Society

Saturday

Christopher Fildes

To make tax simple, low and compulsory, get at it with the heavy roller

It is all the fault of the fairy who came, uninvited, to Gordon Brown’s christening. Beside the scowling infant’s Moses basket, his godparents’ gifts of industry and ambition were assembled when this glittering creature approached him with a parcel of her own. ‘See, little man,’ she told him, ‘I’ve brought you the great gift of simplification.’ Then she curtsied, and presented it to him, upside down. After that, he grew up to be Chancellor and opened the parcel. Once in a generation, he announced, came the moment for a fundamental reform of the tax system. He set about it in his own way or, rather, in the fairy’s way. His

Paul Johnson

The ayatollah of atheism and Darwin’s altars

How long will Darwin continue to repose on his high but perilous pedestal? I am beginning to wonder. Few people doubt the principles of evolution. The question at issue is: are all evolutionary advances achieved exclusively by the process of natural selection? That is the position of the Darwinian fundamentalists, and they cling to their absolutist position with all the unyielding certitude with which Southern Baptists assert the literal truth of the Book of Genesis, or Wahabi Muslims proclaim the need for a universal jihad against ‘the Great Satan’. At a revivalist meeting of Darwinians two or three years ago, I heard the chairman, the fiction-writer Ian McEwan, call out,

The Spectator

Tolerating terror

‘My point to you is this,’ Tony Blair said of terrorists last month, ‘It’s time we stopped saying “OK, we abhor their methods but we kinda see something in their ideas or maybe they’ve got a sliver of an excuse or justification.” They’ve got no justification for it.’ The Prime Minister’s words must sound pretty hollow to the Hall family of Newchurch, Staffordshire, this week. The Halls have been driven to close their farm, which breeds guinea pigs for medical research, after a six-year sustained campaign of terror by animal rights extremists. Over that time they have been subjected to numerous death threats, a firebomb attack and hundreds of acts

Simon Heffer

Gunning for game-shooting

The first fortnight of the shooting season has not been as auspicious as it might have been. This is not just because the grouse themselves are in short supply. It is also because, having put on to the statute book a crass, pointless and probably unenforcable law against the killing of vermin with hounds, the animal rights fascists are now turning their attention to the killing of birds with guns. The RSPCA, which used to do good work in persuading children to be kind to furry and feathered beasts, and still does perform a valuable public service through its inspectorate in tackling the genuine and sickening incidences of cruelty to

Friday

Diary – 26 August 2005

By the time you read this, England and Australia will be playing at Trent Bridge, and the news may be good. Or bad. Channel 4 reported record viewing figures for the first three Ashes Tests. Barely countable millions, it seems, tuned in at all times of day (and night, for the highlights are invariably on in the small hours) to watch the two sides slug it out in the first real contests for years. But what, I would like to know, about the record numbers of people like me, who become so emotionally involved that they can’t bear to watch the Ashes? The barely countable millions so agonised by the

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 26 August 2005

These days the ability to understand and explain in public prints the aims of the people perceived as public enemies is likely to get you deported. So one wonders what our government would have made of that pillar of the Roman establishment Tacitus — consul, provincial governor and historian — who invented an extraordinarily sympathetic speech to put in the mouth of Calgacus, the Caledonian ‘terrorist’ who fought Agricola’s army somewhere in the mountains of Aberdeenshire in ad 83. Here is the first selection of extracts from it: ‘As often as I examine the reasons for this war and the crisis we now face, I am fully confident that the

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 20 August 2005

To Sir John Hall, Bt (not to be confused with the other Sir John Hall, Bt, the magician), I owe the most satisfying defining statement I have seen for a long time: ‘The chief use of vipers is for the making of treacle.’ Sir John did not write that sentence himself, for his subject was the Golden Syrup tin. The declaration about vipers came from the Natural History (1693) of Sir Thomas Blount, Bt, whose wife bore him five sons and nine daughters before he died, aged 47. I stumbled across that in following up something Sir John wrote about the ‘strong’ in the Golden Syrup motto having a subsidiary

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 20 August 2005

British Airways flights to and from London Heathrow were brought to a standstill for a day, and disrupted for days afterwards, by unofficial strikes by ground staff in sympathy with 700 staff sacked by a company supplying airline meals. Leaked documents showed that the Brazilian man shot dead at Stockwell in London by police seeking suicide-bombers had not vaulted over a barrier at the station, nor had he been wearing a baggy jacket. Mr Omar Bakri, a radical Islamic cleric who had left Britain after 20 years to visit his mother, he said, in Lebanon, was barred from returning by Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, who declared his presence

Robin Oakley

A feeling in your bones

Racing at Newbury on Stan James Day was more like yachting, once defined as standing in a gale tearing up £20 notes. Nor did it help when the heavens opened that my umbrella was in the stands 200 yards away and that, thanks to a back injury, I could only hobble at the pace of an asthmatic turtle. It just wasn’t my day. On the way from Kennington to Paddington I had been foolish enough to question the sainted Mrs Oakley’s navigational skills and only narrowly escaped being turned to stone in the froideur which followed. I had mistimed my trains and was bound to miss the first race anyway,

Frank Keating

Trent warfare

The Ashes are burning bright all right. A lot of cricket still to play. Two Tests remaining — the fourth begins at Nottingham on Thursday, and how might things stand as they go for the grandest of finales at Kennington on 8 September? The series has easily outstripped its ballyhoo billing, every dramatic switch and swash pinning back the ears of the nation. ‘What’s the score?’ is the ubiquitous question. In every high street you see huddles of the citizenry pausing on pavements, fretfully to peer through the plateglass shopfronts of premises which sell television sets. A month ago the Australian captain, with disdainful sauce, reckoned that only a solitary

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 20 August 2005

Dear Mary… Q. My wife and I have had a number of people to stay at our seaside house this summer. We are writers and since most of our friends are what would be called ‘arty types’ we are usually a very relaxed party. Nevertheless I still feel ill at ease when hosting breakfast in pyjamas, which is usually the case, because of the insecure aperture of the traditional pyjama trouser. Should one inadvertently give offence, what is the correct apology? How do other men manage to keep the aperture from gaping when in mixed company? C.B., Aldeburgh, Suffolk A. It is almost impossible for a pyjama-wearer to avoid giving

The Spectator

Feedback | 20 August 2005

Comments on Don’t blame religion by Theo Hobson 15/08/05 It is not the belief in an afterlife that is the problem, it is the absolute belief in God, the Fuhrer or the working class or whatever else. Once you have that belief it is a short step to being willing to kill those who are not part of the group. George Bush’s ‘if you are not with us you are against us’ attitude is the basis of all religious violence and oppression through the ages. The current spate of Islamic violence is not an odd aberration. This is what the religious do, and have done, for thousands of years. Jeff

Jaspistos

Inst

In Competition No. 2405 you were invited to write a poem in praise or dispraise of the month of August. ‘The English winter — ending in July,/ To recommence in August,’ grumbled Byron when he was particularly fed up with the island. On the other hand Day Lewis wrote a delightful poem, ‘A Windy Day in August’: Dust leaps up, apples thud down,The river’s caught between a smile and a frown… ‘August for the people and their favourite islands’ — today I’m leaving for Andros, which I hope will not prove a people’s favourite. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, barring Alanna Blake, who has £30. Though August is

Mark Glazebrook

Northern lights

The Edinburgh Festival started in 1947 as essentially a music festival, the brainchild of Glyndebourne’s John Christie. The capital was soon turned into a magnet for fringe theatre and other events. It is said that dour natives fearing success left town in a hurry in order to escape the culture-tourist influx. Meanwhile public and private galleries rose to the occasion with special exhibitions, despite the fact that the visual arts have never been part of the official International Festival. Douglas Cooper’s threat to resign his curatorship of a major 1960s Arts Council Delacroix show because some loans had been refused was a sign, among other things, that standards were of

Paul Johnson

Wittgenstein and the fatal propensity of politicians to lie

Lying is a terrible thing in any circumstances. When politicians and governments lie, it is a sin against society as a whole, against justice and civilisation. In Ray Monk’s admirable life of Wittgenstein, I learn that at the age of eight he asked himself the question: ‘Why should one tell the truth, if it’s to one’s advantage to tell a lie?’ This was the first time he posed a philosophical query. His answer was a kind of Kantian categorical imperative: ‘One must be truthful, and that is the end of the matter. The “Why?” is inappropriate and cannot be answered.’ He concluded, quite young, that one had an inviolable duty

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor

A plague on the new Puritans Tories beware! Roundheads are infiltrating the party of the Cavaliers. The six new MPs (Letters, 13 August) who issued a tirade against contemporary decadence claim to be ‘unencumbered by the political baggage of the past’. They are not, for they sing an old song. Their proposed new moral order is full of the dire warnings and prohibitions dear to the heart of Cromwell and his Puritans. Nothing less than a return to the bleak years of the ‘Rule of the Saints’ is proposed. New moral gendarmeries succeeded the Puritans, all self-appointed moral elites who assumed the right to tell others what to do, read

The Spectator

A necessary betrayal

Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, deserves praise for forcing the settlers in Gaza off the land and out of the homes that he encouraged them to settle and to build over 35 years ago. As he admitted in his televised address to Israel on Monday evening, he ‘hoped we could forever hold on’ to the settlements in Gaza — and he certainly encouraged the unfortunate settlers he sent there to share his hope. Until very recently, Mr Sharon was one of the leading advocates of the policy of settling Jews in the areas occupied by Israel after its victory over its Arab neighbours in the 1967 Six Day

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A land of puritans, snobs and socialists

Martin Vander Weyer on the British idea that businessmen are by nature greedy, heartless, incompetent or dishonest — or all four Our local arts festival this summer included a community opera with a large cast of children and teenagers, playing to a capacity audience of their families and friends. The show was so full of joy and energy that I came out with tears in my eyes — but also a feeling of unease. The problem was ideological: Maggio’s Magic — book and lyrics by Peter Spafford — was a theatrical triumph, but it was also a vivid parable of the perceived evils of capitalism, a reinforcement in all those

Douglas Davis

United in hate

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Stranger still when the odd couple are fundamentalist Islam and the secular Left. The evolving Black–Red alliance is growing in France, Germany and Belgium. But, based on the successful British model, it is now going global to declare war on the war on terror. No fewer than three international conferences have been convened in Cairo, presided over by the former president of Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella, under the auspices of the International Campaign Against US and Zionist Occupations. One outcome is ‘The Cairo Declaration Against US Hegemony, War on Iraq and Solidarity with Palestine.’ British signatories included Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn and, of course, the indefatigable

Friday

Barbara Amiel

Diary – 19 August 2005

I’ve taken to calling myself Lady Black of No Fixed Address while I spend the summer betwixt and between houses. Floating happily in a semi-weightless state, I stay in touch wherever I am by watching BBC World News. The BBC addiction to anti-Americanism is getting more acute and can only end in delirium tremens. Every second story has a negative take on America. Last week the ratio seemed higher. Every 20 minutes an anonymous voice promoted the upcoming news stories to the accompaniment of agitated music. Cue announcer: ‘Sixty years after the US dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, how do you feel about that attack?’ Cut to faces of