Features

Thursday

Philip Delves-Broughton

The American economy vs gravity

The American economy always feels better when the Super Bowl is on. Ads for trucks and beer fill the airwaves. It’s steak and cigar season for the corporate bigwigs, not a time for the calorie conscious. For a few days, they can forget about foreign labour and cratering emerging markets and wallow in the fantasy that America is still about men in faded jeans and worn baseball caps, doing practical things with their hands. Now the pigskin has been locked away until autumn, however, one can take a colder look at the behemoth. No doubt, it has been a fine few years to be rich in America. The crash of 2008 turned out to be an epic buying opportunity, and you didn’t even have to use your own money.

Matthew Lynn

You, too, can be a shale profiteer

It might not be something you want to mention in the Half Moon Inn in Balcombe, or around any of the other communities where people are getting anxious about shale gas explorers ripping up the countryside with their drills and pipelines. But if shale is the tremendous source of wealth that David Cameron insists it can be for this country, how do you go about investing it? After all, if there are fortunes to be made, there is no reason not to claim your share. There is no longer any question that shale gas is a major industry. In the US, where it is most advanced, it is already worth $76 billion annually, according to its trade association, and by the end of next year that will have grown to $118 billion.

Peter Atherton

Why has Britain signed up for the world’s most expensive power station?

‘As part of our plan to help Britain succeed, after months of negotiation, today we have a deal for the first nuclear power station in a generation to be built in Britain.’ That was David Cameron in October, announcing that his government had reached an agreement with the French power giant EDF over the construction of two reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset. The Prime Minister must have a funny idea of success, because the more we learn about the Hinkley deal, the more we can see that it is one of the worst ever signed by a British government. Even the European Union can smell a rat. Last month, the European Commission published an initial report suggesting that the contract involves illegal back-door government subsidies to EDF, and will now carry out a full investigation.

Andrew Watts

The church of self-worship: Sunday morning with the atheists

I had always assumed that the one thing atheism had going for it was that you could have a lie-in on Sundays. For the past year, however, an atheist church has been meeting in London on Sunday mornings. Founded by two comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, the Sunday Assembly is a symptom of what Theo Hobson identified in this magazine as ‘the new new atheism’, the recognition that the new atheism of Professor Dawkins et al had, in rejecting God, gone too far in rejecting all His works. Churches, the founders felt, had much to recommend themselves — a space for inspiration, reflection, and a sense of community in an atomised city — and they found a willing audience.

Julie Burchill

Don’t you dare tell me to check my privilege

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_February_2014_v4.mp3" title="From this week's View from 22 podcast, Burchill and Paris Lees debate intersectionality" startat=86 fullwidth="yes"] Julie Burchill vs Paris Lees [/audioplayer]In the early 1970s, my dad was a singular sort of feminist. As well as working all night in a factory, he had banned my mother from the kitchen for as long as I could remember because, and I quote, ‘Women gets hysterical and you needs to be calm in a kitchen.’ He also adored tough broads: ‘There’s a lady!’ he would yell appreciatively at Mrs Desai when the Grunwick strike came on TV, the Indian women wearing English winter coats over their hard-core saris. ‘Thass a lady too!

Owen Matthews

Vladimir Putin’s new plan for world domination

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3" title="Anne Applebaum and Matthew Parris discuss how far we should let Putin go"] Listen [/audioplayer]It’s been a generation or so since Russians were in the business of shaping the destiny of the world, and most of us have forgotten how good they used to be at it. For much of the last century Moscow fuelled — and often won — the West’s ideological and culture wars. In the 1930s, brilliant operatives like Willi Muenzenberg convinced ‘useful idiots’ to join anti-fascist organisations that were in reality fronts for the Soviet-backed Communist International.

Melissa Kite

The Environment Agency cares more about wildlife than people

What do voles, beetles, mussels, trout and the golden plover have in common? Believe it or not, they have all been used as excuses by the Environment Agency not to improve flood defences. Travelling around the worst of the flooded areas last week, I met family after family who said their local rivers had been left to clog with debris — and always because of some critter or other. Somerset farmer David Gillard, for example, repeatedly begged the Environment Agency to dredge the River Parrett, which runs near his sheep farm just outside Burrowbridge. And last summer they did come and give it a go. But while they were at it they found a vole, so of course they packed up and left. The farm is now flooded.

Andrew M Brown

Investment trusts – the way the City saves

After years in the doldrums, investment trusts — those venerable pooled funds with names like Foreign and Colonial and City of London — are in danger of becoming fashionable. There are good reasons why they should be better known. They offer the possibility of high returns at low cost, as well as access to exotic asset classes that would otherwise be out of reach. They can be a way of spreading risk, if you do not have the time or the inclination to pick individual stocks for yourself.

Thursday

Mark Palmer

Warning: upspeak can wreck your career

A few weeks ago, I accompanied my daughter to an Open Day at Roehampton College, where she is hoping to start a teacher training course in September. I enjoyed it — and was impressed by the broad mix of motivated young men and women who, if all goes well, will soon be teaching the next generation of primary school children. Towards the end of the afternoon, the co-ordinator said she wanted to offer a few tips about the interview process that would begin once all the applications have been submitted. It turned out she had only one main tip: avoid upspeak. She stressed the point vigorously.

Cosmo Landesman

I’m nearly 60. I’m still interested in sex. Is that a problem?

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_February_2014_v4.mp3" title="Cosmo Landesman and Mary Wakefield discuss what defines a 'dirty old man'" startat=683] Listen [/audioplayer] The other day I casually remarked to my ex-wife that our son’s new teacher is ‘really hot’. She gave me a look of disgust, shook her head and said, ‘You dirty old man!’ It’s not the first time I’ve been called that, and usually I just keep smiling and stay silent. But this time I bridled. Recently, in two separate courtrooms, both Dave Lee Travis and Bill Roache had been denounced as ’dirty old men’. OK, I confess: maybe I did emit a ‘phwhoar!

Clarissa Tan

Britain has many major problems – racism isn’t one of them

I am a banana. In Singapore, where I used to live, this needs no explanation — it means I’m yellow on the outside but white on the inside, someone who looks ethnically Chinese but whose way of thinking is ‘western’. There are bananas all over Asia, and I daresay the world. We are better versed in Shakespeare than Confucius, our Mandarin is appalling, and we often have pretentious Anglo or American accents. Then there are people who are ‘ching-chong’, a reference to anyone who enjoys the kitschy bling of stereotypically Chinese things, sans irony — they like paving their entire garden with cement, for example, or driving a huge Mercedes, or placing two garish stone lions on either side of a wrought-iron gate.

Alain De Botton

Why I’ve started my own Mail Online

There are good reasons for serious people to despair of the news. A minor country singer dies, and the BBC gives him the front page. An actor dies and every channel mourns him as if a president had expired. There’s one final fact that particularly sticks in the throat of serious news people: the most followed news website in the English language, by an enormous factor, is the Mail Online, purveyor of a stream of appalling ‘human interest’ stories of the lowest kind. The clear temptation is to withdraw into the bunker and lament the decadence of a ruined age. This would be a big mistake. We can face the facts head on: the most attractive, charming, sexy and compelling news outlets enjoy unparalleled influence over the minds of tens of millions of people.

Michael Henderson

And the prize for most fatuous awards ceremony goes to…

‘Prizes are for boys,’ said Charles Ives, the American composer, upon receiving the Pulitzer in 1947, ‘and I’ve grown up now.’ He was using humour to make a serious point, but it would be lost on many people today. Never has there been a lusher time for self-congratulation; when all, as in Alice in Wonderland, must have prizes. Not all prizes are bad. Nathan Filer, who collected the Costa last month for his first novel, The Shock of the Fall, was granted the kind of recognition that evades most first-time authors. The Costa, formerly the Whitbread, has a reputable tradition that values quality of writing above commercial considerations. Good for them. There was a time when you could say something similar about the Evening Standard drama awards.

Christopher Booker

Revealed: how green ideology turned a deluge into a flood

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_February_2014_v4.mp3" title="Christopher Booker explains how the EA failed to prepare for the floods " startat=60] Listen [/audioplayer]It has taken six long weeks to uncover the real hidden reasons why, from the West Country to the Thames Valley, the flooding caused by the wettest January on record has led to such an immense national disaster. Only now have the two ‘smoking guns’ finally come to light which show just how and why all this chaos and misery has resulted directly from a massive system failure in the curious way our country is governed. Because I live in Somerset, I first became aware that something very disturbing was going on back around the new year.

Thursday

Christopher Booker

How the first world war inspired the EU

Among the millions of words which will be expended over the next four years on the first world war, very few will be devoted to explaining one of its greatest legacies of all, the effects of which continue to dominate our politics to this day. One of the best-kept secrets of the European Union is that the core idea which gave rise to it owed its genesis not to the second world war, as is generally supposed, but to the Great War a quarter of a century earlier. It was around that time that the man who can be described as ‘the Father of Europe’ was first inspired to the detailed vision which only after 1945 was he finally in a position to launch on its way.

Melanie McDonagh

Forgive me, Father

For non-Catholics, the most luridly fascinating aspect of Catholicism is confession. Telling your inmost sins — and we know what they are — to a male cleric, eh? In a darkened booth. How medieval is that? Well, the fantasies that people who never go to confession nurse about it are about to be shored up by a new book on the subject by the Catholic author John Cornwell. It’s called The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession. On the cover is a scary-looking picture of a confessional — not somewhere you’d take the children, frankly, but right at home in a Hitchcock movie. John Cornwell is a friend, and moreover an intelligent and thoughtful man, but if ever there were a book that played to its gallery, it’s this one.

Alex Massie

Alex Salmond is within striking distance of victory. Why hasn’t England noticed?

 Edinburgh [audioplayer src='http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_6_February_2014_v4.mp3' title='Alex Massie and Matthew Parris discuss why the Union is in peril' startat=55] Listen [/audioplayer]A century ago, with Britain in peril, Lord Kitchener’s stern countenance demanded that every stout-hearted Briton do their bit for King and Country. ‘Your country needs you’ rallied hundreds of thousands to khaki and the Kaiser’s War. Today, with Britain in peril again, you could be forgiven for asking where Kitchener’s successor is. A new recruiting poster might cry: ‘Britons: Wake up! Pay attention! Your country really is at risk!’ The threat, of course, is domestic rather than foreign (for now, at least).

Mark Mason

The comedy club theory of dictatorship

Have you ever wanted to know how dictators stay in power? Try visiting a comedy club. I went to one the other night. The acts varied in quality. No one died on their backside, no one stormed it, the audience went away happy. But at a couple of points the thing happened, the thing that gives you a clue about dictators: the comedian picked on a member of the audience. In fairness they were both minor examples. One was the compère assessing how a line had gone down. Two guys in their fifties sitting at the side had laughed. ‘Wow, even you two liked that,’ said the compère. ‘Look at you, Waldorf and Statler there.’ Everyone laughed, including Waldorf and Statler, and the evening moved on.

Patrick Allitt

America’s right still hates Hillary Clinton. And it still can’t stop her

 Atlanta, Georgia Who thinks Hillary Clinton is the nastiest woman in the world? The American Spectator once called her ‘the Lady Macbeth of Arkansas’ while US News and World Report described her as ‘the overbearing yuppie wife from hell’. But that was back in the nineties. Surely such vitriol is a thing of the past? No. The founders of ‘StopHillaryPAC’ say on their website that they want to ‘save America from the destructive far-left liberal cancer’ that Mrs Clinton represents. Do they wish her actual harm? Well, they plan to ‘STOP Hillary dead in her tracks’ but, you know… just politically. They’re not the only ones.

Dennis Sewell

The quango state: how the left still runs Britain

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_6_February_2014_v4.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson discusses David Cameron's quango problems" startat=1350] Listen [/audioplayer]Last week Sally Morgan reverted to type. After almost three years as a model of cross-party co-operation, instinctive Labour tribalism finally won out as she accused Downing Street of purging Labour supporters from high offices. Of the many Labour types appointed by the coalition into quangos, she was probably the last person the government expected to go hostile. Not only had she done a fine job chairing Ofsted, the schools inspector, but she was a proven reformer who certainly shares Michael Gove’s passion for new schools. Like many Blairites, she is something of a Goveite at heart.