Features

Wednesday

James Kirkup

The Foreign Office’s new green orders

Pity the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Once supreme in Whitehall, King Charles Street is now a frail and damaged place, bleeding power and purpose from multiple wounds. It is emasculated by the interference of No. 10 and the drift towards a common EU foreign and security policy while the sun sets on our time as a first-rank power-projecting country. All this leaves the FCO seeking a raison d’être. But in climate change, it may have found one. The political orthodoxy on the environment has now been woven into the very purpose of the Foreign Office. In the peculiar dialect of management-speak employed in Whitehall, its work is defined and directed by eight ‘departmental strategic objectives’.

Interconnect

Man-made global warming is real. The solutions being touted are not

The pledges many countries will make on greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen are pure fantasy, says Bjørn Lomborg. We must pursue other options Judging by the opinion polls, those gathering at the Copenhagen climate change summit have a lot of persuading to do. Just two in five Brits think that global warming is taking place and is man-made. Only one third of Americans think that humans are responsible for climate change. The number of Australians who deem global warming a ‘serious and pressing problem’ has dropped sharply. The urgency which grips politicians around the world seems not to be shared by the general public — to the frustration of people like David Miliband, Britain’s Foreign Secretary.

Stephen J Dubner

A solution that dare not speak its name

Imagine for a moment that a terrible, unforeseen threat to humankind had suddenly arisen, one so grave that it endangered the very future of the planet. Two teams of respected scientists immediately set to work, trying to find a way to prevent the impending disaster. The first set of scientists returned with a potential solution, but it had some shortcomings. It was expensive, with a price tag in the trillions of dollars. It also required nearly every human being on the planet to change his or her behaviour in fundamental ways. And even if the scientists’ scheme worked, it would take decades for the benefits to be felt. The second set of scientists returned with a very different answer.

Paul Reiter

The inconvenient truth about malaria

Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a masterpiece. Like an elder brother to all humanity, he patiently explained the familiar litany of disasters — droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise and the rest — spiced with heartrending personal stories: his baby son’s near-fatal accident, the agony of losing a sister to lung cancer. It was a science lecture crafted by Hollywood. In his book — the version for adults, not the one for schoolchildren — he even included a colour photograph of a corpse, a young man, floating face downward, drowned by Hurricane Katrina. I wonder whether the dead boy’s family were consulted. I am a scientist, not a climatologist, so I don’t dabble in climatology.

Rupert Darwall

Why Marx would have been a denier

Make no mistake, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would have given short shrift to global warming and environmentalism in some of their most colourful prose. As Sherlock Holmes explained to the Scotland Yard detective, there is the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. But the dog did nothing. ‘That,’ Holmes replied, ‘was the curious incident.’ Who heard the Marxist bark? In the history of global warming, that dog was classical Marxism, a Promethean doctrine that argued for the strengthening of man’s power over nature. It is hard to conceive of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union being a party to global carbon emissions treaties on ideological grounds, let alone during a strategic race to bury the West.

Robert O-Mendelsohn

Calm down, dear. There’s plenty of time

The Stern Review is four years old but remains a vital tool for Copenhagen’s policy-makers. It shows them exactly what not to do, says Robert O. Mendelsohn Across the West, we hear the increasingly shrill prophesies that climate change will destroy the earth. The solution proposed is to adopt a new world order with regulations that will dramatically change the global economy. Against this backdrop, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen in a few days’ time to discuss whether such upheaval can be justified. And it is a subject on which economists have plenty to say. Simply put, the costs of ‘abatement’ — the carbon reduction plans being advocated in Britain and many other countries — must be weighed up against the benefits.

Maurizio Morabito

The CIA’s ‘global cooling’ files

A high-priority government report warns of climate change that will lead to floods and starvation. ‘Leading climatologists’ speak of a ‘detrimental global climatic change’, threatening ‘the stability of most nations’. The scenario is eerily familiar although the document — never made public before — dates from 1974. But here’s the difference: it was written to respond to the threat of global cooling, not warming. And yes, it even mentions a ‘consensus’ among scientists.

Christina Lamb

Meet the Brit in charge of the Af-Pak ‘kill list’

No one has followed the Taleban and al-Qa’eda more closely than Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations monitoring mission. He tells Christina Lamb why Obama’s reinforcements won’t scare the fundamentalists away It’s known as the ‘kill list’. The world’s biggest directory of bad guys — the 1267, as it is officially called after the United Nations resolution which voted it into force — has long been essential kit for Special Forces scouring Afghanistan and the tribal badlands of Pakistan for al-Qa’eda and Taleban. From Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar down, finding or eliminating these baddies will be crucial to the success of President Barack Obama’s much awaited Get Out of Afghanistan strategy.

Andrew Gilligan

The minister for Hizb ut Tahrir

By one of those bizarre coincidences, I bumped into Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, on Tuesday night, just after I had accused him in print of being ‘the minister for Hizb ut Tahrir’. Quite extraordinarily, Mr Balls has spent much of the past seven days defending two primary schools run by supporters of this deeply nasty, racist and segregationist group after the Tories attacked his department’s decision to give them £113,000 of public money. As you might expect, our meeting was brief. Mr Balls said I was disgraceful. I said I fully reciprocated the charge: Minister for Hizb ut Tahrir, while harsh, was entirely justified by the facts in this case. ‘No evidence has been found that extremist views are being taught.

Rachel Johnson

Come on, girls — have a crack!

When I was asked recently whether I wanted to go shooting, I felt torn. It’s clearly very fashionable at the moment, as Charles Moore’s story about Cherie Blair and Lord Mandelson at the Rothschilds shows. But shooting is unutterably bloody, if you’re a woman. It starts with a long drive to a big house, encumbered by a vast array of boots, hats, gloves, jackets and thermal underwear, as well as sparkly evening outfits. You spend the night carousing, and in the morning the men — henceforth to be referred to only as ‘guns’ — wake early and pad about in heavy, Scott-of-the-Antarctic tweeds that smell of gun oil, reeking breeks, and long, gartered woollen socks in amusing colours. A massive cooked breakfast is underway.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Prepare for a Japanese-style lost decade

Zombie banks and high unemployment look set to curse our economy as they did Japan’s, say Fraser Nelson and Mark Bathgate. A Conservative government could avoid disaster, but only if it is prepared to face the painful reality To say a country is turning Japanese has a very special meaning to economists. It means entering recession and never properly escaping it. It means entering a world of zombie banks that are being kept alive by taxpayers’ money. It means year after year of huge government deficits: profligacy masked as Keynesian medicine. It means year after year of false dawns, high unemployment and lapses back into recession. It is an acute form of economic purgatory — and one which Britain might well be facing.

Andrew Gilligan

Yanks are from Mars, Brits are from Venus

MoD documents leaked to Andrew Gilligan show that the ‘special relationship’ in Iraq was more like a bad marriage: riven with misunderstanding, irritation and hurt feelings It may have made it into such pillars of the zeitgeist as The Simpsons, the film Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Geri Halliwell’s single ‘Bag It Up’. But it is still, perhaps, a little surprising that that seminal work of cod psychology, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, should have infiltrated a secret Ministry of Defence report into the war on Iraq. Let me tell you, the average MoD leaked document is hard going: thickets of bureaucratic bindweed wrapped tightly around the odd meaningful sentence. Not this time.

Dennis Sewell

How eugenics poisoned the welfare state

We live in a country where the poorest members of society are literally trapped. We pay them millions not to work, simply maintaining them at subsistence level like prisoners of the state. Tied up with bureaucratic regulations and subject to crazy marginal rates of tax, there are few chances to escape for Britain’s welfare-dependent. A million of those out of work have been jobless for a decade or more. They see their chances of getting a job in the future as so remote as to be barely worth considering. The chances of their children ever finding work are beginning to look slim too. The neighbourhoods in which they live are falling apart. The squalor is palpable; crime rampant; local schools are very often failing or ‘sink’ schools.

Rod Liddle

Scrap Ofsted and get 5,000 new teachers for our schools

Rod Liddle says that Ofsted’s attempt to rank schools according to their SATS scores is, like so many of its other ideas, not just unhelpful but counterproductive Fancy a job as head of Ofsted? The post apparently pays not far short of half a million quid per year, and I can’t imagine that there’s much work involved. The problem, I suppose, is that one never knows precisely what they’re looking for when these unelected sinecures at quangocratic bureaucracies are up for grabs, so it’s bloody difficult to prepare for the interview. What qualifies Catherine Ashton, for example, to be the foreign minister for the continent of Europe? She’s worked for CND and the National Council for One Parent Families (why do they have a national council?

Matthew Dennison

Dog days for British breeds

Imagine the scenario. You are a military man who retires at 40. Able-bodied, cushioned by a small army pension and the income from a rural estate in west Wales, you turn your back on soldiering. You remain through and through a sportsman. Across your peaceful acres foxes, badgers and otters carve their busy paths. In barns and hedgerows rats and rabbits run amok. How to rout out so much quarry? Only one way presents itself to the resourceful mid-Victorian landowner: breed your own terrier. It is 1848. Meet Captain John Tucker Edwardes. Edwardes knew what he wanted: a sporting little dog, low to the ground, tenacious, brave and mostly white in colour — in every way a characteristically 19th-century British ideal.

Sam Kiley

‘We’ve been spreading the Marmite too thin’

Lance corporal Jay Bateman and Jeff Doherty slumped to the ground. They were killed instantly in the first swarm of bullets from an enemy ambush. Their comrades dragged their bodies along irrigation ditches and across burning fields under intense fire. Rocket-propelled grenades skidded and cartwheeled through the poppy stubble, exploded and showered them in dirt and shrapnel. The only helicopter available to evacuate the bodies was called away to pick up a another soldier wounded in a battle up the Musa Qala wadi. So the dead were pushed clear of the fighting in wheelbarrows; until a sniper team commandeered a saloon car to carry them back to Forward Operating Base Gibraltar.

Saturday

Andrew Gimson

The political education of David Cameron

Eighty years ago this week, the institution in which David Cameron and his closest lieutenants learned their trade was born. The press is fascinated by his membership of the Bullingdon Club, but Cameron owes a thousand times more to the apprenticeship he served in the Conservative Research Department. How dreary those words sound, and how modest the press release on 17 November 1929 announcing the foundation of the new body: ‘In view of the growing complexity of the political aspect of modern industrial, Imperial and social problems, Mr Stanley Baldwin has decided to set up a special department charged with the task of organising and conducting research into these matters.’ But the ambitions which lay behind CRD were anything but modest.

Wednesday

Con Coughlin

A special form of disrespect

Barack Obama’s increasing disregard for Britain’s views is no way to treat an ally whose troops have fought side by side with America since September 11, says Con Coughlin Washington It says much about Britain’s rapidly disappearing ‘special relationship’ with America that when I happened to mention to some of our senior military officers that I was visiting Washington, they begged me to find out what the Obama administration was thinking about Afghanistan. It is not just that the transatlantic lines of communication, so strong just a few years ago, have fallen into disuse. There is now a feeling that, even if we reached the Oval Office, there would be no one willing to take Britain’s call.

Mihir Bose

England’s botched bid to stage the 2018 World Cup

To understand how World Cup bids are won, let me take you to the third-floor suite of Dolder Grand hotel overlooking Lake Zurich. The date is May 2004 and the cast as high-powered as you would expect in any political summit. There was Thabo Mbeki, then president of South Africa, and Nelson Mandela, his predecessor. They had come to meet Jack Warner, the Trinidadian vice-president of FIFA — the organisation which controls world football. Warner had been sympathetic to South Africa’s bid for the 2010 World Cup, but had suddenly turned cold — refusing to return any calls to Cape Town. So the South Africans had come to see him. Mandela, of course, was South Africa’s trump card.