Features

Saturday

Bruce Anderson

Conduct unbecoming

Actions are being taken in the British people’s name which should make us feel appalled. The government’s behaviour towards the British army has been despicable. In Northern Ireland, there are plans to give an amnesty to IRA terrorists who were never prosecuted because they went on the run. Though an unappealing prospect, that could be regarded as falling within the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement. But someone saw a difficulty. What if evidence emerged which could lead to the prosecution of a British soldier, after all the terrorists had won immunity. A bizarre solution was found. It is proposed to re-examine thousands of killings which took place in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, including the killings of terrorists by members of the security forces.

Saturday

Leo McKinstry

Young people are the business

Lazy, ignorant, shallow and irresponsible, more interested in taking drugs than in proper study, too apathetic to make it to the polling station but not to an ecstasy-fuelled rave: those are the images often associated with young people in modern Britain. Survey after survey shows widespread illiteracy and innumeracy among teenagers. At the ever-expanding universities, it is said that terror of placing too heavy an intellectual burden on students has resulted in remorseless grade inflation and undemanding degree courses like media studies and golf-course management. The anxiety about youth is graphically reflected in the current hysteria about binge drinking.

James Delingpole

Profiles in courage

Have you ever escaped from captivity by removing from your boot the serrated surgical wire cunningly disguised as a shoelace and sawing through the windpipe of your hapless, squirming guard? Me neither, but I know someone who has. He’s a lovely old boy, gentle, thoughtful, slightly melancholy and, but for that unsettlingly sardonic smile and the gimlet glint in his eye, you’d never imagine for a moment that he could have killed anyone. But he did, quite a few times in fact, during his service in the second world war with the commandos. On this particular occasion, he had been captured with three of his comrades outside Dunkirk.

Patrick Sookhdeo

Will London burn too?

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, has warned recently of ‘sleepwalking our way to segregation’. Although he was not speaking principally about Muslims, they have become perhaps the most dominant group in British society. Divided along ethnic and sectarian lines, Muslims are nevertheless united by their creed, their law and the powerful concept of the umma, the totality of Muslims worldwide. The process of migrating and establishing a Muslim community in a non-Muslim context has an important place in Islamic theology. The word hijra is used to describe such a migration, in particular the migration of Mohammed and his followers in ad 622 from Mecca, where they were persecuted, to Medina where they established the first Islamic state.

Rod Liddle

The crescent of fear

As France burned, the mullahs arrived on the scene, shook their heads sadly and immediately issued a fatwa. However, for the many Frenchmen who may have shuddered inwardly when they heard the term so invoked, this was a good fatwa, a nice fatwa, a fatwa to be proud of. The mullahs swung by and ordained that Allah would be extremely cross if Muslims torched any more cars, shot any more policemen, lobbed any more petrol bombs or murdered any more elderly white people. Allah wanted Muslims instead to stay at home, potter about the house, maybe watch a little TV.

Saturday

John Laughland

Full Marx for George Bush

Ever since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there has been a seemingly endless flow of self-congratulatory comment in the West about how former communist countries — and even some which have remained communist — are gradually westernising and learning the ropes in the capitalist jungle. Very often, these countries’ so-called progress is in fact cultural decline: the advent of bars for transsexuals in Havana, for instance, has been adduced as evidence of Cuba’s ‘liberalisation’. But the equal and opposite movement nearly always goes unnoticed — the way in which the West has itself adopted many of the old nostrums of communism, and especially the twin doctrines of revolution and internationalism.

Jonathan Mirsky

A gangster comes to town

Jonathan Mirsky says that the state visit to Britain of China’s President is no cause for celebration When China’s President Hu Jintao sits next to the Queen at her state banquet for him on 8 November he will be a contented man. In the words of the Royal Academy of Arts, ‘China Turns London Red’. Somerset House, the London Eye and other buildings will be illuminated in the Communist party’s preferred colour to mark, says the Academy, ‘an extraordinary moment in Britain’s continuing relationship with China’.

Richard Ehrman

A dying breed

By mid-century, the world’s population will be 50 per cent higher than it is now, says Richard Ehrman, but the boom will come from developing countries, not Europe, and that’s very bad news indeed If demography is destiny, then, on the face of it, Britain should be feeling pretty smug. In late May the number of people in the UK finally passed the 60 million mark. By 2031, according to official projections released last month, there will be 67 million of us. While populations across most of the rest of Europe are stagnating, and many will soon be shrinking, ours is booming. So why does this bountiful prospect make so many of us uneasy? A century ago such news would have been greeted with jubilation, as another sign of national virility and self-confidence.

Saturday

Paul Robinson

The return of White Russia

‘Unbelievable,’ the professor told me. It was hard to disagree. We had just laid flowers on the grave of the anti-communist Russian philosopher Ivan Alexandrovich Il’in. Just a short time ago, mere possession of one of Il’in’s books would have brought six years in prison. Now the Russian state has reburied the philosopher in Moscow with all the pomp and ceremony it could muster. Earlier this month the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexei II, presided over a service of reburial at the Donskoi monastery in Moscow for not only Il’in but also his far more famous contemporary General Anton Denikin, head of the anti-Bolshevik White forces in southern Russia during the Russian civil war.

Andrew Gilligan

A terrifying plan for pre-emptive nuclear strikes

Britain, the Prime Minister will be pleased to learn, once had a nuclear weapon named the Tony. (It was a prototype warhead to be fitted to the Bloodhound surface-to-air missile, tried in the 1950s but never developed.) The record books of our great nation’s early nuclear experiments also yield something called the Peter (appropriately enough, a trigger device for a larger explosion) but, alas, no Alastair, no Gordon (though there was, perhaps in anticipation of the late Robin Cook, another prototype unhappily christened the Pixie). The first-generation Tony, produced by trench-coated chaps with soldering irons in a collection of sheds just off the A340, was reassuringly cheap. Hidden under a thick 1950s bedsheet of secrecy, it was also free from specific public controversy.

Saturday

Mary Wakefield

Is homeopathy really hogwash?

It didn’t occur to me until a few weeks ago to question homeopathy. Of course it worked. I grew up with it; my aunt Liz was and still is a homeopathic practitioner and for us — my mother, father, aunts, uncles, brother, cousins — calling Liz was the natural reaction to the slightest swollen gland. We weren’t loopy: if things got dangerous, a trained doctor would be summoned but as he tapped and tutted, the aunts would hover, a copy of First Aid Homeopathy in Accidents and Ailments by Dr D.M. Gibson to hand. My childhood memories are full of the taste of little sugary pills — ‘There, open wide, let it dissolve on your tongue’ — and the rhythmic clinking of remedies being beaten into water with a hundred stirs of a silver spoon.

Ian Birrell

The hell I share with David Cameron

My daughter suffered two seizures the other night. One was shortly after midnight, the other a couple of hours later. Having been away on business the previous night, it was my turn to get up to comfort her, to check that the fits were not life-threatening and, afterwards, to settle her back to sleep. Five hours later the alarm went off and, as my teenage son stomped into the shower, I popped back into her bedroom to check that she was still asleep — and still alive. This was a typical night in our house, and it was followed by a typical day of attempting to balance work and family while caring for a severely disabled child and engaging in a ceaseless battle with the bureaucracy of our public services.

Tom Gross

Dead Jews aren’t news

British newspapers care greatly about some victims of the Israel army, says Tom Gross, but not the Jewish victims of Palestinian terror — even if they are British Rachel Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following a suicide bomb attack on a crowd of teenagers on 16 February 2002. Even though Thaler was a British citizen, born in London, where her grandparents still live, her death has never been mentioned in a British newspaper. Rachel Corrie, on the other hand, an American radical who died in 2003 while acting as a human shield during an Israeli anti-terror operation in Gaza, has been widely featured in the British press.

Quentin Letts

The Tories pick a winner

Less than six weeks ago a threadbare group of Conservative MPs, from what one might call the boarding-school wing of the party, assembled in a small, air-conditioned room in Portcullis House, Westminster. Not everyone was punctual. The Commons was deep in recess. The fifth Test against Australia was flickering on television sets around London SW1, Mark Nicholas saying, ‘there’s still plenty of time in this game’. But was there? September-heavy houseflies buzzed against window panes as the team supporting David Cameron’s bid for the Tory leadership excavated their ear wax and pondered a different sort of leader — in the Times.

Saturday

Tony Leon

Why South Africa backs Mugabe

Tony Leon says the Zimbabwean leader’s histrionics appeal to the resentment and Soviet nostalgia of southern Africa’s elite Cape Town It was a proud moment for aviation in Zimbabwe. The country was suffering the worst fuel crisis in its history; hospitals were reverting to ox-drawn ambulances. But still the Zimbabwean air force managed to stage a spectacular air show last month to celebrate its 25th anniversary. In recognition of this astounding logistical feat, the South African air force sent its own planes to join the fun, including a squadron of fighter jets, two helicopters and the Silver Falcons aerobatics team. Our defence minister explained that it was necessary for South African pilots ‘to test their skills against other defence forces’.

Vernon Bogdanor

The Tories need a genuine liberal

Vernon Bogdanor says that David Cameron is the only Conservative who can read the nation’s mood and respond to it In the 1960s Harold Wilson sought to make Labour the natural party of government. Tony Blair seems to have succeeded in doing so. The Conservatives have now been in opposition for eight years, their longest period out of government since the days of Asquith and Lloyd George before 1914. Never before, during the period of mass suffrage, have they lost three consecutive general elections. Moreover, at no stage since 1997 have they appeared credible as a potential party of government. That is bad, not only for the Conservatives but also for the country.

Richard North

Europe is costing us a bomb

The threat to our national security has seldom been greater. Not only are historic regiments being scrapped — or amalgamated — but the fundamental reorganisation of armed forces now under way is likely to undermine the special relationship with the United States, and thus a key element in our defence strategy. There is, of course, nothing wrong in principle with the reorganisation: it has been embarked on to accommodate a technological revolution in warfare. This revolution is as profound as the switch from horse to tank. The term for the new military technology is ‘netcentric warfare’ and it aims to meld high-tech weaponry with the power of computers, satellites and advanced digital communications.

Ross Clark

Death, drugs and red tape

Over the next few weekends, the gardens of 23 stately homes will be opened up to several thousand sponsored fun-runners who, demonstrating the typically huge generosity shown towards cancer charities by the British public, will raise £2.5 million for oncology research. Elsewhere, the stalls at village shows will heave with home-baked cakes, thousands will empty their lofts to send surplus possessions to Cancer Research shops, and many more will be stuffing ‘pinkie rings’ on to their fingers and toes in order to support work on breast cancer. In all, Britons last year raised £302 million for cancer charities, far more than any other country in Europe.

Saturday

Aidan Hartley

Terror in Mogadishu

On a recent drive in downtown Mogadishu with ten heavily armed bodyguards, I passed the site of the old US embassy, and observed a melancholy scene that Britain and the USA might ponder if they decide to bale out of Iraq early. The embassy has been totally demolished, either out of hatred or because Mogadishu’s benighted inhabitants need bricks with which to build their hovels. The site is now a forest of thorns browsed by camels. Washington has long regarded Somalia as nothing but a nasty backwater populated by ungrateful Africans, but the continuing violence there — much of it directed by Islamic extremists — suggests that the country may become the springboard for an Africa-wide Islamic jihad.

Ross Clark

Guilty until proved innocent

Ross Clark shows that Tony Blair’s new theory of justice is both sinister and historically illiterate I don’t know whether Maria Otone de Menezes, the mother of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot by police at Stockwell underground station on 22 July, has hired the services of a PR firm, but even Max Clifford could not have timed better her arrival in Britain. As Mrs Menezes and other members of her family surveyed the spot where her son was summarily executed on suspicion of being a terrorist, the Prime Minister was on a stage in Brighton saying this: ‘We are trying to fight 21st-century crime — antisocial behaviour, drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime — with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens.