Society

Saturday

Graham Brady-Mp

The case for privatising Manchester airport

It is 12 years since Tony Blair did battle with the socialist dinosaurs and forced them to abandon their commitment to nationalisation with his celebrated ‘Clause 4 moment’ — the very birth of New Labour. It is 12 years since Tony Blair did battle with the socialist dinosaurs and forced them to abandon their commitment to nationalisation with his celebrated ‘Clause 4 moment’ — the very birth of New Labour. Now that Blair has been and gone, you would struggle to find a serious politician in any party who would advocate state ownership of any industry as a 21st-century model. Indeed, the idea of the state running our utilities, airlines

Simon Hoggart

AUGUST WINE CLUB

Spectator readers are famous for being richer than most, which is why the magazine carries ads for cashmere hip flasks and handbags made from the toenails of hand-reared angora rabbits. Nonetheless, we all like a bargain, and I do my best to seek these out. Sometimes merchants will have too much of a wine which they bought because it was absolutely delicious but, lacking a famous name, didn’t sell as well as it deserved. So they offer it to us, sometimes at ludicrously low prices. We have two very good examples here from the famous old house of El Vino in Fleet Street, known as ‘Pomeroys’ to Rumpole fans. On

Paul Johnson

One last cigarette before the firing squad? Certainly not!

I suppose in 100 years’ time, perhaps much sooner, no one will smoke. So we will be back where we were before the 16th century, when adventurers like Raleigh brought the Red Indian habit of smoking tobacco to Europe. I suppose in 100 years’ time, perhaps much sooner, no one will smoke. So we will be back where we were before the 16th century, when adventurers like Raleigh brought the Red Indian habit of smoking tobacco to Europe. It was one of the points on which he intrigued Queen Elizabeth. ‘I can weigh tobacco smoke, Your Grace.’ ‘Oh no, you can’t, Sir Walter.’ Then he would produce a small pair

Frank Keating

Sledge betting

London on Saturday stages a precise convergence of the sporting seasons. At the Oval England’s cricketers play the decider of their compelling and all too short Test series against India, and upriver at Twickenham England’s rugby men have a penultimate dress-rehearsal for their imminent World Cup defence in just a month. But it is the restart of Premiership football and its overflowing baggage of baloney, avarice and artful dodging which will be given pole position by its enamoured obsessives in broadcasting and the public prints. Take a deep breath, it’s a long, long way from August till May. It is curtain-up in the capital at Arsenal’s Emirates stadium, at Chelsea’s

Lucy Vickery

Hole hearted

In Competition No. 2506 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘A Life With a Hole In It’. In Competition No. 2506 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘A Life With a Hole In It’.This is the title of a poem written by Philip Larkin in 1974, shortly after a move that plunged him into a black depression. It reeks of fury and disappointment: ‘Life is an immobile, locked/ Three-handed struggle between/ Your wants, the world’s for you, and (worse)/ The unbeatable slow machine/ That brings what you’ll get…’.The entry this week was impressive, which cheered me up after Larkin’s doom and gloom. Top marks

Toby Young Toby Young

Bergman, Antonioni and the end of an error

Sixteen years ago I got together with a group of like-minded friends and started a magazine called The Modern Review. Its premise was that popular culture is as worthy of serious critical attention as high culture and, to that end, we commissioned intellectuals and academics to write about the likes of Madonna and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Believe it or not, this was a fairly radical idea back in 1991 — though not a wholly original one — and the magazine caused quite a stir. The previous generation of writers and critics attacked us on an almost weekly basis. Like many people who questioned the status quo in their youth, I now

The Spectator

The disease and us

Given the boost in the opinion polls enjoyed by Gordon Brown following the recent floods, a cynic might wonder whether the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Surrey has been staged in order to give the Prime Minister an excuse to break off his holiday in Dorset and earn brownie points by taking control of a national crisis while David Cameron (who has since called off his own holiday) was lounging around on a Breton beach. That, we concede, is far-fetched, but it is not wrong to wonder whether the nation’s reaction to foot-and-mouth — which is rarely fatal in animals and causes no human symptoms whatsoever — is not a

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The West is running a protectionist racket against the developing world

The West’s new greenness conceals a giant protectionist racket On 27 September, President George W. Bush will finally come in from the cold over global warming. On that day he will host a conference in Washington to be attended by what he has defined as the world’s 15 most polluting nations. He intends, for the first time, to commit the United States to slashing its carbon emissions. That, anyway, is the positive spin. Alternatively, one might put Bush’s multilateralist initiative like this: he is fed up with being depicted as the bad boy of climate change. Rather than keeping the US out of the world’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions,

Harry Mount

The irony and the ecstasy of Lady Mary Clive

Deep in a remote valley on the edge of the Black Mountains sits one of the last great witnesses of the 20th century. Lady Mary Clive, who turns 100 on 23 August, shook Kitchener’s hand before the first world war, and heard first-hand accounts of the 1916 Dublin Easter Uprising hours after it happened. During the 1926 General Strike she served tea to lorry drivers in the same year that she was presented to George V as a debutante. In the 1930s she was a denizen of Fleet Street, one of Lord Beaverbrook’s favourite journalists. Memoirs and biographies streamed from her pen throughout the century. Last December her children’s book,

D J-Taylor

Trusty steeds and saucy varlets

Supposedly narrated by the scholar and Aristotelian Michael Scott to his pupil the future Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, sometime in the early 13th century, Charlemagne and Roland completes the trilogy begun by The Evening of the World and Arthur the King. Although framed as a picturesquely tongue-in-cheek accompaniment to a great deal of Carolingian history, it also doubles up — and far more amusingly — as a highly sophisticated commentary on the whole idea of how one sets about writing an historical novel. The battlefield on which most purists of the genre take their stand lies on the plain of idiom. All very well cramming in casket-loads of period

Friday

The Spectator

Football’s back

The football season kicks off tomorrow and with England so far on the back foot in the cricket that they’re in danger of stepping on their stumps, it will be a welcome distraction. For what it’s worth, here are a few predictions—do leave yours in the comments. Manchester United will play fantastic football but won’t win the title. Across the road, City will start poorly but end up doing better under Sven Goran Eriksson than anyone is expecting and finish in the top half. Roy Keane’s Sunderland will, and as Newcastle fan this pains me to write, have a good season and finish in the top 7. Liverpool’s Marcus Babel

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ignoring our debt to the Iraqi interpreters

I would have thought that the idea of granting asylum to those Iraqis who have served as interpreters for British troops would be fairly uncontroversial. But Neil Clark has issued a ferocious broadside against it today on Comment is Free, saying “let’s do all we can to keep self-centred mercenaries who betrayed their fellow countrymen and women for financial gain out of Britain.” What’s particularly striking, or one might say sickening, about Clark’s arguments is that he is under no illusions about what will happen to these people once the British leave. He writes, “History tells us that down through history, Quislings have – surprise, surprise – not been well

The Spectator

Ashley’s Ashes

Simon Barnes has a lovely tribute to the retiring England spinner Ashley Giles in this morning’s Times. Giles had a bit of a rough press as he was nearly always used in purely negative ways by his captain. While he irritated the purists as he wasn’t a great spinner of the ball. But, as Barnes, points out England wouldn’t have won the Ashes in 2005 without him. Few small innings have been as important as Giles’s at Trent Bridge in 2005. England were collapsing chasing a mere 129 to win. The Australians had opened up every old English wound and looked to set to snatch the unlikeliest of victories and

The Spectator

A healthy crunch

It seems the silly season is extending to financial markets. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation about how the credit crunch is supposed to be such a disaster for the companies quoted in London and New York – yes, its bad news for American homeowners and a few of the more speculative private equity deals. But we need these credit squeezes to make sure we don’t repeat the mistake of Asia in 1998 and have asset prices pumped up to ridiculous levels by cheap debt. Isn’t this the kind of weeding we need in a healthy stock market? And as Lombard Street research powerfully argues here stock markets

Thursday

Sarah Standing

The security charade

Going to Calais from Dover this morning on the Eurotunnel was a master class in the ineptitude and pointlessness of security. As my car approached Passport Control I handed over my passport. My girlfriend was talking on her mobile whilst rummaging in her handbag and my 17 year old daughter was sleeping like a corpse in the back seat. After a cursory glance at my passport we were waved through. I honestly don’t think the officer on duty even noticed there was someone in the back-seat. My girlfriend still hadn’t found her passport by the time we drove the car onto the train. Every carriage is festooned with posters of

The Spectator

What Bush almost said about Iraq

George W. Bush’s speech in May 2003 declaring major combat operations in Iraq over while a banner behind him proclaimed “mission accomplished” was, with the benefit of hindsight, unfortunate at best. (Even at the time it was clear that the fighter pilot-style entrance was a little excessive.) But Bush’s words could have been so much worse. Apparently, his chief speechwriter had drafted the following for him: “The sirens of Baghdad are quiet. The desert has returned to silence. The Battle of Iraq is over, and the United States and our allies have prevailed.” One dreads to think how these words would have been hung round Bush, and every other Iraq

The Spectator

Are diversity and solidarity compatible?

Robert Putnam’s new work on diversity is sure to set the cat amongst the pigeons. The Boston Globe summarises the findings of The Bowling Alone author thus: “the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings.” This research bolsters the argument that David Goodhart made a few years back about the tensions between ever-growing diversity and the welfare state. But I suspect that diversity is not actually at the root of

The Spectator

Look who’s coming to dinner

The Bush clan will be gathering in their New England retreat this weekend and they will be joined, as Irwin Stelzer hinted they would be, by Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also holidaying in New England. Sarkozy is pulling off the opposite trick to Gordon Brown. While Brown has distanced himself stylistically from Bush but not substantively, Sarkozy is playing buddy buddy without changing anything other than the atmospherics of French policy towards America. Sarkozy has carried this off with even more élan than Brown. It is amazing to find the same people who used to think that France was a dirty word now praising its president and holding him up as

The Spectator

The Iranians in Iraq

Do watch the opening segment from yesterday’s edition of Newsnight on what the Iranians are up to in southern Iraq. It gives you a very good idea of what the Iranian game plan is and how they plan to benefit from a British withdrawal. Even if Newsnight did rather spoil it by then having John Bolton debate Denis Kucinich to give us the US point of view, which is a little bit like having Bill Cash and John McDonnell square off on British politics–entertaining but not particulalry enlightening.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hold The Jaws Remake

It is safe to go back in the water in Cornwall. It turns out that the the great white shark that was supposedly seen off Newquay was actually photographed in South Africa by a Cornish nightclub bouncer who sent the photos into the papers claiming he had snapped them off the Cornish coast as a bit of a laugh.