Immigration

Thursday

Taki

High life | 23 February 2017

From my chalet high up above the village, I look up at the immense, glistening mountain range of the Alps, and my spirit soars. Even youthful memories receding into sepia cannot bring me down from the high. Mountains, more than seas, can be exhilarating for the soul. Then I open the newspapers and the downer is as swift as the onset of an Alpine blizzard. Television is even more of a bummer. Last week I saw Piers Morgan tell an American TV personality — a big-time Trump hater — whose face looks exactly like a penis how strange he found it that two people like Bush and Blair, who lied

Ed West Ed West

Brexit isn’t to blame for the Polish exodus

I guess the hate crime epidemic that gripped Britain after Brexit hasn’t put that many people off, with new figures showing net migration of 273,000 in the three months to September 2016. That represents a decline of 49,000, of which 12,000 is due to an increase in eastern Europeans heading home (39,000, as opposed to 27,000 the previous year), which I imagine is less to do with any hostile atmosphere in Britain than the booming economy in Poland. No doubt that’s the way it will be presented, though – ‘Poles fleeing the Brexit terror’. In my view, the Government is doing a lot of things wrong at the moment, chiefly

Thursday

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: The good and bad news about Britain’s booming jobs market

More Brits then ever are now in work, with the proportion of the working age population in jobs hitting 74.6 per cent at the end of 2016. Good news such as this about Britain’s job market has become ‘almost mundane’, says the Daily Telegraph. But even in this climate of healthy jobs figures, these latest numbers are worthy of attention. For the Telegraph, this is a ‘vivid reminder that Britain’s flexible labour market has weathered all the recent storms’. Talk about joblessness and unemployment used to dominate the headlines. But no more; ‘the conversation’ now is more ‘about the nature of those jobs’. Talk of the ‘gig economy’ in particular

Friday

Freddy Gray

Trump may lose this legal battle – but he can still win the political war

Donald Trump now looks the weakest US president of recent times. His approval rating is historically low for a new Commander-in-Chief. And the 9th District Court of Appeals has now refused to reinstate his executive order on immigration — an order which, if you stop breathing in all the media hot air surrounding it, isn’t all that dramatic a presidential move. The immigration order now seems likely to go up to the Supreme Court — Trump, typically,  tweeted ‘see you in court’ after learning of the decision. He could win there, especially if his administration can get their Supreme Court nominee Judge Gorsuch in place quickly. But the delay will make

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Shock horror! Many Europeans agree with Trump on Muslim immigration

Well, now… would you just look at this. I’d read it here if I were you because I suspect it won’t be covered on the BBC News tonight. A large majority of Europeans are in total agreement with Donald Trump in his restriction upon immigrants from Muslim countries. Here are the figures. Now, never mind what I think. And for that matter, never mind what you think. Simply accept that the shrieking at Trump and from that idiotic, jumped-up thick-as-mince dwarf, Bercow, weighing in with his two pennorthworth, is a million miles from how the majority of people in our continent view the matter. Again, this is not about my point

Monday

Ed West

Airbnb relies on discrimination. So why is it so bothered by Trump’s travel ban?

Much of the fiercest opposition to the Trump regime has come from large corporations. The most recent example is Airbnb, whose Superbowl advert showed a group of people alongside a message saying: ‘We believe no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love or who you worship, we all belong’. It was a clear attack on the president’s nationalist policies. We use Airbnb quite a bit, both as hosts and guests, and it is a fantastic business. On top of the extra cash it allows people to earn, it does bring some solid social benefits, perhaps the biggest of which is that, because of online reputations, it encourages people

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Sign of the times

As if on cue, The World At One on Monday (Radio 4) ended with a short (too short) interview with an Austrian documentary film-maker who recently made a film about Brunhilde Pomsel, secretary to Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. The announcement of her death in Munich, aged 106, prompted the conversation, which happened to follow all the stories about the repercussions of President Trump’s executive order banning those from certain countries from entering the US. The significance was not lost on the ever-astute Martha Kearney. Florian Weigensamer described Pomsel in great age as ‘just incredible’. She was ‘quick-witted, funny, a great storyteller’. But, said Kearney, ‘She was working at the

Tuesday

Matt Purple

Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ is nothing of the sort, but what the hell is going on?

Among Donald Trump’s many neologisms is the ‘What the hell is going on’ evidentiary standard. It was introduced by Trump during his presidential campaign as his biggest dare yet: ‘a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on’. A high hurdle to clear, no doubt, and a controversial idea. Whether it would ever be implemented was unknown—after Trump’s election the Muslim ban was scrubbed from his website, then restored, with a spokesman blaming a technical glitch. Now we have our answers. Fleshed into public policy, figuring out ‘what the hell is going on’ means the government

Douglas Murray

Nine questions those protesting against Donald Trump’s immigration ban must answer

I wonder whether there might be any long-term effects from shouting ‘racist’, ‘fascist’, ‘misogynist’ all the time? It is possible that it is hard to think while your fingers are in your ears and you are shouting names at everybody. I just put the thought out there. Certainly the consequences of not thinking much seem to be all around us.  Though the Trump administration has decided to put temporary travel restrictions on people from certain countries, the policy seems to have certain internal inconsistencies. For instance, as Gordon Brown said in 2008, 75 per cent of Britain’s security threats originate from Pakistan. As anybody involved in the American security apparatus in

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 26 January 2017

What is a university? Sir: As a former Russell Group vice chancellor, I think that Toby Young’s appeal for more universities (Status anxiety, 14 January) needs several caveats. First, what is a university? Recently some have been created by stapling together several institutions without any substantial element of research and renaming them as a university. There is even some suggestion that research is inimical to good teaching, because some university researchers with a duty to teach shirk it. But the presence of a weighty research community lends a university an invaluable ambience. In America, many colleges that teach only to the bachelor degree are well regarded without possessing the title of university.

Ian Buruma

Orange alert | 26 January 2017

That the US should have elected as president someone like Donald Trump came as a shock. But the US is a strange country, given to periodic outbursts of political madness — though perhaps never quite as mad as this. That the Dutch, often caricatured as pragmatic, bourgeois, phlegmatic, business-minded, tolerant and perhaps a little boring, might in March pick a party led by a vulgar rabble-rouser with dyed blond hair to be the biggest in the land is more surprising. But the rise of Geert Wilders, leader (and only official member) of the Freedom party, shows how populism is sweeping across the Netherlands too. Wilders was one of the main

Thursday

The Spectator

An emperor’s inauguration

Given that Donald Trump is not the most popular president the USA has ever seen, even among his own party, it is salutary to be reminded what induction ceremonies can be like for those who devised imaginative routes to power. Pertinax, who started life as a schoolmaster, was a governor of Britain and a highly respected consul before succeeding the ghastly Commodus as emperor on 30 December AD 192. But the military did not appreciate his immediate attempts to restore discipline and financial stability, and he was assassinated three months later. There then followed an auction: the assassins put the office up for sale to the highest bidder, and Didius

Simon Wilder

Flight into Israel

I’ve always lived in London. I grew up near Baker Street and went to school in Camden. Even when I was at college in Kent, I lived in Islington and commuted. Five years ago I moved to Belsize Park and I’ve been here, the nicest place I’ve lived, ever since. I didn’t mean to stay — I was going to see the world, but my father died and my mother said she needed me to be close. She said it with a tremor in her voice, so I stayed. London is in my heart and in my blood, but the wind has changed, like it did for Mary Poppins, and I

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Nativism

The title of America’s first woman bishop was claimed in 1918 by Bishop Alma White, leader of the Pillar of Fire Church, noted for her feminism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, for her alliance with the Ku Klux Klan, and for her nativism. I was puzzled by the word. After all, Native Americans are what we used to call Indians. Native American is not a new piece of terminology. Sir Fulke Greville in his Life of Sir Philip Sidney, published in 1628, inveighed against the Spaniard as a race for suppressing ‘the poor native Americans’ with heavy impositions. But these American Indians, no matter how heavily suppressed, hardly seemed the sort of

Tuesday

The Spectator

Full text: Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit speech

Listen to the whole speech here: Whether you voted to Leave or to Remain, you voted for a better future for Britain. One thing is clear, the Tories cannot deliver that. So today I want to set how Labour will deliver that vision of a better Britain. This government is in disarray over Brexit. As the Prime Minister made clear herself  they didn’t plan for it before the referendum and they still don’t have a plan now. I voted and campaigned to remain and reform as many of you may know I was not uncritical of the European Union. It has many failings. Some people argued that we should have

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Can Jeremy Corbyn reinvent himself as a Trot Trump?

‘Populism’ is a useless word. By definition, anyone who wins an election is more popular than his or her opponents are. According to this logic, John Major and Barack Obama must have once been ‘populists’, which does not sound right at all. When we use ‘populist’ today, we should mean something more than popular. The label covers movements of the nationalist right, which claim to speak on behalf of ‘the people’ against immigrants, cosmopolitans, and multinational institutions. Their most distinctive feature is their contempt for the checks and balances of complicated democracies. From Law and Justice’s Poland to Trump’s America, they attack judges, journalists, opposition politicians and parties as ‘enemies

Thursday

Taki

High life | 5 January 2017

Gstaad  New Year’s Eve was a Rhapsody in Blue, with a clarinet glissando that promised joys to come, and the Gershwin downbeat not registering until 6 a.m. The hangover was, of course, Karamazovian, but who the hell cares. I am finally solid again, and even the flu I caught on the trip over is on its last legs, lingering and as annoying as EU regulations, but no longer to be taken seriously. I had lots of close friends for dinner, but the new chalet was packed by the time I began slurring. Mind you, it’s during dreamlike moments such as those between midnight and dawn that wisdom strikes: there is

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My poster girl for free speech

Now is the time of year to take down the Christmas decorations from your front window and put up, in their place, the anti-immigration posters. Please display them prominently and make sure the message on each is suitably strident. It behoves all of us to do this, as quickly as possible, even — perhaps especially — if we are liberally minded. For this is not about immigration, per se. It is to show solidarity with Ms Anne Maple, who is aged 61 and unfortunate enough to live in Lewisham. I do not know Ms Maple personally. It may well be that, rather than a sainted individual, she is a meddlesome

Thursday

John Osullivan

Populism vs post-democracy

Europeans are usually alarmed or sniffy about American concern for democracy’s fate, but this time liberal opinion on both sides of the pond sings in unison: populism is a threat to democracy. A recent issue of the Journal of Democracy (a sober publication published by America’s National Endowment for Democracy) provided a handy compendium of all the parties, policies and histories that can be included in the vast cabin-trunk of populism. A lead article by Takis S. Pappas, a Greek political theorist living in Hungary, lists 22 different parties he cautiously calls ‘challengers to liberal democracy’. He breaks them down into three categories: anti-democrats, nativists and populists. (All are commonly

Thursday

Matthew Parris & Matt Ridley

Unforgiven

Now that almost six months have passed since the EU referendum, might it be time for old enemies to find common ground? Matthew Parris and Matt Ridley, two of the most eloquent voices on either side of the campaign, meet in the offices of The Spectator to find out.   MATTHEW PARRIS: Catastrophe has not engulfed us yet, it’s true. But I feel worse since the result, rather than better. I thought that, as in all hard-fought campaigns, you get terribly wound up and depressed when you lose. Then you pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again. But my animosities — not just towards the Brexit