The wives of high-ranking Cambodian officials are expected to be angry this year. Is Barack Obama a Marxist? Joe Lieberman says that’s “a good question.” Sigh. Sign of the times: a Virginia school bans playground games of tig. Double Sigh.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is Basra back under Iraqi government–not militia–control?

Today’s AFP dispatch from Basra makes for fascinating reading. It suggests that the Iraqi government efforts to rein in the militias that had come to dominate the town, thanks in part to British policy, has been much more successful than initially thought:  “Residents say the streets have been cleared of gunmen, markets have reopened, basic services have been resumed and a measure of normality has returned to the oil-rich city. The port of Umm Qasr is in the hands of the Iraqi forces who wrested control of the facility from Shiite militiamen, and according to the British military it is operational once again.” There’s no doubt that Prime Minister Maliki’s

Matthew Dancona

A better effort. Just

Take two: Gordon did better in his interview with the BBC today than in his exchange with Nick Robinson last week. As I wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, Brown answered Robinson’s questions in the earlier exchange about people’s anxieties over the economy without a shred of apparent empathy or feeling for worried mortgage holders and aspiring home owners. Today, the PM tried hard – so hard – to show the emotional intelligence that you just knew his media handlers had been urging upon him. So today it was different: deep breath: “I wake up in the morning thinking about how I can help those people who have mortgages or are

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Tax refugees

Shire Pharmaceutics, a FTSE100 firm worth GBP5.5bn, is to relist its head office offshore for tax reasons. Global firms (as Shire now is) can report profits anywhere – and Shire will move to Jersey and pay tax in Ireland (where corporation tax is 12.5% for trading income, not 28%). It is a move explicitly “designed to help protect the group’s taxation position”. Shire is fearing a bid from Pfizer, and perhaps quitting the UK tax system is a form of defence. This fits a trend. Hiscox and Amlin have already switched. Amazon recently headed to Ireland.   Businesses do not petulantly say: we’ve had enough of Brown, we’re off. This

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Wanted: A Revolution

Astonishingly, this story seems to be true: THE railway station bar, once a classic venue for romantic encounters, has fallen victim to the health and safety police. When Michael Leventhal, a London publisher, wanted to impress his date on her birthday, the longest champagne bar in Europe seemed to be the perfect setting. So Leventhal, 35, made a booking at the new St Pancras station, whose 96-metre bar has been promoted as a perfect meeting point for lovers. He also e-mailed a request for help in arranging a birthday surprise. Leventhal asked whether he could bring a candle and have it surreptitiously placed on a cake, brought to the bar

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Self-indulgence Alert

This blog is, I just realised, one year old today. Jings, who’d have thunk it? Anyway, thanks to all those who linked and, of course, to all who have visited and read and left comments and all the rest of it.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Not worth the candle

The full absurdity of the health and safety culture is brought home by this story in The Sunday Times.  A chap was taking his date to the champagne bar at St Pancras for her birthday and so asked if he could bring a candle for them to put on a cake for her. This is the email he received in response: “I have asked the station operations if we would be allowed to have a lit candle at the champagne bar for a birthday cake and they have said that we will have to submit a risk assessment form stating what the risk will be to the bar and the

Matthew Dancona

His own worst enemy | 13 April 2008

There is a must-read piece in the Mail on Sunday by the impeccably connected Sue Cameron, who provides a compelling inventory of the Brown administration’s dysfunctions. My favourite detail – so rich in irony – is that Number Ten is frustrated by the poor flow of information from the Treasury, and that the PM’s aides were especially furious that details of the changes to capital gains tax were settled without reference to them. The reason? Habit. During the Blair-Brown years, the Treasury’s entire culture was founded on the principle that its officials kept Number Ten in the dark until absolutely necessary. ‘We don’t normally tell No 10 what we’re doing,’

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Lost property

The most interesting thing about relationship break-ups is not so much what is said but what is not said. For example, last week I parted from my boyfriend of eight months and the thing I really wanted to say was not ‘why has it come to this?’ or ‘how dare you call me co-dependent’. No, the thing I desperately longed to say was, ‘I want my brown trousers back.’ I don’t know why break-ups bring out the territorial in people. There is no natural or primeval reason why human beings should argue over record collections when their hearts are broken. Did Neanderthal men and women fight over who got to

Jeremy Clarke

Seeking civilisation

I turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. I switched on the radio. Nothing. Flat battery. Even the clock had stopped. I checked the switches to see if I’d left a light on. Nothing. I rang the AA. ‘Someone will be with you in up to 80 minutes,’ said the controller after he’d taken down a few details. The car was in the station car park, nose against the railings, facing the platforms. I sat in the driver’s seat and contemplated the litter-strewn railway tracks and the abandoned, partially dismantled milk depot behind. I smelt vomit, which I traced to a dash of dried vomit on the lapel of my

Taki

Old school ties

New York I read in the New York Times that one of the four persons who apparently operated the escort service that undid Eliot Spitzer, the ex-governor of the state of New York, was one Cecil Suwal, 23, ‘a graduate of an élite New Jersey prep school’. Bad news travels fast and I was informed of the fact that Cecil — a girl, incidentally — and I had attended the same élite institution, Blair Academy, from more than one old friend. Mind you, we were 45 years apart, and when I went to Blair the place was not co-ed. I have the fondest memories of Blair. It took me in