Features

Saturday

George Osborne

Losing out in China

Through all the changes of the past decades, Tiananmen Square still sums up China. I was there last week and the first thing that strikes you is its size. Like many things in China, it is the biggest of its kind in the world. China also has the largest population and the biggest army, produces the most cement, and has put much of this into the world’s largest dam. Combined with the world’s highest rate of sustained economic growth, this makes China both the greatest threat to British economic complacency and the biggest opportunity for UK exporters. Tiananmen Square also reflects China as it is divided: Mao’s mausoleum, a grisly relic of unhappier times, cuts it in two.

Interconnect

RACE AND CULTURE: Whites need not apply

The ideology of multiculturalism is theoretically meant to build a more tolerant, inclusive Britain. But in practice it is a deeply racist concept, one that judges people by their ethnic origin and thereby promotes division in our society. The very basis of multiculturalism is a contradiction of the democratic principle that everyone should be treated equally, regardless of their background or skin colour. Through its obsession with racial identity, this pernicious creed actually encourages discrimination. The first anti-racism campaigners in Britain fought for equality, demanding government action to combat overt racial prejudice in employment and the provision of public services, especially housing. But since the early 1980s the agenda of anti-racism has changed.

Interconnect

RACE AND CULTURE: ‘Schooling people to be strangers’

About halfway through our interview, Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, lets out a snort of exasperation. It had been building up for quite a while, I think; every time I quoted some good old leftie shibboleth about race relations I sensed a hidden snort or a stifled guffaw. Eventually the man could hold back no longer. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You can’t make people love people of other races. You just can’t. And you can’t have a law which says we have to love each other. That’s bonkers.

Peter Oborne

RACE AND CULTURE: ‘Israel’s actions affect our security’

The weeks since the death of Robin Cook have seen an unwholesome squabble concerning who will inherit the ‘legacy’ of the former foreign secretary. Chancellor Gordon Brown made an instant smash-and-grab raid, while allies of the Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain have been furtively suggesting that he is the true inheritor. There is a respectable case to be made, however, that the backbencher John Denham is the only mainstream Labour politician who has a legitimate claim to step into Robin Cook’s shoes. Denham’s resignation on the eve of the Iraq war was rather more courageous even than Robin Cook’s, because he had far more to lose. Denham was on the way up.

Saturday

Leo McKinstry

Disability allowances

An insidious paradox lies at the heart of the modern thrust for disability rights. This agenda is supposed to promote equality and fair treatment, goals to which no one could object. Yet the official definition of disability is now so wide, so all-embracing, that it includes the feckless, the antisocial, even the criminal. In the madhouse of today’s Britain, even the crack addict and the violent thug can be classified as disabled under anti-discrimination regulations. Such absurdities have arisen because of the influence of the psychiatric profession, which has decided that almost any selfish or dangerous conduct can now be categorised as mental illness.

Ross Clark

Fear in the community

The local people who turned out to see Princess Helen Louise open the new wing of St Leonard’s Hospital in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1938 would not have recognised the term ‘stakeholder’, but they would seem to have fitted perfectly Tony Blair’s vision of a breed of socially responsible citizens helping to run the country’s public services. ‘They paid for the hospital through voluntary subscriptions of a few pence a week,’ says local historian Barry Wall. ‘The hospital had been built in 1867 using the proceeds of the sale of the site of an old leper home which had been in existence since the reign of Edward II. But it was local people who paid to keep it going.

Saturday

Boris Johnson

How to live for ever

I found myself in disgrace a while ago when I contrived to fly my family to a Greek airport called Preveza, only to discover on arrival that they didn’t have a hire car big enough for our purposes. It was about 11 p.m. and I was standing pathetically thinking about buses and looking at a map of the area when I saw that Preveza was really called Preveza Aktio. ‘Hey!’ I said to my wife. ‘It’s fantastic!’ ‘What is fantastic?’ she asked in the tones of someone still faintly hoping that her husband would produce a people carrier. ‘It’s Actium,’ I cried. ‘All my life I have wanted to see Actium!’ ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘and I’m still waiting to see some action from you.

Interconnect

The Flintoff phenomenon

Michael Henderson talks to the sporting hero who is set to lift England’s hearts at the Oval ‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ But when it comes, as it has this summer, what joys fly upon its wings. As the fifth and final cricket Test against Australia takes place at the Oval this weekend, the whole kingdom, it seems, is one with Shelley. Should England, who are 2–1 to the good, win or draw, they will regain the Ashes, the little urn that symbolises the longest-running rivalry in international sport, and banish 16 years of humiliation.

Interconnect

The cowardice of the BBC

The peculiar and very bitter New Labour vendetta against the BBC presenter, John Humphrys, has at last drawn blood. Our government really, really hates the man and it is being aided in its campaign by one or two sycophantic News International journalists and one or two naive or envious souls from within the BBC itself. For the best part of a decade, New Labour has repeatedly accused the Today presenter of engendering within the listening public a cynical attitude towards politicians. It is, the spin doctors aver, the ‘Humphrys Problem’ and for seven years the Prime Minister has conspicuously avoided being interviewed by the man.

Patrick J-Buchanan

Is this the end of empire?

Washington What did Katrina tell us? Much we already knew. Our politics is as poisoned as in the Nixon era. Even the worst disasters are exploited to score on one’s enemy. Where September 11 united us, Katrina divides us anew. No sooner had she made landfall than Robert Kennedy Jr was accusing the beleaguered Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour of moral complicity in the disaster — for having opposed the Kyoto Protocol. As it became apparent that African– Americans, two thirds of New Orleans’s population and almost all its poor, had stayed behind or been left behind, the race card was played. Bush was indifferent, it was said, because those suffering most were black.

Walter Ellis

The grim lessons of Katrina

New York It is tempting when looking back on natural catastrophes to see them as symbols of the affected nation’s fatal departure from good sense or moral progress. Hubris is retrospectively invoked to justify the evident nemesis. The horrific events in New Orleans and surrounding territories are being picked apart, like entrails in aboriginal Africa, as though there might be a clue, even a message, that will explain how America has begun to fall apart. In a bid to pre-empt at least some of Congress’s investigative zeal, the President announced on Monday that he would carry out his own inquiry into the catastrophe, but senators and congressmen refuse to be deterred and are to launch their own investigation.

Saturday

Ross Clark

Flap over nothing

Who believes that bird flu may cause as many as 50 million deaths? Ross Clark doesn’t, and here’s why I don’t personally know anyone suffering from malaria or tuberculosis, but I imagine that if they have been following the Western media they must have found the past week somewhat surreal. Half a billion people are now suffering from malaria, of whom about one million will be dead by this time next year. Nine million are suffering from tuberculosis, two million of whom will die in the next 12 months.

Peter Oborne

Who runs the Tory party?

Peter Oborne says that Ken Clarke’s leadership bid comes at a time of almost unprecedented anger and chaos in Westminster and the constituencies The Prime Minister faced a number of grave problems on his return from his Caribbean holiday this week: the collapse of his policy in Iraq, a sharp downturn in the British economy, a looming funding crisis in the health service. However, one ingredient was entirely missing: political opposition. Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, is apparently in a state of hibernation, while the Tories have turned in on themselves. They are unable to make more than a perfunctory contribution to public debate, and this lamentable state of affairs will continue until they elect a new leader.

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.