It isn’t spending cuts Those arguing against spending cuts have recently adopted a one-word argument: Ireland. The case it stands for is as simple as it is bogus. Ireland had a deficit, now even worse than Britain’s. It adopted an agenda of sharp public spending cuts, on the same logic used by the British government.
As a hardened opponent of military interventionism and international war crimes tribunals, I find I am often floored when Rwanda is invoked. ‘How can you possibly advocate standing idly by when hundreds of thousands of people are being massacred?’ is a difficult question to answer. The events in Rwanda in 1994 have become the supreme
David Cameron’s Conservative party has several uniquely destructive traits. But perhaps foremost is that it believes the lies of its enemies. And even when it doesn’t, it panders to them. A perfect example arose three years ago when the shadow minister of homeland security, Patrick Mercer, gave a newspaper interview in which he mentioned the
Who knows who in the world of Westminster Click to see this feature
To celebrate 25 years of The Spectator/Threadneedle Parliamentarian Awards, we invite you to nominate the best MP of the past quarter-century The question hangs in the air: what makes a great parliamentarian? And the answer echoes back: many things. A great parliamentarian may be a swashbuckling orator whose rhetoric never fails to draw blood. He
You don’t need to go abroad to eat, pray or love The Kensington branch of the upmarket travel company Kuoni has a poster on the window bearing the cryptic legend: Eat, Pray, Love. It’s intelligible probably only to women passers-by and for them, it means one thing: the film of the book by Elizabeth Gilbert,
The Conservatives are planning to chip away at the lower middle-class voter and release his inner Tory Two inconvenient truths will put the dampeners on what could have been a celebratory Conservative party conference in Birmingham next week. First, there is a champagne ban for the third year running. There are to be no pictures
Baroness Warnock, atheist pillar of the liberal establishment, on the need for Christianity in schools and the folly of human rights Baroness Warnock has had many battles with religion over the course of her long and distinguished career. In 1984, when the Warnock Report recommended allowing in vitro fertilisation and research on embryos, she was
Right-wing Tea Party activists might well reshape the US Congress – but they have already routed the Republican establishment When angry right-wing American voters started taking to the streets to protest against the Obama administration’s policies, leading Republicans were ecstatic. In the group of protesters who became known as the Tea Party, they saw a
Who on earth wants to know about the leaders’ children, pets, kitchens and favourite biscuits? I am sitting in the audience at Labour party conference, watching a tribute video to Gordon Brown. As Brown smiles, walks, talks, scowls and moves his limbs up and down, giving a fairly decent impersonation of a soon-to-be-discontinued toy, I
There is a view, prevalent among a sizeable minority of people in this country, and particularly within the angry, fat and drunk white underclass, that one day very soon the green flag of Islam will fly above Westminster and Britain will have become a Muslim country, by stealth. This is the snarled and yet resigned reaction
The Spectator/KPMG conference explored investment opportunities in today’s uncertain geopolitical climate We live in an age of uncertainty. The predictable threats of the Cold War have been replaced with more nebulous dangers: great power politics might be stable but across large parts of the world instability rules. The Spectator’s ‘Global Risk and Opportunity’ conference in
The United States is almost as segregated under Obama as it was in the time of Martin Luther King As I arrived in New Orleans this summer, there was a juicy racism row blazing across the airwaves and the blogosphere. Like lots of the juiciest rows, it was over a little thing. The question was,
A day in Juárez – once a party town, now the murder capital of the world ‘We’re not going to die, are we Dan?’ asked my friend Joe, a CBS radio reporter, shortly before we crossed from El Paso into Juárez, Mexico, murder capital of the world. ‘Nah,’ I replied. ‘Our guide is a priest.
Hookworms are parasites. But could they also be a revolutionary medical treatment? In a bright modern office in the University of Nottingham’s complex of bright and modern buildings, Dr David Pritchard has fallen silent and is sitting staring at his hands. It’s been a few minutes since he stopped talking. In the first 30 seconds
Can I ask a small favour of you? Nothing too onerous, just something you might usefully store away at the back of your memory. Can I ask a small favour of you? Nothing too onerous, just something you might usefully store away at the back of your memory. It is this: if I am ever
With or without global warming, Britain is disappearing into the sea. We must invest more in coastal and river defences I have an idea for saving public money: replace the Department for Energy and Climate Change with one man and a sandwich board carrying the words: ‘Prepare to Meet Thy Doom’. It shouldn’t cost much
The writer Sebastian Faulks exudes a sense of calm accomplishment. But even he seems tense about the stage adaptation of his bestselling novel Birdsong ‘I’m not excited. I don’t do excitement,’ says Sebastian Faulks. Which is probably just as well. Four years have elapsed since the project he’s currently involved with, a dramatisation of his
Murray Sayle, who died last weekend, wrote regularly for The Spectator. Here is an edited extract from his column of 13 May 1989. Aikawa, near Tokyo The night of 19 December last was cold and starry. Our house stood in a clearing in a pine forest halfway up a mountainside, and the flames could be
Even leaderless and without fresh ideas, Labour has surged in the polls. Think what the party might be able to do with someone – anyone – in charge The Labour leadership contest has been easy to mock. It has set brother against brother, lasted for months and shown that the party has no heir to