Features

Saturday

Christian House

Our friend in the north

The last surviving leader of Norway’s anti-Nazi resistance Oslo Even in the glare of a crisp spring day the execution ground at Akershus Fortress is a chilling place. Snow still fringes the old gun battery and the Oslofjord clinks with ice. Sitting above this small patch of ground, in Norway’s Resistance Museum, I’m reminded of the risks taken by the man sitting next to me. Seventy years ago, Gunnar Sønsteby, the most decorated man in the country and the last remaining leader of the resistance movement, spent five years fighting the Nazi occupation. Avoiding the firing squad in that courtyard was his highest priority. Sønsteby is a fine reed of a man; thin, poised and dignified, like a Nordic Giacometti.

Dennis Sewell

Who speaks for the world?

In the field of public diplomacy, the tiny Gulf state of Qatar has become a mouse that roars. According to Hillary Clinton, the Emir of Qatar’s television network, Al Jazeera, is knocking spots off the broadcasters of three superpowers in a global struggle for influence being played out across the airwaves. ‘We are in an information war and we are losing,’ Clinton warned the Senate foreign relations committee in March. Making only the briefest mention of the enormous expansion of international broadcasting funded by the Russian and Chinese governments in recent years, the US secretary of state went on to declare that ‘Al Jazeera is winning.

Peter Hoskin

Never-never land

Liverpool The payday loan shop in Breck Road erupts from its grey surroundings. Everything is painted yellow, black and red — colours that in the natural world mean ‘do not touch’ but that serve here as a lure. ‘Need cash now?’ ask the posters in the windows, in scarlet block capitals on a sunburst background. ‘We can help.’ The shop is well placed. Breck Road is where Everton meets Anfield — the centre of Liverpool’s football rivalry, but also of its destitution. Industrial decline has put the streets around here into a decades-long slump. One in three adults is out of work. There are plenty of people here who need cash now, and will take it from wherever it comes.

Saturday

Michael Thomas-Duffy

Web exclusive: the global free schools network

A dozen years ago the charter school movement found me when I volunteered my time as a member of the governing board of the MATCH Charter High School in Boston. American charter schools are taxpayer funded public schools that are independently managed, akin to the free schools that are taking root in England now. I'd been a civil rights activist, having headed the civil rights enforcement agency for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, when I became captivated by the promise that charter schools held to redress the achievement gap between black and white students. While in London recently to attend the 'Schools Revolution' conference sponsored by this magazine, I was struck by parallels between the travails that free schools face and those charter schools have endured.

Iain Martin

How to save the Union | 14 May 2011

Alex Salmond will be a formidable opponent – so David Cameron needs to fight on his own terms In Aberdeen this week, a new statue of Robert the Bruce was unveiled. Canny, daring and tenacious, he is a king revered for an audacious victory that altered the course of Scottish history and secured his country’s independence from England. It is easy to imagine Alex Salmond plotting where his own statue will be, how tall the plinth. He has the same ambition, to win Scotland’s independence, and his battle plan is not entirely dissimilar. In Bannockburn, a much larger English force was destroyed on the battlefield as a result of its recklessly complacent commanders. Almost 700 years later, the same fate may well befall the unionist parties if they’re not careful.

Fraser Nelson

Salmond’s treasure map

Since oil was struck in the North Sea in 1970, it has fuelled dreams of Scottish independence. ‘Rich Scots, or poor Britons?’ ran the Scottish Nationalist Party’s slogan two years later. Alex Salmond has refined this slogan into a formal plan for separation which — he says — would make Scottish independence financially viable. For a country which has Swedish levels of state spending, this is quite some claim. British waters are already separated from Norwegian waters, and so are the oil and gas underneath. Salmond’s proposed division, drawn up by the British civil servants he commands, would claim 91 per cent of British North Sea revenue. This would have raised £11.7 billion in 2008/09.

George Bridges

Too many toddlers

A new baby boom is reaching school age, and we’re not prepared Some time in the next week or so, all being well, my wife will have baby number three. That means more hours spent in Battersea Park’s playground, a flocking place for parents who inhabit that sliver of south-west London known as Nappy Valley. Go there any Saturday morning and you’ll see toddlers everywhere: squabbling on the swings, pushing each other off the pirate ship. Having lived in London for 20 years, I’m used to a crush of commuters. But toddler overcrowding strikes me as something new. There are now Nappy Valleys all over Britain — places feeling the blast of a population explosion that our political class seems determined to ignore.

Rod Liddle

If the slebs think the tabloids are bad, let them deal with the people who read them

Well, knock me down with a Ferrari, who’d have thought it? Jemima Khan and Jeremy Clarkson! The fragrant, pouting Mima — epitome of well-bred, bankrolled, metro liberal hand-wringing faux angst — getting it on with the dishevelled reactionary so far to the right-of-centre-he’s-almost-in-the-median-strip petrolhead Jeremy. Well, knock me down with a Ferrari, who’d have thought it? Jemima Khan and Jeremy Clarkson! The fragrant, pouting Mima — epitome of well-bred, bankrolled, metro liberal hand-wringing faux angst — getting it on with the dishevelled reactionary so far to the right-of-centre-he’s-almost-in-the-median-strip petrolhead Jeremy.

Freddy Gray

The chattering classes

Louise Stern on what the deaf really think of ‘hearing people’ I’m at my desk in London chatting to a deaf woman in Mexico. We are communing through the internet. At 17.57 GMT, an instant messenger bubble pops on to my computer screen: ‘Louise Stern: Hi Freddy, it’s Louise’ and the interview has begun. It’s miraculous, when you think about it. Louise Stern is the author of Chattering Stories, a recently published collection of short stories about adventurous deaf girls in the big noisy world. Louise has a very original writing voice, and critics say that she enables them to understand for the first time what it must be like to be deaf. She isn’t comfortable writing in instant messenger, however. ‘I tend to avoid it,’ she says.

Elliot Wilson

Breaking the bank

The vendetta against Bangladesh’s Nobel Peace Prize winner ‘It is all lies,’ says Muhammad Yunus, his voice quiet but firm. ‘The media in Bangladesh attacks me unceasingly and I cannot stop them, but the accusations are untrue.’ I believe him absolutely. Yunus is a Nobel Peace Prize winner who has done perhaps more than any other living person to alleviate global poverty. Grameen Bank, the microfinance operation that he founded nearly 30 years ago, has (by lending to even the very poorest families) transformed the lives of millions of his fellow Bangladeshis and become a model emulated across the world. But he is now living in fear of his government, which seems bent on discrediting him. ‘My voice is not heard.

Ross Clark

Neighbourhood botch

‘Localisation’ is an expensive path to greater political corruption The last time the Dorset village of Cerne Abbas played a part in national debate was in the 17th century, when — recent studies suggest — locals carved a rude chalk parody of Oliver Cromwell into a hillside. It failed to unsettle Cromwell, but the village may yet be the nemesis of another Oliver: Oliver Letwin, architect of the government’s pet policy of localism. Cerne Abbas is one of 17 communities selected by the Department for Communities and Local Government to prepare a ‘neighbourhood plan’.

Patrick Marnham

CONGO NOTEBOOK

Kisangani, capital of the province of Orientale, Democratic Republic of the Congo, once Zaire, is the setting for A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul’s grim masterpiece, published in 1979, about post-colonial reality in central Africa. Naipaul’s plot describes a tribal war that threatens the city. This actually happened 20 years later, when Kisangani became a battlefield for the bandit armies of Uganda and Rwanda. The city is now controlled by General Jean-Claude Kifwa, commander of the 9th Military Region of the Armed Forces of the DRC. We arrive to find that the temperature has reached a seasonal 40 ºC. A thunderstorm lasting most of our first night reduces this to a more bearable level. The Congo River is why we are here, filming Snake Dance, a historical documentary.

Saturday

Gilead Ini

Web exclusive: A grim panorama

Tom Giles’ attempt – on The Spectator's Coffee House blog – to impugn CAMERA’s video documenting the BBC’s violations of its Editorial Guidelines is an example of the illogical and desperate flailing with which the BBC has consistently approached reasoned arguments about Panorama’s “A Walk in the Park”, a flagrantly biased documentary about Jerusalem.   Mr. Giles’s complaint relies in part on his assertion, with ominous undertones, that CAMERA’s brief video “re-edited” the Panorama documentary and shows only excerpts from the programme.

Christina Lamb

Out of the shadows

Bin Laden’s death has exposed Pakistan’s double game with the West Even those of us who did not believe that Osama bin Laden was producing his videos from a cave in a remote tribal mountain would never have guessed that he was, in fact, living in a ‘Come and Get Me’ three-storey house surrounded by cabbage fields just down the road from Pakistan’s top military academy. To many in Washington, here was final proof — if any were needed — that its supposed ally has been playing a double game; that, for the past ten years, Pakistan has been playing the role of US ally (and taking more than $18 billion of American aid) while all the time sheltering the Taleban and al-Qa’eda.

Alan Judd

Terrorism after bin Laden

Two propositions: first, whatever its short-term consequences, the killing of Osama bin Laden will neither significantly hasten nor significantly delay the decline of al-Qa’eda. That is happening anyway. Secondly, however slowly or rapidly AQ declines, it will not significantly affect the global level of terrorism. We’re stuck with it anyway. But it’s manageable. Two propositions: first, whatever its short-term consequences, the killing of Osama bin Laden will neither significantly hasten nor significantly delay the decline of al-Qa’eda. That is happening anyway. Secondly, however slowly or rapidly AQ declines, it will not significantly affect the global level of terrorism. We’re stuck with it anyway. But it’s manageable.

Andrew J. Bacevich

Mission impossible

The killing of Osama bin Laden settles nothing, decides nothing, and repairs nothing. Yet the passing of the al-Qa’eda leader just might serve an important purpose. We confront a moment of revelation: coming across bin Laden comfortably ensconced in a purpose-built compound in the middle of major Pakistani city down the street from the nation’s premier military academy should demolish once and for all any lingering illusions that Americans retain about their so-called global war on terror. The needle, it turns out, was not in the haystack but tucked safely away in our neighbour’s purse — the very same neighbour who professed to be searching high and low to locate that very same needle. Think we’ve been had? Bin Laden was an indubitably evil figure.

Rod Liddle

The 24-hour rush to certainty leaves plenty of room for conspiracy theories

I know that Wills married Kate last weekend because I saw it with my own eyes. I didn’t have much choice in the matter because my wife was camped out in front of the TV for 12 hours being catty about Victoria Beckham’s Croydon facelift and stupid hat and generously summoning me in whenever Lady Amelia Spencer, the pouting blonde baddun accused of lamping some bloke in a Cape Town McDonald’s drive-thru restaurant (that’s how I like my quasi-royals to be), hove into view. So, anyway, I had no objections when the BBC and ITV News that night reported their marriage as an unchallenged fact, nor when the newspapers said the same thing the next morning.

David Blackburn

Web exclusive: “AV is the thin of the wedge, that’s why we support it”

Nigel Farage is in a bullish mood. Also, the True Finns Party has shot a warning at Brussels by winning nearly 19 percent of the vote in a general election. Mr Farage hopes that the combination of an unpopular and insufficiently Eurosceptic coalition government, the EU’s budget increases and the European Court of Human Right’s recent controversies will win him similar victories. “I’ve waited a long time for this. Finally it’s changing,” he says.      Ukip’s lack of success is perplexing, given that 51 percent of Britons think our EU membership is counterproductive.

Anthony Gardner

Net loss

The scene is a drawing-room at nightfall. A group of weekenders sit in time-honoured tradition around a crackling fire. One is engrossed in a magazine; another chats with her boyfriend; the rest debate whether the word ‘zapateado’ is permissible in their board game. But this is not a house party as Terence Rattigan knew it: the magazine is being read on an iPad; the lovers are exchanging endearments by text message; the game-players have swapped the Scrabble set for a laptop with access to Wordscrape. New technology is tightening its grip on our lives, and not even the country house weekend is immune.

Hugh Sebagmontefiore

Spy fiction

Have historians exaggerated Ian Fleming’s role in the cracking of the Enigma code? Ian Fleming is best known for his novels about the superspy James Bond. But his reputation as a creative genius has been considerably enhanced by his exploits during the second world war as a lieutenant commander in naval intelligence. He has been praised in particular for coming up with Operation Ruthless, the first viable plan to capture naval Enigma codebooks for Alan Turing and his codebreakers at Bletchley Park. In the words of the official Enigma historian, this was ‘a somewhat ungentlemanly scheme’. That was putting it mildly.