Society

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Black is best

Here’s something to be cheerful about. At an English Premiership football match last year, the fans of one London club were heard to be singing the following jolly refrain: ‘We all agree, our coons are better than your coons.’ We should be glad, because this little chanson marks what we might call a paradigm shift in the perceptions and expectations of a certain tranche of educationally subnormal white-trash football supporters. Whereas, some years ago, black players were a rarity to be derided by not-that-small-a-minority of the crowd whenever they touched the ball, they are now happily prominent in pretty much every club throughout every league in England. The dribbling, shell-suited

Paul Robinson

A dodgy constitution

I once heard of an Ivy League professor who had written 50 constitutions. All of them collapsed, including the one for the college boat club. If that gentleman is not now advising the Convention on the Future of Europe, someone very like him surely is. On the opening day of the convention in March 2002, its president, ValZry Giscard d’Estaing, bravely compared the congress to the Philadelphia Convention, which wrote the US constitution in 1787. One might equally make a comparison with the conferences which created the Dominion of Canada. Unlike the constitutions of the Ivy League professor, the products of those meetings have stood the test of time. So,

Mark Steyn

Let’s quit the UN

New Hampshire Earlier this week, on NBC’s Today Show, Katie Couric, America’s favourite wake-up gal, saluted the fallen heroes of the Columbia: ‘They were an airborne United Nations – men, women, an African-American, an Indian woman, an Israeli….’ Steady on, Katie. They were six Americans plus an Israeli. And, if they had been an ‘airborne United Nations’, for one thing the Zionist usurper wouldn’t have been on board: the UN is divided into regional voting blocs and, Israel being in a region comprised almost entirely of its enemies, it gets frosted out from the organisation’s corridors of power; no country gets so little out of its UN membership. Say what

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Don’t feel sorry for the City

Here are four connected facts. First, on Monday, Standard Life – one of Britain’s most respected investment institutions – cut the value of its payouts to 2.3 million pension savers by 15 per cent. Second, some 30,000 people have lost their jobs in the City of London this winter – including Alex, the cartoon archetype invented by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor, who was given the heave-ho by ‘Megabank’ a couple of weeks ago. Third, also on Monday, Gordon Brown gave a rambling speech to the Social Market Foundation in praise of his own economic policies, in the midst of which he made a single, brief reference to investors, claiming

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 1 February 2003

Dear Mary… Q. The story of Red Chris in last week’s issue brings to mind another tricky issue about house parties, and that is the subject of bringing presents. As a host who occasionally entertains in the country, I do not expect guests to arrive with a gift but am nevertheless delighted to receive one if they do. My pleasure does not, however, extend to receiving second-hand goods. A good friend of mine, the owner of a hilltop estate in Wiltshire and a schloss in Austria, recently came to stay with his wife and four children, and presented me with a box containing a small bar of soap and three

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 1 February 2003

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, decided to fly to Camp David for talks with President George Bush of the United States about the war against Iraq. Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said: ‘The Iraqi regime is responding to resolution 1441 not with active co-operation but with a consistent pattern of concealment and deceit.’ The Financial Times-Stock Exchange index of the top 100 companies fell on 11 consecutive days of trading to its lowest for seven years, losing 49.8 per cent of its value at the peak reached on 30 December 1999. The banking group Cazenove postponed plans to float on the London Stock Exchange. The Fire Brigades Union

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary – 1 February 2003

I was brought up to pay little attention to vegetables, apart from beetroot, which was served every day, and carrots, of which we had two each on a Sunday, on the grounds that they enabled Spitfire pilots to see in the dark. And then last week I arranged to meet a friend in the bar of the Waldorf Hotel, and while waiting ordered a vodka-and-lime, no ice. After some time had passed, a small vase arrived with an enormous stalk of celery stuck in the middle and a radish floating alongside. Up until this moment, I had been feeling fairly gloomy – whether we are content or in a disturbed

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 1 February 2003

What is it in our interests to do about immigration? The ancient Athenians came up with an interesting answer. The reason for Athens’ control of immigrants (metoikoi, ‘those who change their habitation’, metics) was suspicion of aliens (war being endemic in the ancient world) and paranoia about the purity of their own citizenship. Any non-Athenian who wanted to take up residence in Athens, temporary or permanent, had to fulfil certain conditions. First, they registered with the state authority; then they registered with the local authority (the ‘deme’, roughly ‘parish’) where they were living. These registers were kept for administrative purposes. They also had to pay a unique monthly tax, and

Hermine Demoriane

Defying vertigo and the void

It is lucky for us common mortals that Philippe Petit is a tightrope-walker who can write. Blondin, the funambule of Niagara Falls (1859), left nothing but interviews, so that we know very little about his character. Like Philippe, he forsook his native France following success in the US but, instead of staying on, moved to London for an engagement at the newly built Crystal Palace. He remained here until his death in 1897 and is buried in Kensal Green cemetery. There was no equivalent of the Crystal Palace to be found the summer of 1973, when Philippe Petit came over to London at my request. The Department of the Environment

Sylvana Tomaselli

The high price of civil security

Hobbes is one of the very greatest political philosophers of all times, Noel Malcolm one of his most highly esteemed contemporary interpreters. Many have written on Hobbes, but few have had the wealth and depth of historical knowledge, the linguistic and bibliographical skills and, most significantly, the philosophical rigorousness which Malcolm deploys consistently in Aspects of Hobbes, a collection of 14 impressive, and often also delightful, scholarly papers. Hobbes’s best known work Leviathan is a masterpiece of English prose. Well worth reading for that reason alone, it is especially important for those who are least inclined to agree with it. Hobbes thought that while some, indeed possibly most, individuals might

Stephen Glover

Is it my imagination, or is the Sun getting smuttier?

A couple of weeks ago I promised that this column would keep a watchful eye on Rebekah Wade, the new editor of the Sun. As is so often the case, the first piece of evidence is right before our eyes, in the pages of Who’s Who. But before we get on to that, let me say something about what Rebekah has done to the Sun. She has certainly livened it up – many would say coarsened it. The substantials may not have changed, but she has turned a lot of knobs and dials, and the overall effect is very different. Rebekah’s rumoured aversion to Page Three girls turns out to

Peter Oborne

If the Tories want to win the asylum debate, they must trust their own instincts

In the aftermath of September 11 we all instinctively felt that the world had utterly changed. In Britain at any rate that turned out not to be the case. After the initial shock, things carried on to some extent as before. But the return to normality was illusory and short-lived. September 11 indeed created new and frightening structures. In America they locked into place at once. But the new order took a long time indeed to cross the Atlantic. It finally did so in the first three or four weeks of this year. The Prime Minister set the tone, in his bleak New Year address. The wrapping-up of terror networks

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Loony meets butcher

Now that Dr Blix has done his work, how will Saddam Hussein cope with the latest threat from the West to both his political stability and his sanity? It seems that, as a softening-up exercise before vaporising Baghdad with expensive ordnance, we have begun to export British lunatics to Iraq. And, because this is total war; because we are seriously angry with Saddam, it is not quite enough that we should dispatch George Galloway. We have gone further. We have thought the unthinkable. We have pushed the envelope. This week, cruelly, we have deployed our Weapon of Mash Deshtruction. You can be assured that by teatime the Iraqi dictator will

Christopher Caldwell

The fruits of victory

Washington DC George W. Bush announced during his State of the Union message that America and its allies will disarm Iraq with or without the UN. If America, as appears increasingly likely, gets war, it will be thanks in large part to Tony Blair and Britain. But what will Tony Blair and Britain get thanks to America? A typical American would answer (a) that’s the wrong question, and (b) quite a lot. If Tony Blair is America’s poodle, then his yap is being heard. Britain stands higher in US estimation than at any time since 1945. Recent opinion polls yield results that could make an American question whether Britain was

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 25 January 2003

I have, I discover, had a letter on the kitchen table for many weeks. Its vintage is indicated by the plum juice which somehow found its way on to the lower part. It is from Mrs Olga Danes-Volkov, from Kent, and it is about cusha. Mrs Danes-Volkov has taken to calling to her two heifer calves (which must be grown-up by now) using this word because it is pretty and because she was prompted by a nursery rhyme in a Victorian book: Cushy cow bonny, let down your milk And I will give you a gown of silk; A gown of silk and a silver key If you will let

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 25 January 2003

Police raided the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park, long suspected to have terrorist links. Seven people were arrested and a stun gun and a CS gas canister were seized. The government dispatched 30,000 troops and 120 Challenger tanks to the Gulf in preparation for an invasion of Iraq, but insisted that war was not inevitable. Half of the soldiers have bought their own boots, a Ministry of Defence survey revealed, because they didn’t like the ones with which they had been issued. The Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, proposed to allow universities to charge their students up to £3,000 in tuition fees. Mr Clarke also announced that he wished

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Diary – 25 January 2003

I spent Tuesday evening watching Ashley, a 15-year-old blonde girl from Oklahoma, flirt with a British boy called PJ. ‘Wanna see some photos of me?’ asked Ashley. PJ grinned. ‘I think you’ll like them, they’re hot,’ said Ashley, and winked. A boy called Ghetto, whom neither of them had met before, interrupted the conversation. ‘Hello, sir,’ he began. ‘Does anybody want to buy a dildo?’ Kitty69 responded immediately: ‘Check out the action on my live teen webcam!’ The Yahoo chat room for teenagers is one of the oddest places I’ve ever been. Boys pick up girls within seconds of meeting, and retire to ‘private rooms’ to talk dirty. PJ and

Taki

All is not lost

Gstaad These are quiet days and nights here, the noisy mobile telephone brigades having left immediately after the New Year. It is a sign of the times, the mobile telephone, that is. One used to be able to tell where a person came from by their manners, their dress, even their looks. Not to mention their accent. No longer. Everything is so dumbed down, everyone so common, one has trouble distinguishing the scion of an old noble family from a coke dealer. Both use the mobile pest non-stop, the former to gossip, the latter for business. Something must be done, but what? The thing is too far gone. I know

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 25 January 2003

Dear Mary… Q. As a newly commissioned officer in a regiment that considers itself both pukka and professional, I have recently encountered a problem concerning the etiquette at formal dinner nights. Once seated, one may not rise for relief until after the Colonel has done so. This may be at least three hours, even longer with speeches. Not consuming alcohol would be considered particularly bad form. A friend (not in my regiment), unable to contain himself any longer, availed himself of a decanter, unfortunately incurring the severest of penalties. I have heard that it is possible to remove one’s mess dress coat, revealing one’s dress shirt, and thus, disguised as

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 25 January 2003

Every week professionals such as teachers and doctors express their desire to get out of their jobs. Why? Because they have lost their independence. Greeks and Romans would have richly sympathised. When Cicero was discussing the problems of old age, he said, ‘The old will be respected only if they fight for themselves, maintain their own rights, avoid dependence, and assert their authority over their households as long as life lasts.’ His point is that in old age one tended to yield one’s grip on that independence and control over one’s own affairs that gave one a sense of purpose. This was why satirists like Juvenal could be so contemptuous