Features

Saturday

Colin Freeman

The Shia Krays: The whole of Iraq is being held to ransom

It’s been only six weeks since the death of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, but already there are a number of local hardmen vying to take his place. Most notable are his sidekicks, the Kray twins of the Shia world: Qais al-Khazali and his brother Laith. Qais and Laith who? Unless you’ve scanned Washington’s latest list of designated global terrorists, these two names won’t be familiar. Yet when I mentioned the brothers in a Baghdad teahouse a few weeks ago, folk lowered their voices and looked surreptitiously around, as if discussing the Krays in a pub in 1960s Bethnal Green. The Khazalis lead an Iran-backed Shia extremist group called the Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or League of the Righteous.

Andrew Watts

Will Brexit make Valentine’s Day flowers less expensive?

Any florist will recognise the look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to buy flowers. Some of them try to make it easier for you. I used to go to a splendid florist in Ealing who talked to me about rugby for no less than five minutes each visit. But most florists are more interested in flowers than people, and let it show. For some reason, you’re never allowed to write the card yourself. You have to dictate it, endearments and private jokes and all, while a couple of women who remind you of your mother lurk in the background. My colleague Rory Sutherland believes that this is the point, that buying flowers is something men don’t like doing, so it is a mild human sacrifice which signals intent, a commitment device.

Saturday

John Lloyd

The Scottish literary giants who stoked the fires of Anglophobia

Though Scots are doubtful about secession from the UK, Scots literary figures and intellectuals are likely to be strongly, even aggressively, for it. Conspicuous in this is Anglophobia, which is a default position for many. At an extreme, it amounts to a rejection of the English and Scots unionists which conjures up the rhetoric of racial hatred. The influence of two large 20th-century figures has soaked into the Scots literary ground. These are the poet and polemicist Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978), and the intellectual Tom Nairn (born 1932). They have a close disciple in the figure of the novel-ist James Kelman (born 1946), the only Scots Booker Prize winner in the past half-century.

Michael Coren

God’s honest truth? Homosexuality is hardly mentioned in the Bible

One has to feel for the good old Church of England. If there’s not a public relations crisis, best to create one. Sex outside of marriage, gay or straight, ‘falls short of God’s purpose for human beings’, the Church declared. A few days later, after a colossally negative reaction inside and outside of the Church, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York felt obliged to offer an ersatz apology: ‘We are very sorry and recognise the division and hurt this has caused.’ And it’s not just the CofE that’s in such a mess over LGBTQ2 acceptance and equal marriage. The Roman Catholic and evangelical churches are even more conservative and less tolerant of dissent. But with great respect and in all seriousness — why?

Ian Acheson

Terror cells: how Britain’s prisons became finishing schools for extremists

Sometimes it appears as if, over the past ten years, the government has been actively trying to destroy the whole criminal justice system. It’s like an evil experiment: impose a 20 per cent cut in the prisons budget, meaning a 26 per cent reduction in the number of operational front line staff — then sit back and see what happens. What happened was predictable, with disastrous consequences for both inmates and the public. As a previous Conservative home secretary once said, our prisons became places that ‘make bad people worse’. Imagine a young man like Sudesh Amman arriving in prison after his first offence. He was already a drug user, known to have a cannabis habit. He was mentally unstable and radicalised by Islamist propaganda.

Rory Stewart

As prisons minister, I saw how bad things really are on the inside

What happened on Streatham High Road last weekend was exactly what I had feared during my time as prisons minister: a recently released convict mounting a terror attack. It was the second incident of this nature in Britain in three months, but the truth is we are lucky that there have not been more like it. When I was appointed prisons minister in January 2018, I was introduced to the full scale of the problem. In one wing of a prison in Liverpool, half the windows were broken. Prisoners could stick their hands straight out to take drugs from drones. In Lewes, an X-ray scanner — which was meant to detect what prisoners were smuggling back into the cells — had been defunct for seven months.

Sinclair McKay

Did Britain commit a war crime in Dresden? A conversation

  In February 1945, the Allies, led by Sir Arthur Harris and Bomber Command, destroyed the historic city of Dresden, killing 25,000, most of them civilians. For the 75th anniversary, Sinclair McKay, author of a recent book on the bombing raid, and A.N. Wilson discuss whether it should be regarded as a ‘war crime’.   SINCLAIR MCKAY It was an atrocity. But I hesitate about war crime because war crime is a legal term and not a moral one. It is a legally defined concept.   A.N. WILSON Certainly at one stage of 20th-century history it was a crime to deliberately kill non-combatants and civilians who weren’t in the line of fire for warfare.   MCKAY Indeed, but there are then a number of follow-on questions that come with the label war crime.

Freddy Gray

After Iowa, Donald Trump looks invincible

Any future history of the decline and fall of the American Republic ought to include a page or two on the Iowa caucuses of 3 February 2020. It’s a meltdown story for the ages. The Democratic party, desperate to undo the victory of Donald Trump in 2016, somehow managed utterly to cock up its first meaningful vote in 2020. The calamity is so great that it may turn the whole Democratic primary — and therefore this presidential election year — into a farce. That suits President Trump. ‘Big WIN for us in Iowa tonight,’ he tweeted, on Tuesday night, as news of the Democratic imbroglio spread. ‘Thank you!’ He then retweeted Piers Morgan, who had responded to his tweet with a ROFL (Rolling on the Floor Laughing) emoji. Fun times.

Julie Burchill

Dining, swimming, therapy: why is everyone obsessed with going ‘wild’?

‘Wild’ used to be one of my favourite words. It was in all the songs I loved best — ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, ‘Wild Thing’, ‘Born to Be Wild’. How times have changed. Wild — once meaning brave, bold, reckless — is now yet another sanctimonious nag. Everyone seems to want to get in touch with their wild side. Dark green is the new black. Even vulgar Channel 5 has given us Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild, in which he ‘travels to remote corners of the globe to experience extreme lifestyles with those who have left modern-day amenities behind’.

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

The comfort of building your own coffin

H.G. Wells got it right in his comic novel The History of Mr Polly, where the wake is so much more fun than the wedding breakfast. How often have you come home from a wedding feeling slightly nauseous from an overdose of cheap champagne and fake bonhomie? Yet a funeral can be heartwarming and inspiring; a celebration, a gathering, without the flimflam and interminable jollity. But how many of us will make plans for that final reckoning? How many will decide on the venue, the music, the food and flowers? Most likely it will be your relatives who will choose the coffin in the funeral director’s brochure (£265 for cardboard, rising to £1,990 if you want one in oak with the Head of Christ carved on the side).

Matt Ridley

Britain needs to rediscover failure if it wants to prosper

What was Brexit for? After finally taking Britain out of the European Union, the Prime Minister can now start to give us his answer — and the opportunity in front of him is pretty clear. He could speed up, perhaps double, the rate of economic growth by unleashing innovation. After leaving the slow steaming European convoy, Britain must not chug along but go full speed ahead. That means rediscovering trial and error, serendipity and swiftness — the mechanisms by which the market finds out what the consumer wants next. The stifling of innovation by vested interests in the corridors of Brussels has held Britain back for too long — but it is not the only reason for our sluggish innovation capacity.

Cindy Yu

China’s response to coronavirus shows a one-party state in action

My hometown of Nanjing is more than 300 miles away from Wuhan but my family there, like Chinese families everywhere, have been gripped by the coronavirus story. We use WeChat (a Chinese version of WhatsApp) to share medical tips, the latest intel and even a spattering of dry jokes. A snippet of information from an official bulletin — passed on by my aunt — jumped out at me. The disease had made its way to Nanjing, with three patients reported. And the authorities knew rather a lot about their location. The government message read: ‘Patient Two: January 18th at 16:15 to 17:54 shopped at Hanzhongmen Avenue Oushang Supermarket (Hanzhongmen Avenue No 151); January 20th at 10:00 took the Number 48 bus at Chating East Street Bus Stop, and disembarked at the terminal station.

Mary Killen

Brexit ruined our social lives. Can we now kiss and make up?

Brexit spoilt our social lives for three and a half years. I was in Austria in a house party of 20 Britons when the result came through. Sixteen of us had voted Remain (three while ‘holding their noses’) and four had voted Leave. The Leave voters stayed silent while the rest of us raged about the stupidity of the voting public. One of the party got busy cancelling a long-planned canal-boat trip with a lifelong friend who she knew had voted Leave. She suddenly couldn’t face sleeping in close proximity to him. In London, protest marches were being organised and it was considered very bad form if, as a Remainer, you failed to turn up and be counted.

Rod Liddle

How it all went right: The great Brexit wound has almost healed

They are getting themselves terribly worked up about that new 50 pence coin commemorating our departure from the European Union. By ‘they’ I mean those people in the Brexit Derangement Syndrome intensive care ward, wired up to saline drips, attended to day and night, occasionally afforded a few thousand volts of ECT when things get really bad, but still foaming, still beside themselves with apoplexy. Alastair Campbell has announced that he will not accept the coin if given it in change. Lord Adonis, who was perhaps already in the antechamber of derangement even before June 2016, said: ‘I am never using or accepting this coin.’ The writer for middle-class kiddies, Philip Pullman, our own pound shop C.S.

Alex Colville

The whole of China is in an eerie state of shutdown

 Shanghai ‘Do you want me to scan your temperature?’ asks the receptionist, brandishing an infrared thermometer. Arriving at my hotel in Shanghai, I have a hacking, chesty cough. I picked the wrong week to contract this year’s bout of normal, perfectly healthy winter flu. In China, there is now only one illness. Like Christmas in the West, the Spring Festival (or Chinese New Year) is always the time when big cities shut down. But thanks to the coronavirus, China has entered a period of quarantine. Early in January, there was still a large crowd of skaters on Houhai Lake in Beijing, revelling in the fun of the frozen landscape. But things have moved very fast. Concert halls, museums and cinemas have shut down.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

It’s time for the word ‘Continental’ to make a comeback

Feasting on the remnants of my edible Christmas presents during the otherwise frugal month of January, I experienced a frisson when I opened the box of Thorntons ‘Continental’ chocolates. For anyone who grew up in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the word ‘Continental’ carries with it a waft of balmy air from the Mediterranean, a sense of longed-for glamour, pleasure and breakfast on a balcony, unavailable on this rainy, cut-off island. I’m wondering whether, as we leave the EU and return to being a small country across the water from a many-countried, warmer landmass, the word ‘Continental’, and the concept, will come back into use. Do other small countries across bodies of water from large continents have this concept?

Stefanie Bolzen

The agony of Brexit – for us Germans

In the early hours of 13 December, I called my newspaper in Berlin and suggested we run a piece about what might happen on Brexit day, 31 January 2020. For a second the line went strangely quiet. ‘Hello? Last night’s result means Brexit,’ I said to my colleague. ‘It’s really happening.’ I imagined the news slowly penetrating her mind. It took a while to sink in and no wonder. Throughout the years of obstruction and stagnation in Britain, many of us in Germany allowed ourselves to think Brexit wouldn’t ever happen. More than any other European nation, we Germans have been in denial about Brexit. There’s a widespread idea here that Brits and Germans belong together.

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

The latest fad: eating your way to better mental health

Which fad diet have you chosen to follow this year? One that helps you lose weight, or one that cures your mental health problems? Chances are that if you’re really following food trends, you’ll be discarding the piles of ‘clean eating’ recipe books in your kitchen in favour of a whole new swath of literature on dieting for mental health. There’s the ‘Mad Diet’, which promises ‘easy steps to lose weight and cure depression’, the ‘Anti-Anxiety Diet’, which is a ‘Whole-Body Programme to Stop Racing Thoughts, Banish Worry and Live Panic-Free’, or ‘Food and Mood: Eating Your Way Out of Depression’. Just like the clean eating trend that came before, each mental health diet has its own mantras.

Mike Daunt

Upstream struggle: we are running out of time to save Britain’s salmon

In October 1987, Hugh Falkus, the most famous name in salmon fishing, and I, with three other friends, caught 124 wild salmon in a week’s fishing on the Junction Pool of the River Tweed. This included several fish over 20lb. Today, you would be lucky to catch a tenth of that number, and there would be no big fish among them. In the 1980s there were approximately nine million salmon swimming in the Atlantic. Now there are roughly two million. The situation has become so dire that earlier this month the chief executive of Fisheries Management Scotland announced that the future of salmon is now at a ‘crisis point’. What are the possible reasons for this tragic decline? The main problem, I believe, is simple: apathy.

John R. Bradley

Ten years on, the Arab Spring has only benefited the Islamists

A decade after the Arab Spring, good news anywhere is hard to find. In contrast to Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty has increased in the Arab region. Both internal economic growth and direct foreign investment have declined. Unemployment, especially among the young, has grown. Education standards are falling. There is less press freedom, less freedom of association. A BBC survey last year found that more than half of Arabs want to emigrate. In the countries where autocratic leaders were overthrown — Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen — there is nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary era.