Society

Saturday

Stephen Vines

An avalanche waiting to happen

Waiting for the bursting of the Chinese share bubble is like waiting for an avalanche. You can hear the rumbling but you have no idea when and where it will strike. Among the most bemused of those waiting to find out are the Chinese authorities — torn between pride in the prowess of their markets and lack of experience in the way they operate. Last week the government made a tentative attempt to cool the markets by bumping up stamp duty on share deals and there was an immediate tumble in prices, followed by an upward blip and this week a more severe decline. Who knows where the market will

The Spectator

Vlad the Blackmailer

‘We will have to get new targets in Europe,’ Vladimir Putin said in an interview last week. ‘Which weapons will be used …ballistic missiles, cruise missiles or some completely new systems — that’s a technical matter.’ The apparent purpose of this outburst was geopolitical blackmail. Ostensibly at least, the Russian President was warning George W. Bush of terrible consequences should the US pursue its plan to station anti-missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. Not quite Khrushchev banging his shoe, but the closest that Mr Putin has come to such tactics. Speaking in advance of the G8 summit in Germany, President Bush parried with an attack on Mr

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Hatred of the rich is back in fashion

Ross Clark says that the anti-globalisation rioters protesting at the G8 summit in Germany and Labour’s deputy leadership contenders are part of a new and dangerous trend towards wealth-bashing One of the little-remarked side effects of 9/11 was the eclipse of the anti-globalisation movement. It is not easy to remember that in the summer of 2001, the year in which protestor Carlo Giuliani died during rioting at the G8 summit in Genoa, the growing venom of anti-capitalism protestors was seen as such a threat to society that, briefly, on the afternoon of 11 September commentators on the live radio and television coverage discussed the possibility that the attacks could have

Irwin Stelzer

Go west to discover the true America

‘Go West, young man, go West,’ newspaper editor Horace Greeley advised ambitious 19th-century Americans as the nation pursued its Manifest Destiny. Well, it might have been Greeley, or perhaps John Babson Lane Soule, editor of the Terre Haute (Indiana) Daily Express. No matter the author: the advice is as applicable today as it was 150 years ago — and not only for young men. After a stint in the rancorous atmosphere of our nation’s capital, where resurgent Democrats are out to prove that another surge, this one in Iraq, is doomed to failure, I headed west on a business trip. America’s Manifest Destiny, of course, has already been fulfilled. We

Andrei Navozov

Farewell to clubland

Palermo In the disheartening post a friend has brought to the tranquillity of Sicily from the wilds of London I see that my name has been placed on the Front Morning Room mantelpiece, in accordance with Rule 15 of our Club, as my annual subscription has not been settled. Yet paying it would mean remaining in the Club. When I first asked to become a member of Brooks’s, I did so at the insistence of my wife, who had given me to understand that joining an historic St James’s club and obtaining British citizenship were the displays of enterprise and fidelity she would require of a slothful and errant husband.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

You get the Olympic logo you deserve

‘We’re fearless. We challenge everything, especially ourselves. We seek the truth relentlessly. We believe in we not me. And we mean it.’Wolff-Olins mission statement There’s been quite a fuss about the official new logo for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. People are aghast at the fact that it is a) hideous and b) cost £400,000. A child, a blind man, an ape let loose with a paintbrush could all have done better, the argument goes. Well yes, of course. The jarring amalgamation of irregular shapes does indeed bring to mind the sort of graffiti one finds on walls near a home for the educationally sub-normal — and there is

Lucy Vickery

Romance rekindled

As a teenager I devoured, in private and with a tinge of shame, my local library’s entire collection of Mills & Boon, so it was a relief to discover that, according to a recent survey conducted on behalf of the Costa Book Awards, 85 per cent of us have a guilty-secret author whose work we read avidly but never in public. Perhaps there are some closet Jilly Cooper fans out there; some of you made a mightily convincing stab at taking off the queen of the racy romp. I liked Tom Durrheim’s Violet Elizabeth swooning over William’s ‘hard magnetism: the square shoulders, the tousled hair, the glittering eyes that twinkled

Frank Keating

Ghost-busted

I was sorry to miss last week’s ghostbusting gig at the Hay-on-Wye festival when David Beckham’s surrogate-scribbler, actor-writer Tom Watt, joined two mates of mine, Paul Hayward (Sir Bobby Robson, Michael Owen) and Peter Burden (novelist-amanuensis of horseracing’s Francome and Pitman, and vet-thesps Hemmings and Phillips). Ghostwriting has a long literary history, but suddenly there’s a superabundant blight of it on the back pages; in my days on the desk at least we employed the strapline courtesy that the star performer ‘was talking to’ such and such a hack. No longer. Added insult to the reader these days is an uncertainty about who actually writes their own stuff. In fact,

Friday

Matthew Dancona

No technicolour language, please

Thought for the weekend: what if the racist Tourette syndrome rampaging through the nation’s reality shows hits Lewis, Keith or Lee tomorrow night as they battle it out to decide who will play Joseph? Let us hope that the unbelievably camp trio do not follow the lead of the expelled Big Brother housemate, Emily, and use the N-word or any other banned term. This really should be Joseph and the Amazing Multi-Cultural Dreamcoat.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sunday rules

I’ve been following with fascination the still-ongoing spat between Iain Dale and Sunday journalists: he suggests they wrote up a story Gordon Brown planted on the condition that no opposition spokesmen was quoted. He raises a reasonable question: why would a responsible journalist not go to the Tories or LibDems for comment?  One answer: you run the risk of the opposition parties telling the world about your story. Say a Sunday newspaper journalist gets (or is given) a story on Saturday morning. He thinks two other papers have it, but no matter: it will be fresh to his readers on Sunday morning. If this journalist asks the Tories for comment, they

The Spectator

Why are we all so fascinated by Paris Hilton?

It is easy to denounce the media for the amount of attention that they devote to Paris Hilton’s antics, to rail against the cult of celebrity and the like. But what this doesn’t explain is why people who couldn’t pick a d-lister out of a Heat line-up and normally don’t give two hoots about celebrity culture are so intrigued by her. Euegene Robinson comes close to explaining this anomaly in his Washington Post column today: “I don’t go out of my way to follow the latest twists and turns in Paris Hilton’s life. I don’t feel as if I know her or even want to know her. I can’t work up

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How big a deal is the climate deal?

Not very. As Matt pointed out the other day, anything like this that doesn’t mandate binding cuts is just hot air. The big winner from the failure to agree a deal: Al Gore. He gets to denounce world leaders for their passivity at his concerts and this inaction preserves one of the essential rationales for him jumping into the presidential race.

The Spectator

Big Brother’s standards

A truculent, argumentative blonde drama student called Emily has just been kicked off Big Brother for saying to the even more truculent and argumentative black WAG wannabe Charley – as they danced – “Are you pushing it out, you n***er?” Emily protests that it was a joke, Charley – who has been known to use it of herself – was unoffended, and it wasn’t even broadcast, but – fearful of Ofcom and the cops – the big girls’ blouses of Channel 4 panicked and Emily was evicted.  There were, of course, no rebukes after seven young women tried to debag the solitary male contestant in an excess of what he

Wednesday

The Spectator

Is it our patriotic duty to support Estonia tonight?

If you think that England will never win a major trophy under Steve McClaren, and everyone pretty much accepts this, then shouldn’t we all be hoping England lose tonight? An England defeat would see the manager out of a job. But then again knowing the FA they’d probably find someone even worse to replace him and the thought of Sam Allardyce as England manager is enough to make one nostalgic for McClaren. Then again as a Newcastle fan, I can see one major upside to the appointment.

The Spectator

Spinning down the Tube

The other morning I came into work after one of those awful tube journeys that put you in the foulest of tempers. So it didn’t improve my mood to see a staged picture of Gordon travelling on a pleasantly full Tube train staring out at me from the papers. The Chancellor had, conveninently, found a Tube carriage in which it was perfectly possible to sit down and do some work. Iain Dale—who is a real must read, he broke the Coulson story the other day—has the scoop on just how cynical the whole thing was. One of the ‘passengers’ quoted in a news story about Brown’s trip is actually chair

The Spectator

Channel 4’s crass sensationalism

My first job was working for Index on Censorship, so I instinctively recoil from prior restraint of the media. Nonetheless, there is a difference between censorship and humane editing, and the defence of free speech ultimately depends upon society understanding the distinction. I can see absolutely no merit in Channel 4 broadcasting the photographs of the crash scene in tonight’s documentary about the death of Diana. True, the programme-makers are not showing the infamous paparazzi pictures of the dying princess herself. But – in exercising this minimal discretion  – they are seeking to have their sensationalist cake and eat it. I imagine that they are privately thrilled by the row,

Sarah Standing

True Brits don’t need a designated Britain day

I understand Labour wants to introduce another Bank Holiday: British Day. Having spent the last decade systematically destroying all that was distinctively British and replacing treasured traditions with new-fangled politically-correct, all-embracing, multi-cultural and downright petty rituals under the guise of taking this country forward into the 21st century we are now left with a legacy of a fractured society. We used to celebrate being British just because we were proud of our heritage. We didn’t require a designated day to wave flags and put up banners. We were just proud of the many institutions that made Britain great: our regiments, our naval capabilities, our parliament, our legal system, our fox-hunting,