Society

Saturday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 29 November 2003

Given President Bush’s refusal so far to lift his illegal tariffs on steel imports, European retaliation is almost inevitable. But a potentially even graver battle is brewing between the US and its fourth largest trading partner, China. Last year America ran a $103 billion-dollar deficit with China, something US unions blame on ‘unfair’ trade practices. Last month US commerce secretary Don Evans warned the Chinese that they faced retaliation, saying, ‘China’s current trade practices are exploiting our open markets and are creating an unfair advantage that is undercutting American workers.’ What is jolly unfair, of course, is that China has far lower labour costs than America and so is able

Stephen Glover

The Times has gone tabloid: where will the broadsheet revolution end?

First the Independent goes tabloid, now the Times follows suit, though both papers are still available in broadsheet form. The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian may not far be behind. What is behind this revolution? There has been a decline in quality newspaper sales over the past couple of years, and publishers have increasingly felt that some sort of shake-up was necessary to revive the market. The Independent was in a particular trough, with sales at less than half the level of the early Nineties, and needed to do something dramatic. It has certainly succeeded. Overall sales have gone up, and in some areas the paper’s tabloid version is outselling

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Sorry, Stephen, but I certainly would work for Richard Desmond

How incredible it is,’ wrote Stephen Glover in last week’s Spectator’s Media studies, ‘and how depressing,’ that Richard Desmond might buy the Telegraph. He went on to paint a most unflattering picture of the minor media magnate, his main complaint being that Mr Desmond is a pornographer because he owns publications that print pornography. I am rather relaxed about pornography. Some of it isn’t very nice, but then much that we entertain in our heads isn’t very nice and it is at least an open question how far expressing our imaginings, or enjoying their expression by others, makes us worse (or better) people, or alters us in any important way.

Mark Strauss

Who hates the Jews now?

They’re at it again: the Jewish conspiracy to take over the world is back in session. The former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s recent claim that the modern-day Elders of Zion ‘now rule the world by proxy’ not only garnered loud applause at the summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), but most likely earned silent nods of approval worldwide. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the oldest hatred has been making a global comeback, culminating in 2002 with the highest number of anti-Semitic attacks in 12 years. According to public opinion polls conducted that same year, 28 per cent of people in Austria think that Jews

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 22 November 2003

President George Bush of the United States made a state visit to Britain, accompanied by a huge entourage. ‘This is the right moment for us to stand firm with the United States in defeating terrorism, wherever it is,’ said Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Britain. Over four days, police in London were to work 14,000 shifts, with 5,000 on duty on the day of a protest march that the Metropolitan Police decided to allow to cross Westminster Bridge and go up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square. About 250 American secret servicemen will be allowed to carry guns under a previously unknown agreement. A security alert was raised over a

Mary Kenny

Diary – 22 November 2003

Miranda Sawyer’s Channel 4 programme pleading for the abolition of the age of consent, Sex Before 16: Why the Law is Failing, featured the following adults: the editor of a sexually frank magazine for young girls, Bliss; a QC as a legal expert; a child protection expert; an MP; three experts in ‘teenage sexuality’; a liberal-minded historian; and a contraceptive nurse. The aggregate opinions of these experts mostly hovered around ‘empowerment’ and ‘education’, advancing arguments as to why ‘kids’ under 16 years should be trusted to decide for themselves ‘when to have sex’, as it is now so unromantically called. There seems no allowance for the pleasure of romantic yearnings:

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 22 November 2003

A query comes from Argyllshire: ‘What is the infinitive of can?’ The reference is not to canning peas. But before I forget, Harry Henry of Esher, who sounds a sport, reminds me, if I ever knew, that (as Max Beerbohm tells us in A Variety of Things) the original pattern for all publishing titles containing the word After was set by T. Fenning Dodsworth, with his article ‘The End of All Things — And After’. Since the fictitious Dodsworth’s name is a sort of apocopation of my own, I should not forget that. Now, can. It does not have an infinitive because it is a modal verb, like may, must,

Jeremy Clarke

All hands to the pump

Wind-driven rain beats on the windscreen. There’s tree debris in the road and standing water in all the usual places when it rains as hard and as long as this. The fuel gauge is resting on empty but I make it to the garage, which is still open. All the pumps are free except one, which has a horse standing next to it. I draw up at the next one and bung in a tenner’s worth. Three people are clustered round this horse. A man in overalls is kneeling on the concrete and doing something to its hoof; a woman in jodhpurs and an expensive hair-do is stroking its head

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 22 November 2003

Dear Mary… Q. Like 37,000 other people, I signed up to go to jail on the declaration day and received a little Hunting Declaration badge to wear on my lapel and a yellow car sticker against the unjust ban. What other gestures can I make to indicate support for this noble cause ?M.H., Collingbourne Ducis, Wiltshire A. Why not load the ‘Gone Away’ hunting call on to your mobile? You must have polyphonic ringtones and be Wap-enabled, but you can find out if your mobile is compatible by looking up the website www.countryside-calls.co.uk., where you can also hear an ‘audio sample’. You can purchase online for £3, with 50p going

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 22 November 2003

As WMDs fail to surface in Iraq, it looks more and more likely that we went to war on false pretences. This is no new phenomenon. According to the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 490-425 bc), the first war of Western literature was fought on equally illusory grounds — though that did not stop Herodotus justifying it. In his Iliad and Odyssey, Homer (c. 700 bc) informs us that Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam, seduced Menelaus’ wife Helen back to Ilium in Troy. The Greeks raised an army to get her back. Efforts to reach a settlement failed, but after a ten-year siege Ilium was sacked and Helen recovered.

Brian Masters

The prank that grew to giant proportions

The story has been told dozens of times already, but never gets dull, and until the 1996 McDonald’s libel case there had not been a longer saga played out in any English court. From 1867 the Tichborne claimant dominated conversation for years, and people openly despaired they might die before a verdict was reached. Photographs of the claimant outsold those of the royal family, and such was the hypnotic fascination of the case that even they fell victim to it, the Prince and Princess of Wales sitting next to the judge on the bench on one occasion (on another, George Eliot was in the public gallery). The whole country was

Olivia Glazebrook

Predictable plots, familiar faces

A Place of Hidingby Elizabeth GeorgeHodder & Stoughton, £18.99, pp. 576, ISBN 034076709X Blacklistby Sara ParetskyHamish Hamilton, £12.99, pp. 432, ISBN 0241141885 I have in front of me three novels, all of which are over 400 pages long. Their average length, in fact, is 482 pages and their average weight is 783g. A Place of Hiding is Elizabeth George’s 12th novel. Blacklist is Sara Paretsky’s 12th novel. And Blow Fly is the 12th Scarpetta novel (although Patricia Cornwell has written a total of 18 books). So from three authors we have a total of 42 books which, if you bought the lot, might easily cost approximately £800, weigh in at

Bruce Anderson

A hanging matter

Until well into the 1980s, the death penalty was a problem for aspiring Tory candidates. Local associations were almost always in favour, strongly. This led to much wrestling with conscience. Conscience often lost. Matters were easier for card-carrying intellectuals. Any constituency prepared to consider one of them had already braced itself for bizarre opinions. But it would have been unwise for a beef-faced squire to declare his opposition to hanging. His audience would have assumed that he had a host of other suspect tastes. Even as recently as the mid-1990s, Shaun Woodward felt it necessary to tell the Tories of West Oxfordshire that he was a hanger. Mr Woodward, a

Frank Johnson

IDS fell for the same reason as Ceausescu: his security apparatus turned against him

For a party which all agree is unlikely to win a general election in the foreseeable future, the Conservatives arouse disproportionate interest. For weeks, an unprecedentedly open dispute between Mr Blair and Mr Brown has racked what has long looked like becoming the natural party of government. But hardly anyone is really interested. Nearly everyone assumes that an unprecedentedly open dispute between Mr Blair and Mr Brown always racks the natural party of government. But the Conservatives? Now there is an interesting situation, everyone seems to agree. Not just what is going to happen but will having a ‘big beast’ of a leader make all the difference, and so on?

Stephen Glover

How incredible, how depressing, that Richard Desmond might buy the Telegraph

Most people are assuming that Conrad Black will lose control of the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. He has been forced to resign as chief executive officer of the New York listed company Hollinger International, which owns these titles in addition to the Jerusalem Post and Chicago Sun-Times. Lord Black and fellow executives face probable investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the American financial regulator. Hollinger has admitted that a total of $32.15 million in so-called ‘non-competition payments’ was made to Lord Black and senior colleagues without the authorisation of the audit committee or the full board. Lord Black has personally agreed to pay back more

Rachel Johnson

The threat to rugby

Rachel Johnson wonders whether Earth has anything to show more fair than 15 beefy rugby players, especially when it’s raining. But lawyers take a more calculating view of the game The Rugby Football Union lot stuck down in Twickenham (Dee, Dave, you’ve been a great help, cheers) have, I know, been looking forward to receiving their copies of this week’s Spectator with more than their usual anticipation. I told them that I wanted to write a piece, to be published just before the World Cup final, that would put rugby into some kind of perspective; in other words, I intimated, The Spectator would be saying that the rugby was the

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 15 November 2003

Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, pressed for the issuing of identity cards, despite lack of enthusiasm in the Cabinet; ‘An ID card is not a luxury or a whim — it is a necessity,’ he said. Mr Michael Howard, the new leader of the Opposition, chose Maurice, Lord Saatchi, and Dr Liam Fox to take on between them the tasks of the party chairman, from which post Mrs Theresa May was removed to become shadow environment and transport secretary. In a shadow Cabinet reduced to 12, Mr Oliver Letwin got the Exchequer, Mr David Davis the Home Office, Mr Tim Yeo health and education, and Mr David Willetts policy

Eric Anderson

Diary – 15 November 2003

In all the endless talk about school examinations I have never heard this important point made. It is that ever improving school exam results are the nearest thing yet to a panacea for universal happiness. Just notice how many people they please. Pupils, or students as everyone calls them these days, like getting A grades rather than Bs and Cs. Parents like that too. Headmasters and headmistresses can boast, year after year, of record results, and universities of rising entry standards. Governments like them most of all, because better results prove, of course, that standards are rising and that they made them rise. Only two groups grouse about them —

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 15 November 2003

A Kentish man, Mr Spencer Jones, sends me a photograph of a street named ‘The Forstal’. It is a cul-de-sac, or dead end, as we say in Oxfordshire. Why, asks Mr Jones, is this perfectly ordinary word not in the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary? The answer would be that it is dialect. There are lots of words not in the OED — slang, jargon, personal names, place-names and dialect words. Some of each category, though, do get in. Forstal is in Joseph Wright’s Dialect Dictionary. The earliest citation it gives (although Wright could not use as wide a catch as James Murray at the OED) is an interesting one from

Interconnect

Your problems solved | 15 November 2003

Dear Mary… Q. While at a party at which I knew only the host, I made the mistake of trying to enter a group by laughing at a joke that I had not heard. Although rather silly, this would have been fine had the man standing next to me not asked what the joke was, as he had not heard. Dumbstruck with horror, I affected a coughing fit in order to escape. Please guard me against this terrifying situation with your advice as to what I should have done.C.W., Edinburgh A. You should have replied, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you. I wasn’t actually laughing at whatever joke was being told