Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Should Scots rule England?

The interests of Englishmen are not threatened with impunity: and the danger of molesting them does not disclose itself till the threat has been uttered, and their enmity has been irrevocably incurred. They have a habit of sleeping up to the very moment of danger, which is equally embarrassing to their champions and their assailants. So wrote Lord Salisbury in 1873. He was echoed a century later by Enoch Powell, who observed that one of the ‘peculiar faults’ of the English was their ‘strange passivity in the face of danger or absurdity or provocation’. The question which ought now to be troubling Tony Blair, but almost certainly isn’t, is whether

Sarah Walden

Shared wit of Whistler and Wilde

Oscar’s play (I was there on Saturday) strikes me as a mixture that will run…though infantine to my sense…There is so much drollery – that is, ‘cheeky’ paradoxical wit of dialogue, and the pit and the gallery are so pleased at finding themselves clever enough to ‘catch on’ to four or five of the ingenious – too ingenious – mots in the dozen, that it makes them feel quite decadent and raffiné …The ‘impudent’ speech at the end was simply inevitable mechanical Oscar – I mean the usual trick of saying the unusual… How about that for a piece of lese-majesty. Few would dare write it about St Oscar today,

Leo McKinstry

Regions of the damned

Whether we like it or not, says Leo McKinstry, regional government is already here – and it is expensive, absurd and undemocratic Expanding bureaucracy is the hallmark of the government. Since the 1997 election, there has been a deluge of expensive new bodies, from the Scottish Parliament to the General Teaching Council. Thanks to Labour, Britain is awash with publicly funded apparatchiks and well-heeled paper-shufflers. We are drowning in action plans, strategy documents, task forces, co-ordination units, forums, commissions, programmes, tsars and mayors. But perhaps the most wasteful, offensive – and ultimately sinister – aspect of Labour’s mania for organisational growth appears not at Westminster, but at a regional level.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Banned Wagon | 12 July 2003

What would it take for the Guardian to argue that mineworkers are a baleful influence on otherwise peaceful rural peoples, and that trees and flowers are more important than well-paid jobs down the pit? The answer is when the mining jobs in question are in Madagascar. The paper has joined the environmental groups campaigning against a plan by Rio Tinto Zinc to mine for ilmenite, a mineral used to produce titanium oxide, used extensively in the paint and plastics industry. ‘In an age where ethical investment has become common, the proposal seems to be a throwback to Africa’s plunder by grasping Europeans and greedy multinationals,’ thundered the Guardian. ‘Life will

Clyde Prestowitz

Like father, like son?

For a moment in early May, American neoconservatives thought they had died and gone to heaven, so much did Bahgdad seem to them to resemble paradise. Their vision of an America that would shed its paper-tiger hesitation and boldly use its overwhelming military power to crush tyrannical regimes and reshape the world for decades to come by establishing American-style democracies in their place seemed well on its way to realisation. As the months have passed since then, however, the whole project is increasingly foundering on a very large rock – the apparent absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. In the United States, as in the United Kingdom,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Hail, Galloway!

I spent last weekend trying to become a revolutionary. In early July the sunny avenues of Bloomsbury fill up with Marxists at their annual conference. The jamboree lasts a week (it’s still going on right now) and there are lectures on a range of subjects from ‘The Roots of Gay Oppression’ to ‘Luk•cs and Class Consciousness’ and ‘The Meiji Restoration: Japan’s revolution from above’. I passed a useful morning in a lecture hall attending a three-module course in political theory. I opened my eyes to historical materialism. I learnt with disgust about the oppression of the workers. I felt a thrilling revulsion at the vices of the ruling class. But

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

You don’t look Buddhist

There is a joke in the Jewish community about a typical Jewish mother who travels to a remote Buddhist temple in Nepal. Eventually granted an audience with the revered guru there, she says just three words: ‘Sheldon, come home.’ The first trickle of Jews began to convert to Buddhism about 50 years ago. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg was among them, and wrote, ‘Born in this world/ you got to suffer/ everything changes/ you got no soul.’ By the 1970s, there were enough Jewish Buddhists for Ginsberg’s guru, Chogyan Trungpa, to talk about forming the Oy Vey school of Meditation. Now Jewish Buddhists – or Jubus – are the largest

Rachel Royce

Girls just want to have funds

The government would like to outlaw pyramid selling. Why? Rachel Royce has joined Hearts, the girls-only investment scheme, and finds it good, clean – and profitable – fun I have a confession to make – but please don’t tell my boyfriend. I’ve made a somewhat high-risk investment. It will cost me £375, but for that I can expect a return of £6,000 – maybe. It’s a gamble – I know it’s a gamble – but I thought that amount of money could be laundered from the housekeeping, lost somewhere among the cornflakes and the chardonnay and bailiff demands for forgotten Blockbuster videos. The scheme I’ve invested in is known as

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 11 July 2003

Last week this column began publishing Alexander Demandt’s list of the 210 reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire (from Der Falls Rom, 1984). The list is now completed, and a conclusion drawn: ‘Lack of leadership, lack of male dignity, lack of military recruits, lack of orderly imperial succession, lack of qualified workers, lack of rainfall, lack of religiousness, lack of seriousness, large landed properties, lead-poisoning, lethargy, levelling (cultural), levelling (social), loss of army discipline, loss of authority, loss of energy, loss of instincts, loss of population, luxury. Malaria, marriages of convenience, mercenary system, mercury damage, militarism, monetary economy, monetary greed, money (shortage of), moral decline, moral idealism, moral

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 5 July 2003

I was just looking up malarkey when my husband called out in the tones of a man who has found a glass eye in his porridge. ‘Looks like yours,’ he said, fishing a bit of paper out of the first volume of Phineas Finn as if with tongs. He was not wrong, it had my writing on it, and I wish I had found the note before, when Sir Ned Sherrin wrote about morning meaning ‘afternoon’. For here in chapter four Trollope writes, ‘He called at Portman Square at about half-past two on the Sunday morning. Yes, – Lady Laura was in the drawing-room. The hall-porter admitted as much, but

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 5 July 2003

The government set out some pretty rum plans for homosexual partnerships, securing tax benefits and severance by ‘divorce’, in a paper called ‘Civil Partnership: A framework for the recognition of same-sex couples’. After a last-minute procedural concession by the government, the Commons voted by 362 to 154 for an outright ban on hunting. A High Court judge criticised the Health and Safety Executive for wasting public money by pursuing a £3 million prosecution, now dropped, of the Metropolitan Police for failing to warn policemen of the dangers of climbing on to roofs. The High Court upheld action by Oftel to reduce charges for telephoning from British Telecom to mobile telephone

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 5 July 2003

On Saturday, I shall be beside the Eiffel Tower, hoping to see David Millar win the Prologue of the centennial Tour de France. Until last year, I’d long followed the Tour at a distance, but never in person. Then I was asked to write a history of the race, and to cover it for the Daily Mail, subsequently transferring to the Financial Times on not quite Beckhamical terms. My reinvention as a sportswriter – FT columnist, Tour historian, not to say lecturer on sport in English history at the University of Texas – has surprised me as much as anyone, but very enjoyable it is. The Tour in particular is

The Spectator

Feedback | 5 July 2003

Comment on The defence of liberty (28/06/2003) It was disappointing to find The Spectator toeing the official pro-war line in this editorial, especially when even a periodical as supportive of the war as The Economist has issued withering criticism of the blundering incompetence of the occupation when such criticism was warranted. As someone who has opposed this war, and the general policy of pre-emption, I take no pleasure in the usually foreseeable setbacks and problems that are besetting American and British soldiers in Iraq. It is infuriating that those in government and the press who urged this course of action upon America and Britain seem to be the ones who

Taki

No soppiness, please

As Marshal Blucher spluttered to the Iron Duke at the conclusion of the Battle of Waterloo, ‘Quelle affaire!’ I am talking about my three wonderful weeks in England. The warnings about one’s health should not be on cigarette boxes but in London airports, hotels and restaurants –during the months of June and July, that is. Having slowed down on the booze, I was reluctant to return to the capital during the high season in case bad habits came back. Well, even without lotsa booze, London, I have to admit, is the place to be come summer. The Bagel is fun but people are either too stiff or too downmarket. They

Jeremy Clarke

Time to fight back

Right, that’s it. On the morning of the 87th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme I’m lying in bed listening to a news ‘update’ on our local commercial radio station. Last night, apparently, our latest batch of MPs voted, in an overwhelming fit of moronic vindictiveness, to ban all hunting with dogs, full stop. And if the Lords reject the Bill, it is likely to be railroaded through Parliament, apparently using something called the Parliament Act. I’m stunned. I really can’t believe it has finally come to this. Who are these fuckwits? (Am I missing something?) What do they want? If it’s an ideological class-war

Petronella Wyatt

Last of the ladies

Should this column be more frugal or less frugal? As an unelected column should it be allowed to ask someone else to squeeze its toothpaste tube? Should it be required to give an account of its expenditure, its private minicabs and the cost of refurbishing itself? If I have to read another word about Prince Charles, his money and what he does or does not do with it, I think I shall scream. I shall scream even louder if I have to read any more articles by commentators attacking him for having Michael Fawcett in the bathroom or complaining that he is a miser. I don’t know what moron at

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 5 July 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I have been giving a summer drinks party in my London garden each year for the past 20 years. It has become something of a fixture on the social calendar and I am loth to give it up, but now a ruthlessly frank friend has suggested that this year I move the party inside the house. She points out that none of us is getting any younger, and that the brightness of the early evening light is not flattering. She says that she is not alone in finding it painful to contemplate a garden full of contemporaries, many of whom were stunners in their prime, ‘all advanced

Tom Flynn

The sacred in secular societies

Those nations and cultural groups lobbying Western museums for the restitution of cultural property acquired during the colonial period are accustomed to having their requests denied on the grounds that modern museums should not be required to atone for historical contingencies. A recent declaration by a group of leading international museum directors phrased it like this: ‘The objects and monumental works that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones.’ In other words, that was then, this is now. This simple appeal to an unwritten statute of limitations on illicitly acquired material is about

Andrew Kenny

Black fascism

Cape Town Anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of South Africa should pay careful attention to a speech made by President Mbeki at an official funeral in the Eastern Cape on 22 June. Surrounded by powerful black leaders of the new, liberated South Africa, Mbeki gave a eulogy for the departed man and urged the nation to rally behind his dream and to carry on his work. The deceased was the leading black supporter of apartheid, Kaiser Matanzima, the former president of the Transkei ‘homeland’, Pretoria’s ultimate stooge in the days of white minority rule. The two key figures in the formation of ‘Grand Apartheid’ were Hendrik Verwoerd

Mark Steyn

Tomorrow he’ll be yesterday’s man

New Hampshire It’s always slightly discombobulating when someone you’ve known for years and always written off as a mediocrity with no talents suddenly leaps to phenomenal success. In my line of work, it’s usually some fellow hack whose first novel gets optioned by Miramax for Cameron Diaz. Or the guy I sat next to at a friend’s wedding who tried to sell me his shoes, and next time I landed in Britain he’d somehow become the nation’s most beloved bisexual gameshow host, Dale Winton. But right now it’s happening on a much larger scale to someone called Howard Dean. If you’ve never heard of him, don’t worry. You’ll soon be