Society

Saturday

George Monbiot

Less is more

It’s time to lighten up about falling birthrates, says George Monbiot. The world will be a happier and better place with fewer people There is a group in North America — I am not joking — whose motto is ‘Back to the Pleistocene’. Its followers would like human society to revert not just to a pre-industrial past, but to a pre-agricultural one. Humans would subsist on the untended fruits of nature, hunting the beasts of the earth and the fowls of the air, gathering roots and berries from the derelict cityscapes reclaimed by the wild. It all sounds rather splendid, if you are young, fit, perfectly sighted, and don’t mind

Simon Heffer

Sack them

For the 500 or so at the Thatcher jubilee dinner it was, if not the high point, certainly one of the more important. Having cheered themselves hoarse at the entry of the lady herself, and roared their joy at a gem of a speech by Norman Tebbit, the diners applauded Michael Howard. He said he was a Thatcherite, and that the party would follow a Thatcherite direction. They loved it, for they believed it was necessary. They could be right. Certainly, when Tony Blair had the previous day accused Mr Howard of being a Thatcherite, many Tories felt the Prime Minister had given them a huge boost. Now Lady Thatcher

Emma Williams

Trapped behind the wall

As the slaughter in the Holy Land continues, Emma Williams reports on the miseries caused by Israel’s security barrier, and wonders whether there is any way out of the cycle of violence Last week yet more children were slaughtered in the Holy Land. Four little Israeli girls and their pregnant mother were gunned down by Palestinian terrorists on a settlement road in Gaza. Eleven Palestinian children were killed by the IDF, also in Gaza. ‘Nothing changes,’ said my Israeli host in Jerusalem as we left his home on our way to a restaurant. ‘We need something — God, do we need something — to pull us out of this madness.’

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 8 May 2004

Labour published a summary of its achievements, under the title Britain is Working. Mr Tony Blair celebrated the seventh anniversary of his becoming prime minister even more quietly than Lady Thatcher celebrated the 25th anniversary of her becoming prime minister. Dr Paul Drayson, who used to run PowderJect, a company awarded a £32 million government contract, and Sir Kumar Bhattacharyya were two donors to the Labour party among its 23 nominees as new peers; but the Tories had three donors among its five new peers, including Sir Stanley Kalms. Mr Blair visited Dublin to make optimistic noises with Mr Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach, about the future of the Northern Ireland

Stuart Reid

Diary – 8 May 2004

My granddaughter was christened at the Brompton Oratory on Saturday. Although the day was muggy and storms had been forecast, I am sorry to say that there was no thunder and lightening. Like Hector Berlioz recalling the circumstances of his birth — ‘I came into the world quite naturally, unheralded by any of the signs which, in poetic ages, preceded the advent of remarkable personages’ — I was a little put out that Holly’s reception into the Church was not accompanied by some celestial commotion. Other than that, the only bleak thing about the service was that it forced me yet again to confront my own perfidy: over the years,

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 8 May 2004

‘Yes, the post never comes till two now,’ said my husband, thereby demonstrating that he hadn’t been listening to what I’d been saying, and by implication that what I had been saying was boring. So then I read out something to make him laugh, which I’ll come to later. But the occasion for my original remark was that someone on the wireless had just said, ‘That’s a post facto justification.’ I had merely observed that it isn’t post facto but post factum, since ‘post’ takes the accusative, not the ablative. The reason it is so often wrong is because of a confusion with the phrase ex post facto, used by

Jeremy Clarke

Speed limit

Personally, unlike some, I’ve nothing against the holidaymakers who flock to this part of the world as soon as the primroses are out. They liven up the place. In winter, the geriatric ghettoes dotted along the coast hereabouts are too unnaturally quiet. Owing to the infirmities of age, artificial joints, strong winds, blindness, deafness, incontinence and fear, the indigenous inhabitants that do venture out of doors tend to creep from A to B slowly and tentatively, keeping to the shadows, pausing often to renew their strength. In winter it’s like living in Madame Tussaud’s after normal business hours. There’s no gossip about sexual infidelity or reproduction in our village because

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 8 May 2004

Dear Mary…. Q. A friend who invited me to stay for a few days in France has told me I can get a lift in the plane of one of the other guests. I am a nervous flyer at the best of times and particularly nervous at the thought that the plane-owner, whom I do not know well but who has an aura of recklessness about him, might be at the wheel. How can I delicately find out whether it will be he or a proper pilot with braid on his shoulders? Should the former be the case and my destiny be in the hands of the plane’s owner, I

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Forget that frontier spirit stuff: Australians are neither adventurous nor subversive

New South Wales The name of the station seemed to ring a bell. An hour or so south of Sydney, and through the window of my double-decker Australian railway carriage, I could read the sign ‘Thirroul’. Wasn’t that the little seaside town where D.H. Lawrence stayed with his wife, Frieda, and where he began his novel Kangaroo? Did the couple not stay in a bungalow here close to the Pacific and where the story starts? I did not much care for Kangaroo when I first read it. But as with Patrick White’s work, I later found that having thrown the book aside, thoughts it had aroused stayed pulsing strongly in

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 8 May 2004

The European Union’s social chapter has been so successful in suppressing economic growth in Europe that it is no surprise to find the US presidential candidate John Kerry seeking to emulate it. Not that he intends to saddle American businesses with more red tape, mind: he wants to try to strangle the booming Chinese economy through a kind of international social chapter. Kerry says that on taking office he would launch an ‘immediate investigation into China’s repression of workers’ rights’ and increase state funding for the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, a government agency which campaigns ‘to create a more stable and prosperous international economic system in which all workers

Interconnect

A sign from the gods

John Craxton (born 1922) is a painter who has spent much of his life in Greece. Growing up in an intensely musical family in Hampstead (his father was the first pianist to play Debussy in England, his sister was a celebrated oboist), he was aware from a very early age of the infinite and magical connections between sound and the visual image. His subsequent work as a painter has all the structure one expects of a great composer: his are paintings which sing of their substance. Craxton first went to Greece in 1946, staying on Poros, an island renowned for its ravishing charm (Lawrence Durrell called it ‘the happiest place

Julian Manyon

Worse than Vietnam

Baghdad As Iraq burns, Paul Bremer’s men remain inventive. Faced with the problem of getting their positive message out from behind the blast walls and barbed wire which surround the Coalition headquarters in Baghdad, they have resorted to technology. A television studio has been built inside Saddam Hussein’s former palace, and broadcasting companies such as ours are expected to link its outpourings to London so that reassuring messages from American officials and their Iraqi allies can be pumped directly on to British television screens. It could be called ‘Good news from the bunker’. In truth, after the most disastrous month since the invasion, good news is hard to come by.

Bruce Anderson

‘Female soldier’ is an oxymoron

Bruce Anderson says that the scandalous events of the past week show that the Arabs can take brutality — but not from American women Anyone who wants to understand the peoples of Arabia and the surrounding regions ought to start with Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands. He was writing about the late 1940s and, as he knew, the world which he described was about to vanish. This provides the modern reader with a necessary perspective. It should make him aware that in the whole of human history, no major region has undergone such profound changes in such a short period. Today, the Maktoums of Dubai fly the world in their private

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 1 May 2004

Fifty-two former ambassadors, high commissioners and governors criticised Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, for supporting an American policy in Iraq that was ‘doomed to failure’. ‘The conduct of the war in Iraq has made it clear that there was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement,’ their open letter said. It also spoke of ‘one-sided and illegal’ policies over Israel, which meant ‘abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land’. The letter was co-ordinated by Mr Oliver Miles, a former ambassador to Libya, and its supporters included Sir Crispin Tickell. There was a certain amount of grumbling among

Jonathan Aitken

Diary – 1 May 2004

Washington Not since Randolph Churchill’s The Fight for the Tory Leadership has any book of political reportage caused as much of a stir on either side of the Atlantic as Bob Woodward’s latest bestseller Plan of Attack. In the last few days I have listened to detailed dissections of the gospel according to Woodward. I have discussed his book in the West Wing of the White House, at student seminars at Georgetown University, during dinner with my fellow columnists of the American Spectator and at the hospitable home of its editor-in-chief, Bob Tyrrell. I even had a conversation about Woodward in a place where his fierce anti-war opponents would no

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 1 May 2004

Well, the Poles are in the European Union, and very welcome they are too as far as I’m concerned. Already Tesco and Carrefour are flogging the poor things centrally distributed comestibles with sell-by dates on them. From my archives (a bundle of post extracted from a pile of unread medical magazines to which my husband subscribes as part of his ‘ongoing education’), I retrieve an interesting letter from Mr Peter Kassler of Haslemere. ‘We noticed recently,’ he writes, ‘in a Carrefour supermarket in southern France that a lack of mineral water on the shelves was explained by a printed card as a result of “mouvements sociaux à notre plateforme de

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 1 May 2004

Dear Mary… Q. My parents, sister and in-laws are all devout Roman Catholics. I myself was raised a Catholic but have been an atheist for over 20 years, a fact of which all my family are aware. Naturally our family life involves attending numerous RC church services (weddings, baptisms, funerals). Joining in with the religious actions (genuflecting, kneeling to pray, taking communion, making the sign of the cross and so on) makes me feel bogus and uncomfortably self-conscious. However, I worry that not joining in would be seen as an ostentatious rejection of beliefs which are dear to people I love. How can I politely attend these Roman Catholic religious

Jane Ridley

Jumping for joy

Jane Shilling is a Times journalist and single parent who lives in Greenwich with her 12-year-old son. One day, for no particular reason, she decides to take up riding lessons. She turns up at a livery stables at Rooting Street in Kent, an establishment run by a formidable lady named Mrs Rogers. Jane Shilling had never swung her leg over a saddle before. ‘I kept thinking of poor, mad Zelda Fitzgerald and her loopy attempts to train as a ballet dancer years after it was too late to begin.’ She was too old, ‘well into middle age’ (she never lets on exactly how old, but she must be 40-something), her

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 1 May 2004

Ten new members join the European Union on Saturday and thousands of economic migrants are queueing up at the borders, raring to go. I refer, of course, to Western European property investors hoping to make a killing on property markets in the East. While we have heard a lot of grim warnings in the press about Eastern Europeans descending on Dover by the busload to take our jobs, steal our women and eat our children, buy-to-let investors have received nothing but encouragement: last weekend’s property sections were brimming with suggestions as to where to invest, what to buy and how much rent it is possible to screw out of your

Peter Oborne

Blair is already thinking about when to go. Summer might be a good time

Everyone knows that moment in the Bugs Bunny cartoons when the rabbit dashes over the cliff. For a few moments the creature remains aloft, suspended in space, little legs busily pumping away. Then he makes the mistake of looking down, realises the gravity of his predicament, and starts to plunge precipitously downwards. Tony Blair is over the edge, and about to begin his descent. There is neither direction nor purpose in Downing Street. Above all there is no political will. Poor Blair has reached the status of a posthumous prime minister. The EU referendum shambles was one example of this terrifying drift, Tuesday’s panicky speech on immigration another. As ever