[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_19_June_2014.mp3″ title=”Paul Staines from Guido Fawkes and Evan Harris of Hacked Off debating Steve Coogan’s involvement with Index” startat=1508] Listen [/audioplayer]I have looked everywhere. I have Googled, and asked around. But I can find no evidence that Steve Coogan has ever taken the trouble to defend freedom of speech at home or abroad. I
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_19_June_2014.mp3″ title=”Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Freddy Gray discuss ISIS, Iraq and pop-up terrorism” startat=49] Listen [/audioplayer]Jihadist banners flying. Victorious extremists on camera slapping and then executing dehydrated and pleading Shia members of the Iraqi security forces. Dark reports of mass slaughter. City charters released in captured territory heralding the implementation of an extreme version of
Danny Alexander doesn’t suntan well, but he looks more freckly than normal when we meet in HM Treasury. He’s just back from the seaside town of Nairn in the Highlands, where, as the most senior Scot in the Cabinet, he’s been sent to fight in the front line of the Battle for Britain. People were
Taki What a pity this competition is not open to members of the fairer sex. Marie Christine of Kent would make an ideal winner. Among the men, of course, we have an embarrassment of riches. Tony Blair, John Bercow, Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, A.A. Gill, Charles Saatchi, I could go on until the next millennium. However
Few people, don’t you find, are as irritating as those who define themselves as Spiritual But Not Religious? There was a riveting piece in the Sunday Times ‘Style’ magazine last week about them, featuring people who were both fabulously stylish and spiritual. Among the names checked was a shop called Celestine Eleven (‘when you buy
‘There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor/ I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm/ Gonna be a twister to blow everything down/ That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground!’ How I used to enjoy singing these ominous lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Promised Land’ as I got ready
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_12_June_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Matthew Parris vs Douglas Murray on the Birmingham Trojan Horse plot” startat=55] Listen [/audioplayer]Who’s up, who’s down? Who’s in, who’s out? While Westminster spent last week gossiping about which minister’s special adviser said what, in another city, not far away, a very different Britain was unveiled. On Monday, the Chief Inspector of Schools,
The introduction of a madrassa curriculum at a secular state school in Birmingham and talk of Christian pupils at risk of ‘cultural isolation’ seem to have come as a revelation to non-Muslim Britain. They should not have. Islam in Britain is dominated by a very specific, and rather illiberal, version of the faith — one
There is really no question about whether it is best for babies to be breast-fed, at least for the first few weeks of life. Plenty of research from around the world has proved conclusively that breast-fed babies, who receive all the mother’s antibodies from the colostrum (produced during the first few days) and then the
World Cup fever has arrived. Every morning on the way to work, more little plastic flags of St George flutter from white vans or, in my case, from the window of our trusty Audi A6. Many of my fellow countrymen regard this footie orgy as wholly unnecessary — not me. Bunting will go up at
The Kindle has changed reading in so many ways. A library in your pocket rather than the hulk of a hardback. Uniform pixels where once dust motes rose from an ancient page. But the biggest change, the most fundamental one, is emotional rather than physical. Reading, which used to be the most private of activities,
Americans make movies about slavery and its abolition. In the past two years we’ve seen the Oscar-winning Twelve Years a Slave, based on a 19th-century slave narrative, and Django Unchained, with Christoph Waltz as a bounty-hunter who, uniquely among bounty-hunters of the period, did not make his living from capturing fugitive slaves. Spielberg’s Lincoln was
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_June_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Freddy Gray discusses the end of the French republic” startat=1844] Listen [/audioplayer]Last week President François Hollande, following his party’s humiliation in the European parliamentary elections (his Socialists won roughly half as many seats as the National Front), decided to cheer himself up. He left Paris and travelled to Clairefontaine to mingle with France’s
By any standards Mary Soames was one of the most remarkable women of her era: close confidante (possibly the closest) to Winston Churchill throughout the second world war, dedicated political wife, one of the most outstanding British ambassadresses sent to Paris, successful (against all reckoning) chairman of the National Theatre, and — later in life
Vladimir Putin has won in Ukraine. Russia is on the verge of getting de facto control of eastern Ukraine, destabilising the remainder, and establishing its president’s cherished Eurasian Union. The West is nowhere — weak, disunited, and out-strategised by a master of geopolitics. Hang on, that’s all wrong. Crimea was the high-water mark of Putin’s
Porky, flabby, lardy? Obese — and morbidly so? Yup. That’s us. We knew already that two out of three of us weigh more than is healthy, and last week the scales of shame revealed further cause for dismay: Britain has more obese girls under 20 than anywhere else in the West. Something, as the hand-wringers
Attending public executions, whether beheadings or stonings, is not my predilection, yet one does come across them in the course of life in Arabia and Pakistan. Beheading and stoning are the accepted penalties for a range of presumed offences in much of the Muslim world, and the all-male crowd — especially the old men — push
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_29_May_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Mats Persson discuss the aftermath of the Euro elections” startat=40] Listen [/audioplayer]It must have come so easily back then. In April 2006, the young David Cameron had already assumed the mantle of leader of the Conservative party as arranged by his predecessor, Michael Howard. And as he prepared to assume
The western world is a mess. The ‘advanced’ economies are failing to generate higher living standards for the majority of citizens. Many of us believe, rightly, that our children and grandchildren will have less prosperous lives than we do. That not only runs counter to the tide of western history, but jars with natural human
‘If you want to send a message,’ said Sam Goldwyn, one of the men who invented Hollywood, ‘try Western Union.’ It is such a well-known remark one might have thought every film-maker of the past 50 years would have acted upon it. Not Ken Loach. After half a century of fighting the good fight on