Northern Ireland may not be the most sectarian place in the world, but it is surely among the most begrudging. Ulstermen often resent their compatriots’ successes. Yet every now and again, the Province surprises. It did so last week — when it was announced that Paul Bew, the Professor of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast,
John Gray, Britain’s foremost political philosopher, says that Ruth Kelly’s new campaign against Islamic extremism is doomed because it exaggerates the scope for cohesion in our fragmented modern world The only thing that can be known with reasonable certainty about Ruth Kelly’s new programme of engagement with Muslim communities, which the Prime Minister told the
Guantanamo Bay has just marked its fifth anniversary. John Yoo was instrumental in setting up the prison camp which the normally solidly pro-American Daily Mail has called ‘the sort of show that once only dictators like Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao knew how to put on’. Yet Yoo’s infamy in America derives less from clearing
A couple of years ago an over-confident Scottish woman called Dr Gillian McKeith made history by being the first person ever to examine human stools on primetime television. A nutritionist — whatever that is — by trade, her shtick was to induce indolent and feckless working-class people to defecate into a tube and then —
Impatience for improvements in education is something I share. It is not a new phenomenon: in 1439 William Bingham, a London rector, petitioned Henry VI about the ‘great scarcity of masters of grammar’. What amazes me in the modern age is our collective complacency on education since the war. The independent National Foundation for Educational
Ross Clark investigates the government’s plans to deal with a human flu pandemic, and finds that the preparations for mass drug treatment are in a scandalous mess — unless, that is, you are on the right list In its early days, New Labour was likened to a ‘big tent’, in which there was room not
At last, a British school where pupils are inculcated in a strict moral code, but also taught to think for themselves. Get your kids’ names down for the King Fahad Academy in Acton, west London, quick. It’s a Muslim faith school, as you might have guessed from its title, but don’t let that put you
Let us take the man at his word. ‘We should start saying what we do mean,’ Tony Blair told his party in 1994. New Labour should promise only what it was sure it could deliver. And at the heart of those promises was education, education, education. ‘I would like,’ he said six months before his
I’d been in Park City less than 24 hours when I spotted the man himself. I was standing on Main Street talking to one of American television’s most distinguished comedy directors when Mr Sundance happened to walk past. ‘Would you like to meet him?’ asked the director. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ ‘Follow me.’ Unfortunately, as soon
With its move into 22 Old Queen Street, The Spectator will occupy a house full of friendly ghosts and memories of grand occasions in the world of the arts in the first quarter of the 20th century. For this elegant mansion in Westminster was for over 30 years the London home of Leo Frank Schuster,
Scandals have anniversaries, too, and another has just passed. In January 2006, it emerged that the Education Department (DfES) had authorised Paul Reeve — a man who had a police caution for viewing child pornography and was on the Sex Offenders Register — to be employed as a PE teacher in a school in Norwich.
I find it hard to overstate the importance of the BBC in ensuring a sense of continuity and cohesion in our national life. As an institution it is far from perfect, but it does continue to offer the possibility of an eventual victory for sanity over nihilism in the evolution of the nation’s media output.
After drinking over 1,000 Riojas in a year while researching a book, John Radford explains how Spain’s best-known red wine continues to reinvent itself with such success If not actually reinventing the wheel, Rioja is certainly reinventing its wines on a rolling basis, as, astonishingly, it always has done. Since the pioneering Marqués de Murrieta
It is 7.30 a.m. and I am the first to arrive at Harris City Technology College in south London, where Andrew Adonis, the schools minister, wants to meet for breakfast. The building is shut, the weather is freezing and a kindly cleaner asks me inside to wait. ‘Are you here for an interview?’ she asks.
Kiunga, on the Kenya–Somali border He was a quiet American, and an oddity in Kiunga. For 20 hours I had rammed the Range Rover through tsetse fly-infested jungles teeming with buffalo. When earlier this month I limped into this Indian Ocean village, within earshot of US air strikes against Islamists across the frontier in Somalia,
Diamonds are a guerrilla’s best friend. You may have heard that it’s ‘girls’ who share a special relationship with the little sparklers, but don’t be fooled; females have simply had a rather more sophisticated advertising campaign working for them over the years. Drug-addled soldiers, morally lobotomised mercenaries and bloodthirsty terrorists are more appreciative of the
James Forsyth says that the mighty race between the two Senators — the first serious black contender against the first serious female contender — will be the main event, as the Republicans’ fate is decided in Baghdad Clinton’s in, Obama’s in, everybody’s in. Last week the 2008 presidential contest got serious, as the Democratic heavyweights
Amid fresh reports that Fidel Castro is at death’s door, Daniel Hannan says that the Cuban dictator was the beneficiary of Western hypocrisy about left-wing tyrants, and of the strategic errors of the 44-year US blockade Sola mors tyrannicida est, wrote Thomas More: death is the only way to get rid of tyrants. And so
Like the assassination of JFK, everybody alive then can remember where they were that Doomsday Week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. That Saturday, 27 October, was, and remains, the closest the world has come to nuclear holocaust — the blackest day of a horrendous week. It was an incredibly beautiful autumn day.
Fraser Nelson meets Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the government’s report on climate change, and is struck by how much more equivocal he is than his political masters In a lecture a year ago, Sir Nicholas Stern confessed that until recently he ‘had an idea of what the greenhouse effect was, but wasn’t really sure’.