Features

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Web exclusive debate report: ‘Immigration: Enough is Enough’

The Spectator recently held a debate at the Royal Geographic Society with the motion ‘Immigration: Enough is Enough’. Proposing it were Frank Field MP, Dominic Raab MP and Kiran Bali MBE JP. Opposing were Oliver Kamm, Jenni Russell and David Aaronovitch. Andrew Neil chaired. Here is Lloyd Evans' review: ‘I’m a coward,’ admitted Frank Field, the Birkenhead MP, proposing the motion. For years, his Labour party membership had prevented him from speaking out about immigration. ‘But when we had huge numbers coming in from eastern Europe, I knew it was safe to move.’ Primarily this is an English issue because, ‘for reasons I can’t fathom,’ migrants tend to shun Wales and Scotland.

Jonathan Fenby

Cracks in China

The downfall of Bo Xilai has been the closest thing the Chinese get to a proper public scandal. Here was the attention-seeking boss of the mega-municipality of Chongqing, a colourful rock star in the country’s monochrome politics, sacked in mysterious circumstances that gripped a gossip-hungry nation. China’s authorities this week even felt compelled to ban the word ‘coup’ from microblogging sites, amid wild speculation that an overthrow was in the offing. The choice of Bo’s successor, a trusted establishment figure, suggests that the authorities who ousted him have had enough of big personalities in politics — but the truth is more complex. For all its pride in its growth, the People’s Republic is wracked with uncertainty about its future.

Andrew Gilligan

The retirement of Rebus

No place for him in Scotland’s new McCop megaforce Here is an intro to get all Scottish Nationalists fuming about London media bias: Alex Salmond is abolishing John Rebus. Well, all right — this recalcitrant Scots detective never actually existed in the first place. And even in fiction, he’s been drawing his generous public-sector pension for some time now. But if Scotland’s First Minister reads crime novels, he will know that many of the successful ones depend as much on place as on character and plot — Conan ­Doyle’s clattering Victorian London, Morse’s Oxford, and a Rebus Edinburgh that keeps tourist board officials awake at night. In Mr Salmond’s new model Scotland, Rebus would never have been born.

Leo McKinstry

Give me strength

Carlsberg Special Brew is the beer of Churchill, Kingsley Amis – and me. They can’t ban it I have a confession to make: I am writing this article under the influence. As I tap away at my laptop, a can of lovely Carlsberg Special Brew sits on the table beside me, acting on my brain as oil acts on a car engine: lubricating the moving parts. Ever since I found that it could help to speed up my word output, strong Danish beer has been essential to my writing career, so it’s a great shock to discover that the government has Special Brew in its sights. Carlsberg Special is perhaps the most notorious of the super-strength lagers on sale in Britain today.

Clarissa Tan

Baby economics

How – and why – ten-year-olds are being taught to run a business There’s an excited buzz in the Year 6 class of Yeading Junior School, in outer London. The ten-year-olds recently set up a polytunnel in the school grounds, and now they’re deciding which vegetables to plant in the new polythene greenhouse. Their teacher, Mrs Taylor, is cheerful but firm: ‘When the vegetables are grown, we’ll sell them for profit. Let’s work out how much we should charge for different vegetables. What should we consider?’ Hands shoot up. Bespectacled Alan notes that the more seeds we sow, the more money we make. Mansoor points out we’ll have to calculate the price of each seed, as seeds are sold in packets of hundreds.

Douglas Murray

Apostle of doubt

One staple of our national comedy is that someone must always fill the role of ‘Barmy Bishop’. While at Durham David Jenkins occupied the position, as perhaps in recent years has Rowan Williams. Certainly Richard Holloway recalls the morning while Bishop of Edinburgh when he woke to discover he had become the incumbent. His liberal views on women priests and gay rights, as well as vocal doubts over the literal claims of Christianity (culminating in his 1999 book Godless Morality) caused derision in the press and eventually made his position as a Bishop and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church untenable. He stepped down in 2000 and now, approaching his eighties, has published an unsparing and moving memoir of his life to that date, Leaving Alexandria.

Christopher Howse

Spanish Notebook

Round a bend in the mountain path, between the flowering rosemary and the wild box bushes, above the spine of bare rock that stretched like a dragon’s tail hundreds of feet down into the valley of the unseen river below, someone had sprayed in black letters on the unsuitable surface of the ground: ‘Catalunya is not Spain’. True enough, but where is? In the 700-mile railway journey I’ve been making over the past week from Montserrat in the east to La Coruña on the Atlantic, not many places. To Léonese nationalists, even the ancient Kingdom of Léon has its own language, though it sounds like good Castilian to me. And I can never see the monastery of Montserrat, long a symbol of Catalan civilisation, without thinking ‘Shangri-La’.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Travel Special – Grenada: Fit for a prince

Having visited most of the islands of the Caribbean when they were British colonies and since they were granted independence, I am convinced that Grenada, in the far south-east, is the fairest one of all. Its volcanic origin created wonderfully varied landscapes, from mountainous rainforests down to fertile plantations and a palmy littoral, brightened by bougainvillea, hibiscus, jasmine, orchids…. This is where Alec Waugh’s Island in the Sun, a novel about romantic miscegenation, was filmed with scandalous success. My partner Diana and I came to Grenada this year for the ninth time. I planned to work on a novel and do some painting, but the very first day my typewriter broke down and somehow the tops wouldn’t come off the tubes of acrylics.

Ian Thomson

Travel Special – Jamaica: Meeting the queen’s man

This August, Jamaica celebrates the 50th anniversary of independence. Amid the bunting and parades, talk will be of Britain’s continued presence in the island and the role of the monarchy in particular. Jamaicans are often incredulous that Queen Elizabeth II should still be their head of state. The Jamaican prime minister, Portia Simpson-Miller, has taken steps to replace the Queen with an elected president; yet she vigorously embraced Prince Harry during his Jubilee tour. Recently in Jamaica I went to see the outgoing governor-general, Sir Howard Cooke. Jamaican by birth, Sir Howard was known to love Britain. We met in the Jamaican capital of Kingston. Soldiers in khaki drill saluted me as the taxi pulled up at the entrance to King’s House on Hope Road.

Lucinda Baring

Travel Special – Antigua: Far from the madding beach

It’s easy to slide into comfortable sloth in Antigua: breakfast, swim, sleep, read; lunch, swim, sleep, read — a morsel of frozen fruit on a stick or afternoon tea here, a snorkelling trip or paddle in a glass-bottomed canoe there. Then perhaps a game of tennis or trip to the spa, followed by dinner. But you’d be a fool to snooze your time in Antigua away. We made some wonderful discoveries. Who knew you could go zip-wiring through rainforest here? I came away with three top tips: first, avoid St John’s, with its cruise ships and KFCs, and head south instead to English Harbour, where row upon row of big boats wink at you like nautical pornstars. Have grilled lobster at Catherine’s Café on the waterfront, a rowdy but fun Antigua institution.

Saturday

Quentin Letts

‘I am in charge’

He needed a trilby and leather coat but there was something of ’Allo ’Allo!’s Herr Flick to the mandarin giving evidence at the Public Accounts Committee one recent afternoon. The PAC is parliament’s prime scrutineer of state spending. Civil servants have it dinned into their skulls to regard it with caution, if not respect. Yet this Herr Flick, with his little sticky-up fringe, his minimalist spectacles, his subtle pouts and sly smiles, conducted himself as a superior mortal. He toyed with the committee. He said he was there as ‘a courtesy’. The MPs should not expect him to make a habit of appearing before them. This lean-livered, bloodless Brahmin was Sir Jeremy Heywood, David Cameron’s new Cabinet Secretary.

Peter Hitchens

The gay marriage trap

The shambling remnants of Britain’s social and moral conservative movement are marching to Stalingrad, singing as they go. They will not be coming back, but they don’t realise that yet. David Cameron has cleverly provoked them into this suicide mission, by claiming to be a keen supporter of homosexual marriage. And so, with all the self-control of bluebottles massing round a dead cat, or squirrels besieging a bird-feeder, the Moral Minority have rushed to campaign against him. The risk to them is great. The risk to Cameron is minor. Even if they succeeded, the Prime Minister would not mind much. Very probably, Cameron does not really support same-sex weddings at all, or even care about the subject. It is not clear that he cares about anything.

Roger Scruton

Brain drain

Neuroscience wants to be the answer to everything. It isn’t There are many reasons for believing the brain is the seat of consciousness. Damage to the brain disrupts our mental processes; specific parts of the brain seem connected to specific mental capacities; and the nervous system, to which we owe movement, perception, sensation and bodily awareness, is a tangled mass of pathways, all of which end in the brain. This much was obvious to Hippocrates. Even Descartes, who believed in a radical divide between soul and body, acknowledged the special role of the brain in tying them together.

Ian Thomson

Rover dose

The other day my five-year-old Labrador was diagnosed with acute cannabis intoxication. I had been taking Olga for a walk on Hackney Downs when she disappeared behind an abandoned railway. I imagined she had found some fox shit and was rolling in it delightedly. Bad pooch! On the way home she began to stumble and fall over; half an hour later she was virtually unconscious. With Olga disoriented and whimpering in the car we drove to a vet in Canonbury. The vet took one look at Olga. ‘Very subdued. Seems almost sedated. Most likely it’s a case of oral marijuana poisoning.’ Marijuana? ‘It’s got nothing to do with me,’ I said. My chocolate-brown retriever was now zonked on the table.

Andrew J. Bacevich

Time we left

The journalist Michael Kinsley defines ‘gaffe’ as that which occurs when a politician accidentally tells the truth. Reacting to the latest bad news coming out of Afghanistan — an American soldier in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province went on a rampage, killing 16 civilians in cold blood — the presidential candidate Newt Gingrich committed a gaffe of the first order. Appearing on Fox News, the former House Speaker had this to say: Look at the things that are going on around the region and then ask yourself, ‘Is this, in fact, a harder, deeper problem that is not going to be susceptible to military force, at least not military force in the scale we are prepared to do?

Melanie McDonagh

Unsinkable drama

The last hours of the Titanic were a perfect tragedy. No wonder we’re still obsessed What with the centenary coming up next month, it was hard to imagine anything that could make the Titanic loom larger in the popular consciousness. But that was before Julian Fellowes’s new series, to be broadcast this month. It’s the lot: period detail, a snobbish countess, class resentment and a darkish-blue iceberg. Each and every episode ends with the sea coming in. And all those important details get a mention.

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Investment Special: Searching for income

The outcome of last week’s Monetary Policy Committee meeting came as no surprise, but if you’re trying to live off income generated from capital, it was still bloody irritating. Once again, base rate was left at 0.5 per cent, its lowest level since records began in 1694. Once again, it was decided that quantitative easing must continue. So annuity rates will remain at record lows; deposit rates will remain below a level worth anything after inflation and tax; the squeeze on pensioner living standards will continue; and savers will feel forced to move into riskier markets to preserve the purchasing power of their cash. So what can you do? The first thing to note is that you don’t have to be bullied into moving out of cash. Deposit interest rates are not all bad.

Alex Brummer

Investment Special: The great savings robbery

The prudent among us can’t expect much reward from the Budget Three years ago, when the Bank of England embarked on its first £200 billion round of quantitative easing (QE), most of us — including some Bank officials — hadn’t a clue how this relatively untried policy would work. There were dire predictions from monetarist critics that ‘printing money’, as it was colloquially called, could only result in Zimbabwe-style inflation. That prediction has so far not been realised, largely because the economy has been operating so far below potential and the repair work, after Labour’s great boom of 1997-2007, is still going on.

Jonathan Davis

Investment Special: Contrarianism pays

When pessimism prevails, it’s probably time to buy If one thing puzzles private investors more than anything else, it is the extraordinary capacity of the stock market to move in ways that appear to follow no discernible logic. ‘Profits Up, Shares Tumble’, or even ‘World War Declared, Stocks Rise’: such headlines understandably confuse the uninitiated. But in reality there’s nothing strange about this pattern of behaviour, and understanding it explains why being a contrarian — going against the thrust of expert professional opinion — is so often the key to the greatest investment success.

Saturday

Jeffrey Goldberg

The most dangerous game

There are four main players in the ongoing, and possibly accelerating, crisis, over Iran and its nuclear programme. There is, of course, the unelected yet ‘supreme’ leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has definitive say over the direction of Iran’s nuclear programme (Iran’s elected — in a fashion — president, the ludicrous Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has never had dispositive sway over it, and appears to be fading as a political power in any case). Then there is the American President, Barack Obama, who has so far done an incomplete job of convincing Iran’s leader that he means what he says when he says he will not allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons.