The emergency water-rationing measures now affecting 13 million people across the south-east have rekindled memories of the last serious drought to afflict the country, in 1976. Britain in many ways is an unrecognisable country from the Britain of 30 years ago, when scraggy figures in flared trousers queued up at the standpipes. But one thing
Two kinds of don From Joseph PalleySir: Boris Johnson laments the declining quality of British universities, with growth in student numbers outpacing funding (‘Farewell to the Young Ones’, 27 May). The problem is not just financial but cultural. It has always been assumed that university lecturers, as good teachers, will automatically be good researchers. This
John Prescott has always claimed to be one of the unacknowledged founders of New Labour. It is certainly true that he took an early lead in modernising the party’s structure, championing the Private Finance Initiative and the coining of slogans: ‘traditional values in a modern setting’ came from the Prescott camp, not the restaurants of
Europeans made the USAFrom Ronald FletcherSir: David Mayger (Letters, 20 May) seems to be unaware that the history of his country has been written many times, and that the salient fact to emerge is that the USA was largely the creation of Europeans, among whom the British were to the fore.It is deeply regrettable that
It was once enough for the Conservative party to be seen as ‘cruel but competent’ It was once enough for the Conservative party to be seen, in Maurice Saatchi’s phrase, as ‘cruel but competent’. Lord Saatchi was among the first to warn, however, that this formula has had its day. Black Wednesday robbed the Tories
Blair’s cowardly invasion From J.G. Cluff Sir: In your leading article (13 May) you list a litany of Mr Blair’s failures without mentioning the Iraq war. How can you leave out his dismal role in committing the country to that illegal, incompetent, unnecessary and cowardly excursion? I say cowardly because I am so cynical about
Tony Blair said last week that the criminal justice system is ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’. Tony Blair said last week that the criminal justice system is ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’. After nine years in office, this was a terrible admission —
In Competition No. 2440 you were invited to offer a poem which is a pastiche of one or all of the young left-wing poets of the early 1930s, MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day Lewis. William Empson’s ‘Just a Smack at Auden’ is an affectionate send-up worth looking for. I have room only for one verse:What
Listing page content here Mosley is no EU heroFrom David MeikleSir: In his review of Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism by Stephen Dorril (Books, 6 May), David Pryce-Jones makes the disgusting suggestion that those who support the European Union, like Kenneth Clarke MP, are somehow continuing the work of the fascist Oswald Mosley.
One of Tony Blair’s most cunning and cynical ploys in his early years as Labour leader was to model himself explicitly upon Margaret Thatcher. One of Tony Blair’s most cunning and cynical ploys in his early years as Labour leader was to model himself explicitly upon Margaret Thatcher. In 1995 he said, ‘She was a
Prepare for coalition From William MacDougall Sir: I hope Fraser Nelson is mistaken in his talk of a ‘Lib Dem Test’ for Tory policies (‘Cameron’s secret plan’, 29 April). Of course the party should not be frightened of coalition; after all, it has been in coalition for much of its history (with Irish parties, or
The foreign prisoners scandal has revealed nothing less than a crisis of governance: the fundamental incapacity of what ministers feebly call ‘the system’ to respond to a series of urgent contemporary problems. This is a modern disaster in the making. It requires modern solutions. On the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News last Monday, the first three
BNP is party of the Left From Lord Tebbit Sir: Oh dear! Oh dear! How can we expect the Guardian and the BBC to get it right when the Telegraph and even The Spectator (Leading article, 22 April) fall into the trap of calling the BNP an extreme right-wing party. In my book it is
The scandal of foreign national prisoners freed from jail without being considered for deportation might have been devised by some malign genius actively seeking to damage the social fabric of this country. So much has been undermined by this devastating disclosure: public confidence in the criminal justice system, the fight against racist bigots such as
The investigation of the battle between the BNP and Labour in the local elections by Peter Oborne in last week’s Spectator has triggered a furious controversy about the threat of the far Right. Jon Cruddas, the MP for Dagenham, told this magazine that the BNP ‘are on the verge of a major political breakthrough’; New
Iran’s leaders may be crazed and dangerous fanatics, but they are not stupid. That is why President Bush is right to show the Iranian regime that he is serious about containing its undisputed ambition to go nuclear in flagrant defiance of the international community. Nobody in their right mind — including President Bush — wants
Blair is no Thatcherite From Lord TebbitSir: I am not sure whether in his review of the programme Tory! Tory! Tory! (Arts, 25 March) Simon Hoggart is expressing his own view or that of Edwina Currie, that ‘by 1990, Thatcher had become the greatest obstacle to Thatcherism, which had to be rescued … by Tony
In his 1997 manifesto Tony Blair described New Labour as ‘the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’. Nine years on, it more closely resembles the ‘political arm’ of an Asbo family, at war with itself and indifferent to the feelings of others. Rarely has a government seemed so introspective,
The performance in the Israeli elections of Kadima, the new centrist party founded by Ariel Sharon, is almost as remarkable as the survival of the state of Israel itself in the 58 years since its foundation. True, Kadima did not secure the clear mandate for which the acting Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, had hoped.
The neocons’ Iraqi ‘vision’ From Correlli BarnettSir: Surely Con Coughlin (‘A bittersweet birthday’, 18 March) is in error when he states that it was only after the fall of Saddam that Washington adopted the neocon vision whereby Iraq should be ‘a beacon of democracy that would shed its light throughout the tired autocracies of the