Features

Thursday

Rod Liddle

A very British witch hunt – wild, furious and three decades late

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="Matthew Parris and Dr Liz Davies discuss the child abuse enquiry" startat=48] Listen [/audioplayer]I suppose we must accustom ourselves to the fact that some 30 years ago Britain was in the grip of a terrible paedo--geddon — even if, at the time, we did not quite know it. More shockingly still, it was not simply light entertainers who were fiddling about up and down the country, with their cunningly coded messages to children about having an ‘extra leg’ and sinister injunctions to restrain kangaroos. It was, it seems, everyone.

Michael Ware

Wave power is a really, really stupid idea. That’s why it’s getting so much taxpayer subsidy

The surface of the sea is a hostile and unforgiving place. Although it covers 71 per cent of the planet, nothing much bigger than a speck lives there. Obviously, lots of slimy and scaly things swim around beneath the surface — but on the very top, pretty much zilch. Mother Nature has found niches for life in the desert, the Arctic and deep underground but, after 4.5 billion years of trying, she is passing on the surface of the sea, thanks all the same. Now you would think that this very long experiment in trying to evolve life in a hostile environment would act as some kind of hint to the nice people at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

Jacob Heilbrunn

Impeaching Obama would be crazy. But the Republicans will probably try

 Washington DC So it’s come to this: the only thing that can save President Obama from his own complacent and lofty self-regard, not to mention his serial failures, are his enemies, and that is what it appears they are about to do. Even as his poll numbers sink to new lows that not even George W. Bush or Richard Nixon sunk to, even as the economy continues to falter, even as the so-called US-Mexico border devolves into chaos, even as al-Qa’eda’s successor establishes its own state in the ruins of Syria and Iraq, and even as the Democrats appear on the verge of losing the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, Obama’s foes seem eager to resuscitate his presidency by launching a demented movement to impeach him.

Michael Hanlon

All this airport security is utterly useless

Here we go again: another summer of airport fun. This year it’s been announced that due to a ‘heightened’ security threat, any Brit attempting a holiday abroad will be subject to an even grimmer ordeal than usual: body searching, shoe removing, laptop searching and endless grinding queueing. Expect it to take twice as long to get through security, an official from the Department of Transport said. Superficially there are some excellent reasons for all the extra precautions and checks. ‘New intelligence’ from America’s security agencies suggests al-Qa’eda has developed clever explosives that can be soaked into clothing or concealed in human ‘body cavities’, and plastic explosives that masquerade as briefcases and iPads.

Christopher Gage

How Wales was betrayed by its (Labour) government.

In England, success in life is bound up with where you went to school. In Wales, where I come from, the standard of education can be so miserable that you’d do better to get expelled. I did. I’d just spent three days in ‘isolation’ in my south Wales comprehensive — banished to a cubicle with a CCTV camera — for misbehaviour. As I left the grounds, I lit a cigarette. A teacher accosted me. I got lippy and she smacked me across the face. I was expelled soon after. Thank God. If you want good schooling in Wales, you’d be best to go private. If you’re taken ill, make sure you’re treated in the English NHS, not the Welsh version. If you want a private-sector job, best leave Wales. You get the picture.

Nick Cohen

Now that everyone’s a journalist, anyone can be sued

Trying to count posts on the web is like trying to number grains of sand on a beach. In June 2012, a data management company called Domo attempted the fool’s errand nevertheless. It calculated that, every minute, the then 2.1 billion users uploaded 48 hours of YouTube video, shared 684,478 pieces of content on Facebook, published 27,778 new posts on Tumblr and sent about 100,000 tweets. Its figures were not exhaustive and they were out of date in an instant, but for a moment they captured the explosion of self-expression the net has brought.

Camilla Swift

Sloane Rangers vs Arabs – the battle for Chelsea

Perhaps you’re aware that it’s Ramadan right now, the month in which all good Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex during daylight. What you might not know is that Ramadan also marks the start of an annual turf war in London; a battle between the tribal Sloanes and the young Gulf Arabs to dominate Chelsea. The skirmish actually begins before Ramadan. The Gulf States heat up to an intolerable degree and their oil-rich young migrate over here in droves to escape both religious censure and the sun. They descend first of all on the department stores in what’s become known as the Harrods Hajj, to flash their cash around. One friend of mine working in Selfridges was asked by a young Saudi what she would like as a present.

Ian Thomson

Why I’m now scared of book clubs

‘Hi Ian!’ the email began. ‘We are a group of mostly females who meet regularly in London to review really good reads. We are currently reading The Dead Yard, and were wondering if you would like to join us as our honorary guest while we fire you (gently) with questions about your book.’ The email concluded: ‘You will be well fed and thoroughly entertained! Kind regards, Phoebe.’ Very nice, but I sensed a danger. My book on Jamaica, The Dead Yard, has earned me a lot of enemies. For good or ill, it exposes a dark side of island life at odds with the ‘paradise’ of travel brochures. Bookshops in Jamaica had declined to stock the book when it came out in 2011, owing to its alleged ‘sensitive content’.

Thursday

James Forsyth

What Britain will lose if Scotland goes

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth, Fraser Nelson and Eddie Bone discuss whether the UK could survive without Scotland" startat=41] Listen [/audioplayer]On 19 September, people over all Britain could wake up in a diminished country, one that doesn’t bestride the world stage but hobbles instead. If Scotland votes to leave the United Kingdom, it would be Britain’s greatest ever defeat: the nation would have voted to abolish itself. The rump that would be left behind after a Scottish yes vote would become a global laughing stock.

Simon Heffer

Vote yes, Scots – and set the English free

It is a sign of how no one expects Scotland to vote yes in September that no serious planning has been done about the consequences. By contrast, Gladstone shut himself away for days in the spring of 1886 drawing up the Bill that would have bestowed Home Rule on the Irish, plotting what it would mean for almost every aspect of the shared lives of Ireland and Britain. Scotland already has what Parnell would have called Home Rule. The creation of a Scottish Free State would be a different matter, and few have started to assess what that would mean. This is a pity, not just for practical reasons, but for emotional ones too. Much of the argument over the Union is rooted in nostalgia and sentimentality: so many of the partisans either want to be Braveheart or Sir Walter Scott.

Jenny McCartney

The terminal confusion of Dignity in Dying

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Harris and Madeleine Teahan discuss the Assisted Dying Bill" startat=874] Listen [/audioplayer]If you were around in the days when the US series M*A*S*H was a regular feature on British television, its sing-song theme is probably still lodged in your memory: ‘Suicide is painless/ It brings on many changes/ And I can take or leave it if I please’. However catchy, it is broadly untrue. The human life force is stubborn, and it takes a visceral struggle to extinguish it.

William Cook

How Napoleon won at Waterloo

In a one-horse town called Hestrud, on the Franco-Belgian border, there’s a monument which encapsulates Europe’s enduring fascination with Napoleon. The story carved upon this plinth is more like poetry than reportage. As Napoleon passed through here, on his way to Waterloo, he struck up a conversation with a bold little boy called Cyprien Joseph Charlet. ‘You think victory will always follow you, but it always disappears,’ this audacious lad told him, apparently. ‘If I were you, I’d stay at home. Tomorrow your star will surely dim.’ Well, that’s the story, anyway. Fact or fiction, or a bit of both? In a way, it hardly matters.

Roger Scruton

Let’s face it – Ray Honeyford got it right on Islam and education

Thirty years ago, as editor of the Salisbury Review, I began to receive short articles from a Bradford headmaster, relating the dilemmas faced by those attempting to provide an English education to the children of Asian immigrants. Ray Honeyford’s case was simple. Children born and raised in Britain must be integrated into British society. Schools and teachers therefore had a duty, not merely to impart the English language and the English curriculum, but to ensure that children understood and adhered to the basic principles of the surrounding society, including racial and religious tolerance, sexual equality and the habit of settling conflicts by compromise and not by force.

Bryan Appleyard

The sheer stupidity of artificial intelligence

The latest US census found that 43 per cent of the population in Santa Clara County, California, were members of a religious institution. This is slightly less than the American national average of 50 per cent, but you’d probably expect that because the area includes Silicon Valley, where geeks are busy designing our online, gadget-laden future. You might assume they would be pretty secular types. You’d be wrong. As a measure of religious observance, that census is useless. Perhaps the geeks don’t all belong to churches, but the reality is that the inhabitants of the Valley are in the grip of a religious mania so bizarre, so exotic, that it makes the Prince Philip-worshipping inhabitants of the island of Pacific Tanna look positively mainstream.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

If Nigel Farage is worried about anti-Semitism, he shouldn’t be teaming up with Beppe Grillo

Nigel Farage turned down an alliance with Marine Le Pen in the European Parliament not because her ‘far right’ Front National party is in fact — unlike his Ukip — ‘far left’ on most economic and social issues, but because it has ‘anti-Semitism in its DNA’. Instead, Nigel Farage, the ex-commodity broker from Sevenoaks, has formed an alliance with the ex-comedian from Genoa, Beppe Grillo, leader of the Movimento 5 Stelle, which is an internet copy-and-paste version of Mussolini’s Fascist movement. Grillo, like his muse Il Duce before him, used to be a communist before he saw the light. Now he aims to replace parliament and the courts — as dictators do — with plebiscites and people’s tribunals on his website.

Damian Thompson

Religion is the new politics — but Britain’s secular politicians just don’t get it

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_26_June_2014_v4.mp3" title="Damian Thompson vs. Cristina Odone on the role religion plays in politics" startat=44] Listen [/audioplayer]Aren’t Buddhist monks adorable?  They meditate for days without needing to go to the toilet. They talk to each other in ‘grasshopper’ haikus. Their pot bellies are full of wholesome vegetarian fare. Your package tour to Southeast Asia isn’t complete without a sprinkling of them begging politely in the markets. Hollywood stars hire them for beachfront weddings because they’re so cute. Apart from the ones who are terrorists.

Melissa Kite

Should I report my boyfriend to the police?

Driving along in the car, listening to the radio news, the boyfriend turned to me and said he thought the Michael Fabricant row a very strange one. Fabricant was being pilloried for having tweeted that he could never go on television with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown because he might ‘end up punching her in the throat’, but my man said he didn’t see what the fuss was about. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘I feel like punching you about 50 times a day.’ Reader, be assured, he was joking. Victims’ groups, hold your horses while I explain. My beloved was pretending to have punching urges for the purposes of humour. Do you see? It was irony. I-r-o… Do I need to spell it out?

Brendan O’Neill

Welcome to the age of self-love

Remember when masturbation was something everybody did but no one talked about? It was not most people’s idea of a conversation starter. Certainly nobody boasted about being a self-abuser. It was seen as a sorry substitute for sex, a sad stand-in for intimacy. Not any more. Masturbation has been reinvented as ‘self-love’, a healthy and positive form of self-exploration. Where once schoolboys were told it was a sin, now they’re told it is essential to good health. An NHS leaflet distributed in schools advised teens to masturbate at least twice a week, because ‘an orgasm a day’ is good for cardiovascular health.

Sean Thomas

Why Thailand’s elite fell out of love with democracy

Like any sensible, prosperous Englishman in his middle years, I spend every winter in Thailand. Indeed, I’ve been visiting the country for three decades: I can still remember my first hotel in Bangkok, a beautiful teak-stilted villa down a rat-infested alley which had the singular facility of offering heroin on room service. I went with the intention of staying a week or two. I ended up staying four months: the heroin on room service proved quite distracting. At the end of my stay I got a bill with just three things itemised: Room, Food, Powder. Now I’ve returned from maybe my fortieth visit to Thailand (I stopped doing the drugs years ago; I still enjoy the sun).

Thursday

Nick Cohen

Since when has Steve Coogan stood against censorship?

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_19_June_2014.mp3" title="Paul Staines from Guido Fawkes and Evan Harris of Hacked Off debating Steve Coogan's involvement with Index" startat=1508] Listen [/audioplayer]I have looked everywhere. I have Googled, and asked around. But I can find no evidence that Steve Coogan has ever taken the trouble to defend freedom of speech at home or abroad. I promised myself I would never again mock ‘luvvies’ in politics after I saw Tim Minchin, Dave Gorman, Robin Ince and Dara Ó Briain give up their time to help Index on Censorship’s campaign against Britain’s repressive libel laws. Steve Coogan did not stand alongside them.