Features

Saturday

Simon Heffer

Gunning for game-shooting

The first fortnight of the shooting season has not been as auspicious as it might have been. This is not just because the grouse themselves are in short supply. It is also because, having put on to the statute book a crass, pointless and probably unenforcable law against the killing of vermin with hounds, the animal rights fascists are now turning their attention to the killing of birds with guns. The RSPCA, which used to do good work in persuading children to be kind to furry and feathered beasts, and still does perform a valuable public service through its inspectorate in tackling the genuine and sickening incidences of cruelty to animals, is also now heavily politicised and partisan in its opposition to field sports. It takes pride in its role in abolishing fox-hunting.

James Hughesonslow

Hop off, you Aussies

‘Individuals who seek to create fear, distrust and divisions in order to stir up terrorist activity will not be tolerated by the government or by our communities.’ So said Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, on Wednesday, when outlining the grounds on which undesirable foreigners can be deported or excluded from the UK. But you don’t have to create fear and distrust to find yourself excluded. Being Australian will do. Earlier this month, an old schoolfriend of my wife’s was booted out of England for no reason that she — or we — could understand. Julie Hope, a 50-year-old divorcee and mother of three grown-up children, arrived to stay with us in London in March.

Saturday

The Spectator

PCC adjudication on Rod Liddle’s blog-post ‘Benefits of a multi-cultural Britain’

Mr Oli Bird of London complained to the Press Complaints Commission that a blog posting on the Spectator’s website, published on 5 December 2009, contained inaccurate information in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice. The complaint was upheld. The piece under complaint was an entry on Rod Liddle’s regular blog for the Spectator’s website.  It said that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”.

Martin Vander Weyer

A land of puritans, snobs and socialists

Martin Vander Weyer on the British idea that businessmen are by nature greedy, heartless, incompetent or dishonest — or all four Our local arts festival this summer included a community opera with a large cast of children and teenagers, playing to a capacity audience of their families and friends. The show was so full of joy and energy that I came out with tears in my eyes — but also a feeling of unease. The problem was ideological: Maggio’s Magic — book and lyrics by Peter Spafford — was a theatrical triumph, but it was also a vivid parable of the perceived evils of capitalism, a reinforcement in all those young minds of an age-old British prejudice against the profit motive.

Roger Scruton

The sound of silence

The musical profession has never recognised borders. Composers, performers and ensembles have moved from city to city and country to country, learning and teaching, experimenting with local styles, adding to the repertoire and delighting patrons and the public. This cosmopolitanism belongs to the spirit of Western music, which is an art without frontiers, flowing unhindered into every corner of the civilised world. You can put together an orchestra in which no member shares ethnicity, language or creed with any other, and still be true to the spirit of Mozart, Debussy or Elgar. For our musical tradition is a universal bond between strangers.

Douglas Davis

United in hate

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Stranger still when the odd couple are fundamentalist Islam and the secular Left. The evolving Black–Red alliance is growing in France, Germany and Belgium. But, based on the successful British model, it is now going global to declare war on the war on terror. No fewer than three international conferences have been convened in Cairo, presided over by the former president of Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella, under the auspices of the International Campaign Against US and Zionist Occupations. One outcome is ‘The Cairo Declaration Against US Hegemony, War on Iraq and Solidarity with Palestine.

Andrew Neil

The last days of the Tartan Raj

Andrew Neil says the English should stop worrying about the invading Jocks: the northern grip on the nation’s politics, media and business is being irrevocably weakened by the dumbing down of the Scottish education system They gathered to praise Robin Cook in the forbidding Presbyterian aisles of Edinburgh’s St Giles’ Cathedral last Friday but the mourners — dominated by the good and the great of Scotland — should also have had heavy hearts for another reason: the setting of the sun on the Scottish Raj, which over the past three decades produced such a substantial tartan tinge into the upper echelons of British life.

Saturday

Dean Godson

Terror camps in the Lake District

Colin Cramphorn, the chief constable of West Yorkshire, occupies one of the two hottest seats in British policing today. Since it emerged that all four British suicide bombers of 7 July came from his patch, he has scarcely drawn breath. Cramphorn’s only relaxation in that fevered week came after his surgeon — who has been treating him for prostate cancer — called on the day of the police raids in Leeds and Dewsbury with the bad news that the tumour had spread to his spine. The consultant dispatched Cramphorn straight to the MRI scanner. ‘I stuck on my earphones, lay back and listened to Vivaldi,’ he recalls with customary matter-of-factness.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Sardonic genius

On the morning of 13 August 1985 I was at my desk at the London Evening Standard when Mary Kenny rang; she had left a message the previous evening on my answering machine at home which I had failed to pick up. Shiva Naipaul had held his 40th birthday party in the spring. Less than a week earlier, he had rung and suggested lunch, which I couldn’t make. Now Mary told me that he had died the day before. Shiva had always been afraid of death. In that respect alone it had come to him mercifully, when he was struck by a coronary thrombosis while sitting alone in his flat in Belsize Park. But what was merciful for him was awful for his wife Jenny, his son Tarun, and a group of friends who were more devoted to him than he may ever have quite known.

Bruce Anderson

Let them build nukes

It would appear to be another August crisis. From Washington to Tel Aviv there are expressions of alarm and despondency, especially in Brussels. It looks as if European diplomacy has failed. The Iranians seem determined to press ahead with their nuclear weapons programme. To judge by the newspapers, one would assume that this has come as a shock. But anyone involved with Iran policy who claims to be shocked is only pretending. Apart from Britain’s relations with the EU, it is hard to think of a foreign policy question on which there has been a greater divergence between the public version of events and the policy-makers’ private thoughts. Over the past few months, I have discussed Iran in Washington, Paris, London and Tel Aviv.

Andrew Gilligan

The real threat to Britain

In these frightening days, we must seek our consolations where we can; and one of mine, over the last month, has been running a private contest to log the most idiotic remark made by one of the battalions of ‘security experts’ on standby at times like this to provide vitally needed, life-sustaining, 24-hour fatuous commentary on all major broadcast news outlets. There was the lady from the prestigious think-tank on Sky News who said, quite late on 7 July, that the bombings were ‘clearly a major incident’. There was the ‘risk management consultant’ on The World Tonight who said that shooting people in the head, à la Jean Charles de Menezes, was not necessarily intended to kill them.

Theo Hobson

Don’t blame religion

Theo Hobson says that the suicide bombers are not inspired by a belief in an afterlife so much as by political ideology — like the kamikaze pilots of the second world war Heaven is the problem. That is what the atheists are saying. Religion is dangerous because it hooks us on heaven; it encourages us to prefer another world to this one. Once people are gulled into believing in eternal bliss, they are likely to be impatient for it. Is it any great surprise that some believers lose all respect for this world and its inhabitants, when they have been told that it is a shadowy antechamber to the real deal? This is what Matthew Parris said soon after the London bombings: that the problem lies not with extremist Islam but with any faith that dangles the afterlife before us.

Saturday

Mj Akbar

The home of jihad

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, aristocrat by temperament, catholic in taste, sectarian in politics, and the father of Pakistan, was the unlikeliest parent that an Islamic republic could possibly have. He was the most British of the generation of Indians that won freedom in August 1947. As a child in the elite Christian Mission High School in Karachi, he changed his birthday from 20 October to Christmas Day. As a student at Lincoln’s Inn, he anglicised his name from Jinnahbhai to Jinnah.

Matthew Bell

Just the ticket

Kate Middleton is a Home Counties brunette with pretty, if not quite supermodel, features who has been Prince William’s girlfriend for just over two years, and naturally speculation is flourishing that she will one day be his Queen. The couple are now reunited following William’s first official tour in New Zealand, and though the media largely spared them while they were both at St Andrews University, television and tabloid coverage is already threatening to be ruthless, especially since it now emerges that they will share a house in London. Despite the earlier denials of the Prince, friends now believe this is the prelude to marriage.

Harry Mount

New squawk

While Rudy Giuliani’s zero tolerance policy took care of crime, the Audubon Society, America’s RSPB, which celebrates its centenary this year, has been taking care of the birds. After decades when the only bird life that flourished in Manhattan was of the Bianca Jagger/Jerry Hall variety — and even they came close to starvation — New York has become one of the greatest bird-watching sites in the world. Within sight of the Empire State Building you can see 500-strong flocks of great egrets, snowy egrets, glossy ibises, cormorants and night herons, emigrés from southern climates nesting in colonies on the islands of New York harbour.

Michael Hanlon

Why do greens hate machines?

When George W. Bush last week stunned the world with his plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions, no one was more surprised than the green lobby. Human psychology being what it is, no one was more furious. It is not so much the scale of the planned reductions that have offended the eco-warriors: how could they possibly quibble with a proposal — supported by China, India, Japan, South Korea and Australia — to reduce greenhouse emissions by 50 per cent? No: what gets the greens’ goat is the methods that Mr Bush proposes to employ. What drives the greens nuts is the boundless technological optimism of Washington, and they have dismissed the plan in withering terms.

Saturday

Douglas Davis

Prince of peace

Prince Hassan bin Talal is the almost-man. After 34 years as heir-apparent to Jordan’s Hashemite throne, the crown was snatched away in 1999 by his dying brother, King Hussein, and handed to his son, the present King Abdullah II. Never mind; Hassan has other fish to fry. And so I visit the direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed (separated by a 42-generation blip) to discuss the terrorist attacks on London. In an elegant reception room at his West London home, the desert prince is wearing a pinstripe suit (his tailor would call him ‘portly’).

Patrick Sookhdeo

The myth of moderate Islam

The funeral of British suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer was held in absentia in his family’s ancestral village, near Lahore, Pakistan. Thousands of people attended, as they did again the following day when a qul ceremony was held for Tanweer. During qul, the Koran is recited to speed the deceased’s journey to paradise, though in Tanweer’s case this was hardly necessary. Being a shahid (martyr), he is deemed to have gone straight to paradise. The 22-year-old from Leeds, whose bomb at Aldgate station killed seven people, was hailed by the crowd as ‘a hero of Islam’. Some in Britain cannot conceive that a suicide bomber could be a hero of Islam. Since 7/7 many have made statements to attempt to explain what seems to them a contradiction in terms.

Saturday

Frederick Mocatta

He did it his way

In January, as the then schoolboy editor of the Eton College Chronicle, I wrote to Sir Edward Heath to ask him for an interview for my school magazine. A few days later, a typed letter from Sir Edward arrived through my letterbox. He was flattered, he wrote, to have been asked, and would be delighted to meet me, but he feared that such an interview, despite the Chronicle’s limited readership, would attract undue and unwanted attention to him in the run-up to the general election. We agreed, therefore, to meet in May. His secretary, when I rang her, told me he was ill. His mobility was poor, but ‘his mind is sharp as a new razor’. She warned me, ‘You can initially have 15 minutes with him.

Matt Price

Why Aussies are rooting for the Poms

Sydney First, a macabre coincidence. The last Ashes series, the eighth straight pitiful England capitulation, started days after the Bali bombing which killed 88 Australians and 26 British travellers. Now, as the Lord’s Test begins, London reels from the atrocious targeting of morning commuters. The recent bombings have evoked enormous and deserved admiration for stoical Londoners. Down in the convict colony, headline writers and cartoonists have utterly exhausted the clichés depicting ye-olde-Dart-never-surrender-stiff-upper-lipped-British-bulldog spirit. Still, as cricketing hostilities resume, you’d think there’d be scant room for sentiment.