Features

Thursday

Mark Mason

Switching on to a new generation gap

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_28_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Mark Mason and Alex Owen discuss the cultural generation gap" startat=1603] Listen [/audioplayer]I was recently talking to an intelligent 24-year-old Cambridge graduate. The conversation turned to TV comedy, and I mentioned Vic Reeves. The graduate had never heard of him. Nor had she heard of Bob Mortimer. This would have surprised me, but it’s happening a lot. Not Vic’n’Bob specifically — anyone who was on TV more than five minutes ago. We now have the first generation to be culturally cut off from its elders.

Thursday

Paul Wood

Travels in Isis country: priests, Peshmerga and property developers

Arriving in Erbil, you don’t feel you are in Iraq, but another country altogether, which is what the Kurds would like. The city’s outer ring is shiny and new, a touch of Dubai in the smooth highways and glittering hotels. A London property developer told me he had made a 40 per cent return in Erbil. He was Jewish, too — might have been a different story in Baghdad. The Kurds are proud of their embryonic capital: open for business; tolerant of all faiths; you can even get a drink. But two weeks ago Erbil was seized by panic, the Islamic State almost at the gates. A diplomat told me the security forces were on the point of fleeing. The US airstrikes steadied nerves. It’s been suggested the Kurds have been living off their reputation for military prowess.

John Osullivan

Looking beyond black and white in Ferguson

The ongoing Ferguson crisis in America is really two stories rather than one. The first story is the straightforward mystery of what happened when Darren Wilson (‘the white cop’) killed Michael Brown (‘the black youth’). The second story, much loved by the British and American media, is ‘America’s Racial Divide’. The two stories are related, of course, but not in quite the way that links them in most reporting and commentary. The first story is treated as another episode in the second’s larger ‘narrative’, which is that white America is murderously hostile to its black minority. Few people express this view as openly as the film-maker Spike Lee, who declared simply that ‘there is a war on the black male’.

Douglas Murray

Our boys in the Islamic state: Britain’s export jihad

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_21_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Douglas Murray and Shiraz Maher discuss Britain's jihadis"] Listen [/audioplayer]It is the now familiar nightmare image. A kneeling prisoner, and behind him a black-hooded man speaking to camera. The standing man denounces the West and claims that his form of Islam is under attack. He then saws off the head of the hostage. Why did Wednesday morning’s video stand out? Because this time the captive was an American journalist — James Foley — and his murderer is speaking in an unmistakable London accent. The revulsion with which this latest Islamist atrocity has been greeted is of course understandable. But it is also surprising.

Tom Holland

The Islamic State is destroying the greatest melting pot in history

As the fighters of the Islamic State drive from village to captured village in their looted humvees, they criss-cross what in ancient times was a veritable womb of gods. For millennia, the Fertile Crescent teemed with a bewildering variety of cults and religions. Back in the 3rd Christian century, a philosopher by the name of Bardaisan was so overwhelmed by the sheer array of beliefs to be found in Mesopotamia that he invoked it to disprove the doctrines of astrology. ‘It is not the stars that make people behave the way do but rather the diversity of their customs.’ Bardaisan himself was a one-man monument to Mesopotamian multiculturalism.

Damian Thompson

Revealed: The Pope’s war with the Vatican

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_21_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Damian Thompson and Freddy Gray discuss Pope Francis's plans" startat=904] Listen [/audioplayer]If you want to understand how Pope Francis is planning to change the Catholic church, then don’t waste time searching for clues in the charming, self-effacing press conference he gave on the plane back from South Korea on Monday. It’s easy to be misled by the Pope’s shoulder-shrugging interviews and impromptu phone calls. On his return flight from Rio last year, he said, ‘If a gay person seeks God, who am I to judge?’ What did that mean?

Carol Sarler

Sorry, Kellie Maloney, but to be a woman you must first be a girl

Anybody with an ounce of compassion would have been doffing caps in recent days to Frank Maloney — as, indeed, absolutely everybody with an ounce of compassion vigorously and noisily was. His announcement that he is undergoing a sex change has been met by plaudits from far and wide, notably from within the muscularly male world of boxing in which he made his name and from where his former client, Lennox Lewis, has led the cheerleading. Quite right, too. Maloney’s appalling, sometimes suicidal misery of half a century is beyond imagination; his eventual admission to his beloved wife was heartbreaking to read and his courage, now, in going public — albeit forced by the threat of media exposure — is admirable. But... oh yes, there is a but.

Brendan O’Neill

The biggest civil liberties outrage you’ve never heard of

Imagine you bought a ticket for the opera and then a copper told you how you may travel to the opera house. You absolutely may not drive there, he says, nor take public transport, nor walk. You must go on a licensed coach, crammed in with all the other opera-lovers, under the watchful eye of the boys in blue. Yes, that’s right, the police will escort you to the opera, monitor you through the performance, and then escort you home. You got a problem with that? I imagine you would. You might feel that your right to get from A to B however you please had been curtailed. Now you know how football fans feel.

Thursday

Andrew J.

The West isn’t the solution in Iraq. It’s the problem

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_14_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Peter Hitchens and Douglas Murray discuss Iraq and Isis" startat=52] Listen [/audioplayer]To hawkish right-wingers, but also to many militant liberals, the antidote to the problem of Isis is clear: the application of military power to defeat the jihadists and lay the foundation for a humane and stable political order, beginning in Iraq but eventually extending across the Islamic world. There are several problems with this analysis. For starters, it glosses over the fact that military power in the form of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion created the opening for the jihadists in the first place. Where there had been stability, US and British forces sowed the seeds of anarchy.

Max Boot

We can’t afford to let Isis run wild in Iraq

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_14_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Peter Hitchens and Douglas Murray discuss Iraq and Isis" startat=52] Listen [/audioplayer]Iraq is a bloody mess. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has extended its hold from eastern Syria into western and northern Iraq, massacring Shi’ites, Christians and Yazidis wherever it can. Meanwhile in Baghdad there has been a constitutional crisis, with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki threatening to cling to power even though his own political bloc has chosen a different candidate. The situation is now so bad that it has impinged on the holiday arrangements of our own leaders in the West.

Douglas Murray

No, I haven’t seen that beheading video. And it’s not right to share it

I am sure we’re all in agreement that watching videos of adults abusing children is wrong. At least outside the halls of BBC light entertainment (historically speaking) such a consensus must exist. So how has it become not just right, but seemingly virtuous, to watch and then promote pictures of big bearded men chopping off children’s heads? The proliferation of torture and beheading porn is one of the social media horrors of our day. Every minute millions of people around the world send links to videos and photographs. And as world news gets darker, even if you don’t seek them out, such images find their way to you. Of course the boastful sadists of Isis and similar groups ‘produce’ most of this content.

Frank Field

David Cameron could have been an anti-slavery hero

When I helped bring the Modern Slavery Bill to parliament I thought here, surely, was a piece of legislation that the PM would want to own. Three women — Theresa May, the Home Secretary; her then special adviser Fiona Cunningham; and Philippa Stroud, Iain Duncan Smith’s special adviser — had all worked for a Bill that would give the government a chance to seize the moral high ground, restoring Britain to its historic role as leader in the abolitionist movement. David Cameron was within touching distance of greatness. But almost at the last moment, he stumbled. Wary of alienating the business community, he balked at the idea of stipulating that quoted companies must report on how they were checking their supply chains against their use of slave labour.

Leo McKinstry

The squeezed middle is a myth

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_14_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Ed West and Ryan Bourne discuss the moaning middle class" startat=1402] Listen [/audioplayer]Almost from the moment the coalition came to power four years ago, a mood of deepening grievance has gripped parts of the middle class, fuelled by a sense that they have been the biggest losers from the government’s austerity programme. They see themselves as ‘the squeezed middle’, the ones cruelly punished by rising taxation and the loss of state support. What makes their anger all the greater is the feeling of betrayal. David Cameron should be on their side. This narrative of victimhood has become conventional wisdom.

Andrew Brown

The bizarre – and costly – cult of Richard Dawkins

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_14_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Andrew Brown and Daniel Trilling discuss the cult of Richard Dawkins" startat=788] Listen [/audioplayer]The other day I wrote something to upset the followers of Richard Dawkins and one of them tracked me down to a pub. I had been asked to give a talk to a group of ‘Skeptics in the Pub’ about whether there are any atheist babies — clearly not, in any interesting sense — and at the end a bearded bloke, bulging in a white T-shirt, asked very angrily where Dawkins had said there were any. I quoted a couple of his recent tweets on the subject: When you say X is the fastest growing religion, all you mean is that X people have babies at the fastest rate.

Martha Gill

I believe in animal research. But it’s time to draw a line

Imagine, for a minute, that you’re a frog — a pro-science frog. You’re so pro-science that you’ve decided to donate yourself to it. You sign the consent forms, climb into the barrel and await your fate. It’s all quite exciting, you think, as you travel the bumpy road to the lab. A huge sacrifice, but a chance to expand the shores of human knowledge. You might be part of a cure for cancer, or the common cold, or help to eliminate polio. Finally you emerge — and for the first time, a doubt does too. You’re in a lab, sure, but instead of scientists, there are children everywhere — all dissecting frogs. ‘Dissecting’, though, is a loose description.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

For Boris, choosing the right seat will only be half the battle

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_07_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Harry Mount and Isabel Hardman discuss Boris's parliamentary campaign"] Listen [/audioplayer]Boris Johnson is to stand as an MP in 2015 — but where? In the next few weeks, his secret parliamentary campaign team (and there is one) expects him to pick his constituency. The Tories need a decision by the beginning of September, as an announcement any closer to the party conference will overshadow David Cameron’s own plans to talk about the manifesto, rather than watch hopelessly as cameras and journalists trail after Boris, asking the same question over and over again. Uxbridge, where former deputy chief whip John Randall is standing down, is the favourite, with a 11,216 majority.

Harry Mount

Here comes Boris! The next Tory leadership fight has just begun

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_07_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Harry Mount and Isabel Hardman discuss Boris's parliamentary campaign" fullwidth="no"] The View from 22 podcast [/audioplayer]So Boris has made his great leap. The blond king over the water has revealed his plans to cross the river, return to Parliament and assume what he believes is his rightful destiny — to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The first signs came with his uncharacteristically Eurosceptic speech this week. Yes, he said, Britain could — perhaps should — leave Europe, if it couldn’t negotiate more favourable terms. This set him at odds with David Cameron and sent a ripple of excitement through the Tory grass roots.

Alex Massie

Secret oil fields! Skewed polls! The Yes campaign is losing the plot

 Edinburgh When the histories of the Scottish independence debate are written, 13 February 2014 will be seen as a crucial date in the story. It was then that George Osborne suggested that no Westminster government, of any party, could countenance a currency union with an independent Scotland. Such an arrangement might be good for Scotland but it would make little sense for the rump United Kingdom. And with that observation, boom went much of the nationalists’ economic credibility. Osborne and his accomplice Alistair Darling might seem an improbable double act (though Osborne’s record in office bears a passing resemblance to Darling’s plans had Labour won) but together they might just have saved the Union.

Simon Jenkins

Who are you calling a blob, Owen Paterson?

Why did David Cameron send Owen Paterson to Environment if he meant to sack him? Paterson knew and cared about his subject. He wore green wellies with panache, loathed Europe and wind turbines, and argued with everyone. He was a sop to the shires and a bulwark against Ukip. Yet like his colleague Michael Gove, he was found to be ‘toxic’. He has told the Sunday Telegraph that he blames his downfall on the ‘green blob’, on ‘highly paid, globe-trotting, anti-capitalist agitprop’. Paterson had discovered that the toughest job in government nowadays is no longer foreign affairs or defence, awash in grand crises, whirling dervishes and expensive kit.

Florence King

How niceness became the eighth deadly sin for women

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_07_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, Camilla Swift and Lara Prendergast discuss the demise of the 'nice girl'" startat=1335] Listen [/audioplayer] Niceness is the eighth deadly sin for any self-respecting feminist Fredericksburg, Virginia I have come a long way with feminism. When it first hit the fan in the early 1970s I was living in a thin-walled apartment next to a woman who held assertiveness-training workshops that included bloodcurdling shouts of ‘This steak is tough! I demand to see the manager!’ Now, 40 years later, assertiveness is all about careers.