Martin Surl, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Gloucestershire, has been buying flipflops. Hundreds of them. Not for the police, but for a local Christian volunteer team of ‘street pastors’. Earlier this year, Surl announced a £40,000 grant to cover the group’s training and resources. ‘Some things are better delivered by people who aren’t the
‘They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He shends one of yoursh to the hospital, you shend one of hish to the morgue.’ Thus Sean Connery in The Untouchables, explaining how you fight a war ‘Chicago-style’. How would you adapt that, do we think, for our collective response to the Paris attacks? ‘They pull
Like most British soldiers of my generation, I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Few would now justify the reasons for invading Iraq; most of us who fought there at first recognised the amateurish nature of the strategy and its lack of realistic political objectives. But in 2007, under General Petraeus, the coalition adopted a new
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreatfakewar/media.mp3″ title=”Andrew J. Bacevich and Con Coughlin discuss the West’s war with Isis” startat=35] Listen [/audioplayer]Not so long ago, David Cameron declared that he was not some ‘naive neocon who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet’. Just a few weeks after making that speech, Cameron authorised UK forces
I’ll willingly admit that the moors of south-west England are not my natural territory. Mention the word ‘Dartmoor’ and my immediate thoughts are of scruffy, sturdy ponies and a giant bog. But then I boarded a train to Exeter to spend two days crossing said bog on horseback, and my whole perception changed. Yes, there
What strange people we Brits are. We spend years moaning that our politicians are cynical opportunists who don’t stand for anything. Then along comes an opposition leader who has principles — and appears to stick by them even when it makes him unpopular — and he is dismissed as a joke. Jeremy Corbyn has been
It is safe to predict that when 20,000 world leaders, officials, green activists and hangers-on convene in Paris next week for the 21st United Nations climate conference, one person you will not see much quotedis Professor Judith Curry. This is a pity. Her record of peer-reviewed publication in the best climate-science journals is second to
Do you have sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria? It’s a hard question to answer: perhaps you’d wonder who the ‘fighters’ were. Or whether the ‘young Muslims’ were 14-year-old girls, groomed by fanatics to be jihadi brides. But if you answer ‘yes’, you may be surprised to find
The veneer of civilisation is easily cracked, as anyone who has followed Donald Trump’s Twitter feed will know. This Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the point of which is no longer clear, there will be riots in shops across the globe, as people fight over discounted products they do not need or even want. The
In 1981, when I was ten and Ian Botham was 26, I thought he was God. Now, the week after Botham turned 60, the 44-year-old me thinks he’s an arse. And that makes me sad. The world is a simple place when you’re ten. There are heroes and villains, victories and defeats. The very best victories
Paris Unfortunately, like most things the president does, his big speech fell flat The terror attacks on Friday have given President François Hollande an opportunity to be statesmanlike, and he has tried his best. He quickly declared a state of emergency and summoned a special congress of the Senate and the National Assembly so that
In the wake of the massacre in Paris, President François Hollande said that France was ‘at war’ — and that it must be fought both inside his country and outside in the Middle East. As the French air force began dropping bombs on Raqqa in Syria, another operation was under way in towns and cities
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/parisattacksaftermath/media.mp3″ title=”Nick Cohen and Freddy Gray discuss whether Jeremy Corbyn dislikes the West” startat=42] Listen [/audioplayer]Before the bodies in Paris’s restaurants were cold, Jeremy Corbyn’s Stop the War Coalition knew who the real villains were — and they were not the Islamists who massacred civilians. ‘Paris reaps whirlwind of western support for extremist violence
We seem to be in the grip of a terrible stress epidemic. According to a new study by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, a professional body for managers in human resources, two fifths of all organisations stated that stress-related absence has increased. It even causes terrorism, apparently: the mother of Paris suicide bomber
The defendant, Roger Khan, was on trial for a vicious attack that left a man’s skull shattered and his brain exposed to the elements, but he had no lawyer representing him in court. He was dyslexic and had no legal knowledge, but the judge had told him that, if he fired the legal-aid lawyers he
Canon Andrew White, the vicar of Baghdad, is not, in person, at all as I’d imagined him. His memoir, about life as first a medic, then a cleric, is chock-a-block with famous friends. Pope John Paul II was a pal, the Grand Ayatollah of Baghdad, General David Petraeus. ‘Oh, Andrew knows everyone,’ I was told
Ain’t it rum? Last week sport was morally bankrupt, finished, no longer worthy of taking up an intelligent person’s time for a single minute. This week it’s shining out as one of the glories of the human spirit. And yet sport can cope with the contradiction quite effortlessly. It’s hard to know the worst thing
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Dr Clare Gerada and Fraser Nelson discuss the row over junior doctors” startat=34] Listen [/audioplayer]Like many of my fellow junior doctors, I trusted a Conservative government with the NHS. If it’s to stay strong and up to date, a health service cannot remain static. It needs not just money but carefully thought-out reform
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Dr Clare Gerada and Fraser Nelson discuss the row over junior doctors” startat=34] Listen [/audioplayer]It has long been rumoured that when Jeremy Hunt took over as Health Secretary, Cameron told him to do one thing with the NHS: keep it out of the headlines. Given that the NHS is an enormous institution, the
Beirut If any of the Syrian refugees who have made it to the relative safety of Europe have been watching the smash-hit TV show Homeland (season five), they would be baffled by its warped depiction of their compatriots’ plight in Lebanon. Unlike the vast majority of Homeland’s viewers ,they would know there are no government-sanctioned