Society

Thursday

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.

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Barry Bonds Passes Hank Aaron

Even political bloggers and policy wonkers seem to feel the need to write something about Barry Lamar Bonds. Matt Yglesias says he must be the best ever; Brian Beutler – being a self-respecting Dodgers fan – must and does decline to endorse that opinion; Megan McArdle is infuriatingly non-commital while Dan Drezner reminds one that Tom Glavine should receive more respect for winning his 300th game (though of course the “wins” statistic is one of the most misleading and useless in all baseball; this is the only explanation for its continued existence) Clearly this is one of those situations that can only be judged by a foreigner. That being the

The Spectator

Obama hits Hillary over Iraq

The contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is entering a decisive phase. The first primary is now only five months away and Hillary retains a commanding national lead, even if things are closer in the early states. So Obama needs to start taking chunks out of Hillary’s numbers soon if he is not going to fade away. This exchange between the two front runners and Chris Dodd, another Senator running for president, at last night’s debate shows how the battle lines are being drawn. Note how hard Obama hits Hillary over her Iraq vote and the reaction of the crowd, albeit one from Obama’s home state of Illinois, when Hillary

The Spectator

The 2008 version of the Olympic Spirit

A small, but telling, example of the nature of the regime that will be hosting the 2008 Olympics comes in James Fallows’s latest missive from China. “CNN International began its report talking about what is obviously the main deal-breaking threat to the Olympics: the air. The correspondent had gotten far enough into the story to say, “Some foreign athletes fear…” and then the screen went blank for the next two minutes or so.” Do also take a look at these fantastic photos that show just how bad the pollution in Beijing really is. It will be a wonder if they get through the games without the poor air quality disrupting

The Spectator

When discrimination is good

Thank God for the Act of Settlement (1701). It keeps us focused. In the past week newspapers have been focusing on poor Peter Phillips, tenth in line to the throne, who is engaged to Autumn Kelly, a Canadian Catholic. If she does not abandon her religion, he will have to renounce his right to succeed — or call the wedding off.  That’s the deal with the Act of Settlement — the Supreme Governor of the Church of England may not be married to a Roman Catholic — and RCs are said to be very cross. In the words of the Times’s excitable Ruth Gledhill, the Act ‘has for centuries been

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What’s wrong with the right

Over at Conservative Home, Peter Franklin has written a hard-hitting piece setting out some ‘home truths for the right.’ He accuses various bits of it of being self-indulgent, hypocritical and living in the past amongst other things. I wouldn’t agree with everything he says, but it is well worth a read. 

The Spectator

How emotional should politicians get?

Drew Westen, the super smart American political scientist who wrote for The Spectator a few weeks back, has extracts of his new book on why leaders need to connect on an emotional as well as intellectual level in G2 today. Westen makes a good case; there’s no doubt that much of the Republicans’ electoral success since 1968 can be chalked up to their superior ability to connect with voters on a gut level. But Westen goes too far when he suggests that Gore would have stood a better chance of being elected president if he had hit back during the 2000 debates when Bush questioned his honesty and called Bush

Tuesday

The Spectator

A Golden Opportunity for the GOP

A ballot initiative in California could have more impact on the 2008 presidential race than any of the back and forth that is going on between the candidates at present. Currently California gives all its presidential votes—and it has more of them than any other state, 55 of the 270 you needs to be elected president—to which ever candidate gets the most votes. This is good news for the Democrats as California is a solidly blue state. However, this ballot initiative would dish out California’s voters by Congressional district—giving the Republicans around 20 or so of its electoral votes, that’s equivalent to winning a state like Pennsylvania, Illinois or Ohio.

The Spectator

Why England industrialised first

Was the industrial revolution a product of downward social mobility? That’s the argument of a forthcoming book by the American historian Gregory Clark. His thesis is that as the rich had more children that survived than the poor, the population of England was by 1800 overwhelmingly made up of the descendants of the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages and that as the children of the rich spread throughout society so did the attitudes and values that make people wealthy. As he puts it, “Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving”. Clark posits that this

The Spectator

The state of Basra

The Washington Post this morning has a sobering account of the situation on the ground in Basra. The paper reveals that the US government has expressed concerns about the impact of the British pull back on the rest of Iraq at the highest levels to the British. While a senior US intelligence official tells the Post, “The British have basically been defeated in the south”.  All of which makes the government’s desicion to refuse to facilitate asylum applications from 91 Iraqi interpreaters who have worked with British forces in Basra all the more shocking. The Times is surely right that these brave folk should be welcomed to this country with open

Monday

The Spectator

Things you shouldn’t reveal on Facebook

If you’re the daughter of a presidential candidate who already has political problems because of his complicated family life it doesn’t help if you reveals on your Facebook page that your supporting another candidate. The only silver lining for Rudy Giuliani is that his Harvard undergrad daughter Caroline (pictured with her mother and Rudy’s second wife) is backing Barack Obama and not another Republican.  Hat Tip: Ben Smith

The Spectator

Another Rumsfeld blunder

Abu Ghraib was a shameful episode and Don Rumsfeld, true to obstinate form, never seemed to grasp quite how much damage it had done America. But what is equally revealing is the careless way that Rumsfeld disclosed the name of the whistle blower, Joe Darby. Dabry recounted the story in the Sunday Times: “Five weeks later I was sitting in the dining facility in Camp Anaconda in Iraq when a press conference came on that was the live feed from the congregational hearings about Abu Ghraib. There was an announcement that secretary Rumsfeld was thanking me for turning in the photos and allowing the investigation to go forward – thanking me by

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Miles off

‘Food miles’ is one of the new eco buzz phrases and makes people think that buying local food is inherently better for the environment. But an op-ed in the New York Times today flags up some new research that shows this is not the case when you consider all the energy used in producing the food not just the amount of CO2 emitted while transporting it. Here’s the key point about what the researchers discovered: “they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide

Sunday

The Spectator

America looks for a first spouse

One of the most notable features of the 2008 presidential race is the amount of attention being lavished on the spouses of the candidates. Just today we have a New York Times interview in which Judith Giuliani responds to a scathing Vanity Fair profile of her and pieces in the Washington Post and Newsweek looking at the role of Fred Thompson’s wife Jeri (pictured) in his campaign. You can come up with lots of reasons for all this interest in the other halves of the candidates. Obviously, there’s the Bill factor with the fascination with him and the Clinton marriage spilling over onto the other candidates and their wives. There’s

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 4 August 2007

Sir: Graham Lord (‘Is it a tough ask to speak proper English?’, 28 July) gives a clue to the increase in use of bad English when he points out that recent immigrants from eastern Europe speak our language much better than many of our own young people do. English lessons Sir: Graham Lord (‘Is it a tough ask to speak proper English?’, 28 July) gives a clue to the increase in use of bad English when he points out that recent immigrants from eastern Europe speak our language much better than many of our own young people do. The reason is that the incomers have been taught by people who