Features

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Brown has exploited immigration to hide from deep problems

The PM’s claim to have created three million British jobs is a grave deceit, says Fraser Nelson. Strip out immigrants from the picture, and Labour has barely dented the problem of British worklessness. Over to you, Mr Cameron If there were to be a British Statue of Liberty, it should be erected at Victoria coach station in London. For it is here that most of the tired, poor, huddled masses of Eastern Europeans have arrived seeking what Michael Howard once called the ‘British dream’. The influx of the last ten years has been the largest in Britain’s history, changing the country for ever. Immigrants now make up a ninth of our population, produce a fifth of our babies and fill (or create) most of our new jobs.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

What possessed McCain to take a punt on Palin?

Rod Liddle says that the appointment of an inexperienced, gun-toting formerbeauty queen as his running mate may well be John McCain’s undoing Ah, just when you pro-Republican monkeys were beginning to think that John McCain was looking a pretty good bet, he goes and chooses a backwoods polar-bear-strangling Britney Spears manqué as a running mate — a woman who appears to believe that the earth was created precisely 4,004 years ago and who, in earlier times, found the Republican Party inclined at far too shallow an angle to the right. A sort of Alaskan version of Pauline Hanson, except with a better embonpoint.

Theodore Dalrymple

In defence of David Southall

One of life’s difficulties, I have found, is that it keeps throwing up questions to which there is no indubitably correct answer. This means that the exercise of judgment is perennially necessary: and there is hardly a moment’s respite from this burdensome imperative. Alas, where there is judgment there is error, or the possibility of error. No one can be right all the time. Of nothing is this truer than the vexed question of child abuse. Not to see it where it exists has terrible consequences for the child; to see it where it does not exist has terrible consequences for the parents or the others accused of it.

Christina Lamb

‘Whoever killed Benazir wants to kill me’

Islamabad On the wall above Asif Ali Zardari’s dining table in Islamabad is a framed copy of a letter. The handwriting is small and neat and it looks nothing special but he frequently grabs it from the wall to show to visitors. For on this piece of paper rests the remarkable rise of the man for years vilified as Mr Ten Percent, who this weekend looks set to become Pakistan’s President. The letter is written by his late wife Benazir Bhutto, and dated 16 October 2007, two days before her return to Pakistan from exile, and 11 weeks before her assassination.

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

A pilgrim’s progress for the 21st century

Because I spoke to him on the phone, not in person, you’ll have to share my mental picture of William P. Young. There he is in a hotel room in Texas: 53, balding, with bright eyes and a greying goatee. He’s ironing as he talks (he says so), his sleeves rolled up (I reckon), with a snowy pile of pressed shirts beside him. On the table beside his bed is a photo of his wife, Kim, and the six young Youngs back home in Gresham, Oregon. On the floor: piles of his extraordinary book The Shack. It’s extraordinary because of the subject matter — a man called Mack meets God in a shed — and also because of its phenomenal, inexplicable success in the face of what should have been certain book death. Though it was much loved by his friends, William P.

Robert Hardman

Never mind the Olympics — get set for the Jubilee

Free and open to everyone, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 will eclipse the London Games, says Robert Hardman — an unforgettable tribute to the monarch Millions gathered on the streets; people of every generation from every background joining in the fun; all the corners of the kingdom united in one thoroughly British occasion... 2012 really is going to see one hell of a party. In fact, buy your Union flags now because there won’t be any left by then. And hang on to them. Because you might just need them for the follow-on event — the supporting gig otherwise known as the London Olympics. Yes, the Games will produce great scenes and big cheers for the endeavours of ‘Team GB’.

Ross Clark

Labour’s punishment freaks are hounding honest citizens

Ross Clark says that far from keeping our streets safer or cleaner, the government’s new force of amateur policemen are ignoring the worst offenders and pursuing law-abiding innocents instead Political brands are constantly changing. For years Liberal Democrats were the party of the environment; now the Conservatives appear to have taken that title. For decades, until Black Wednesday, the Tories were the party of sound money, a role then assumed by Labour until the credit crunch began to bite a year ago. Labour supporters may cite bad luck and international economic pressures in losing that revered mantle. But there is another unwelcome shift in political branding for which the party is wholly responsible: almost overnight, Labour has become the new nasty party.

Wednesday

Susan Jacoby

Reading on the web is not really reading

One of Senator Barack Obama’s persistent themes, since the drawn-out US presidential campaign began in the snows of 2007, has been the need for parents to turn off the television, put away video games, and spend more time reading to and talking with their children. Although no candidate would be dumb enough to call potential voters dumb, Obama is in fact referring to the dumbing down of American culture over the past three decades — a phenomenon that can be measured by everything from a sharp decline in book and newspaper reading to the mediocre performance of American students on international assessments of proficiency in science and mathematics.

Oar Pali

Confessions of a travelling non-dom

O’ar Pali says it isn’t easy being on planes next to strangers all the time — and you quickly find there are a series of character types, dying to tell you about themselves Perhaps it goes with the territory: if you have decided to live your life between two countries you must accept the consequences. And no, I am not talking about Darling’s taxation treat. I am referring to what most non-doms endure on a monthly if not weekly basis. While the average UK citizen may undergo the travel dilemma a few times a year, usually during the summer and winter holidays, entitling them to complain about Heathrow’s Terminal 5, non-doms have been forced to evolve past such trivialities.

Rod Liddle

Our obsession with paedophilia is more dangerous than Gary Glitter’s return

Hello, hello, he’s back again. Although not necessarily — as the words of his 1972 hit had it — ‘on the right track’. Nobody, these past few weeks, has accused Gary Glitter of being on the right track. The lady in my local post office wants him strung up by his gonads and, from the various websites I’ve been trawling through, this a fairly popular denouement. Glitter was convicted of downloading pornographic images of children in Britain and, after he completed his briefish sentence, of sexually abusing two young girls in Vietnam, to which country he had fled. He served a longer sentence there and is now back in the UK somewhere, having failed to be admitted to China or Thailand. I can’t imagine why they didn’t want him.

Boris Johnson

Beijing Notebook

We only had a few seconds left to get ready. There were 91,000 people in the stadium and (allegedly) about 1.5 billion watching apathetically at home. I advanced to the little plastic sign on the red carpet saying ‘Mayor of London’, and as we waited to be called to the centre of the arena I decided I had better spruce myself up. Now the crowd were roaring and waving their red light sabres, and hastily I got out my wallet, mobile, keys, and all the other clobber that might impair my flag-waving performance, and handed them to a chap on my left. I rolled my shoulders like Rocky, and rehearsed the agenda again in my head. What could possibly go wrong? Take flag, get red circle out to left, wave four times, hand flag to flag-bearer. Piece of cake.

Reihan Salam

Here’s how McCain can beat Obama to the White House

In January, I met a friend of mine to discuss his impending departure from Washington DC. He was moving to Chicago to join Senator Barack Obama’s budding presidential campaign. At the time, it was hard not to have an instinctive sympathy for Obama, not least because the Clinton campaign had by that point attracted many of the most loathsome careerists in Democratic politics. Among other things, we discussed the general election landscape. My friend, confident even then that Obama would win the Democratic nomination, was convinced that New York mayor Rudy Giuliani would be Obama’s toughest opponent in a general election.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

After Jade’s cancer, what next? ‘I’m a tumour, get me out of here’?

Rod Liddle says that the stunningly tasteless announcement of Jade Goody’s cervical cancer on Indian Big Brother marks a new low. But that won’t stop TV bosses saying it is a public service Here’s a notable first for television — a contestant on a Big Brother programme was told, in front of a television audience, that she had cancer. The woman in question was Jade Goody, whom you may vaguely remember as the coarse, thick, Bermondsey chav who sprung to national prominence for having been allegedly racist on a previous series of the programme.

Wednesday

Dennis Sewell

Poles are the fall guys of the immigration debate

When, back in 2005, Michael Howard said, ‘it’s not racist to talk about immigration’, his words sounded less like a statement of the obvious than a plea for the political and media classes to cut him some slack. They didn’t, of course. The then Conservative leader was roundly chided for playing the race card, accused of giving aid and comfort to the BNP, and warned that his focus on immigration would lead to an increase in racial assaults. These days, however, everyone is thinking what Michael Howard was thinking three years ago.

Clemency Burtonhill

Behind closed doors with the maestro

‘It has to do with the condition of being human,’ Daniel Barenboim smiles, looking remarkably relaxed for someone who’s just battled through rush-hour traffic from Stansted. The conductor, along with his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, is in London on the latest stop of a European tour, but instead of resting before the next day’s epic Proms programme of Haydn, Schoenberg and Brahms, the 65-year-old maestro is now in a hotel near the Royal Albert Hall, deep in animated discussion about one of his favourite topics: the power of music and, yes, the human condition. Not that we should be surprised: Barenboim’s energy is as legendary as his intellectual curiosity.

James Forsyth

Georgia sheds light on the mind of Cameron

The final phase of preparing the country for Prime Minister Cameron is under way. Having decontaminated the brand and marched ahead of Labour in the polls, the Tories are now introducing the country to Statesman Cameron. Politics abhors a vacuum. So with Gordon Brown hunkered down planning his autumn ‘relaunch’ and David Miliband practising looking like an innocent flower while being the serpent underneath, Cameron had the opportunity to act the statesman during the Georgia crisis. He did so, even going to Tbilisi to convey Britain’s solidarity with Georgia. As one top Tory purred to me, ‘He’s combined the toughness of a Thatcher, with the tactical acumen of a Blair.

Martin Vander Weyer

Economic recovery plan? Forget it, Gordon

The Prime Minister’s survival is pinned on a September ‘relaunch’ to ease the voters’ economic woes. But, says Martin Vander Weyer, each door through which Brown tries to escape his predicament slams in his face. His room for manoeuvre is negligible All this talk of Gordon Brown’s ‘economic recovery plan’ calls to mind the unhappy day, many years ago on a junior bankers’ training course, when I took part in a competitive team game which involved managing a computer model of the British economy. We were told it was a version of the Treasury’s own model.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

America is still the nation whose eyes say ‘yes’

Douglas Murray tours a country despondent about its presidential race and increasingly uncertain about Barack Obama. Yet the world still needs America’s strengths In front of me at the University of Chicago, and several times my height, is a stone carving of a half-human deity from the Assyrian empire. All round this exhibition on ancient Iraq are towering artefacts from lost cities and faded empires. The whole is overshadowed by a room featuring the Baghdad looting of 2003. Beside me, a father tries to answer a question from his son: ‘What happened to Babylon?’ The father attempts to explain how empires ebb and flow — how armies rise and fall.

Philip Bobbitt

Russia’s aggression in Georgia is a portent of perils to come

Philip Bobbitt says that the crisis reflects Russia’s determination to remain an old-fashioned nation state, dominating its region. Intellectual imagination will be needed to thwart that ambition: a recognition that the post-Cold War world needs new global institutions Georgia, which was admitted to the UN in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, was beset from the outset by the fatal conundrum at the heart of the national self-determination of the nation state: when is a nation — an ethnic, linguistic, historic-cultural idea — entitled to its own state? In Georgia, two nations — Abkhazis and Ossettians — were isolated within the majority population of ethnic Georgians.

Liam Byrne

Give us back our Big Idea, Mr Cameron

Liam Byrne — tipped for Cabinet promotion in the reshuffle — says that when Cameroons advocate ‘fraternity’ they are repackaging the Conservative case for the shrinking of the state The idea that we might have a fight about ‘fraternity’ at the next election shows just how far the centre ground of politics has moved. Not so long ago, people would have laughed if you suggested the Tories might have a stab at a row about feelings of solidarity. Indeed among Conservatives the very concept may still be a specialist taste. But a casual glance at David Cameron’s recent speeches reveals a pretty clear direction of travel. Having put his cards on the table and professed ‘there is more to life than money’ (David Cameron is worth some £3.