Features

Saturday

Rachel Royce

Girls just want to have funds

The government would like to outlaw pyramid selling. Why? Rachel Royce has joined Hearts, the girls-only investment scheme, and finds it good, clean – and profitable – fun I have a confession to make – but please don't tell my boyfriend. I've made a somewhat high-risk investment. It will cost me £375, but for that I can expect a return of £6,000 – maybe. It's a gamble – I know it's a gamble – but I thought that amount of money could be laundered from the housekeeping, lost somewhere among the cornflakes and the chardonnay and bailiff demands for forgotten Blockbuster videos. The scheme I've invested in is known as Hearts, and it's for women only. It calls itself a 'gifting scheme that benefits all women'.

Saturday

Tom Flynn

The sacred in secular societies

Those nations and cultural groups lobbying Western museums for the restitution of cultural property acquired during the colonial period are accustomed to having their requests denied on the grounds that modern museums should not be required to atone for historical contingencies. A recent declaration by a group of leading international museum directors phrased it like this: 'The objects and monumental works that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones.' In other words, that was then, this is now.

Andrew Kenny

Black fascism

Cape Town Anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of South Africa should pay careful attention to a speech made by President Mbeki at an official funeral in the Eastern Cape on 22 June. Surrounded by powerful black leaders of the new, liberated South Africa, Mbeki gave a eulogy for the departed man and urged the nation to rally behind his dream and to carry on his work. The deceased was the leading black supporter of apartheid, Kaiser Matanzima, the former president of the Transkei 'homeland', Pretoria's ultimate stooge in the days of white minority rule. The two key figures in the formation of 'Grand Apartheid' were Hendrik Verwoerd and Kaiser Matanzima.

James Delingpole

I’m boring, I’m ugly and I can’t write

My new book, Thinly Disguised Autobiography, is not just good. It's absolutely bloody amazing. The drug scenes make Irvine Welsh look like Mary Poppins; the sex scenes are more realistic than the real thing; it's the finest dissection of the English class system since Evelyn Waugh; the dialogue rocks; it's funny and moving, pacy, and lyrical enough when it needs to be but never so purple that you get bogged down in descriptions of trees or furniture; it's at least as wittily post-modern as Dave Eggers but without the cloying sentimentality; the squalid bits outfoul Martin Amis; it's better edited than The Corrections; and the ending, when with sorrow you reach it, turns out to be so blindingly brilliant that you go, 'Bugger me. That was a brilliant ending.

Simon Nixon

Whistling in the dark

Power cuts and rolling blackouts are about as Old Labour as rising taxes and paranoia about spooks, so it should come as no surprise that astute observers of the political scene are stockpiling candles. A report published this week explains why. According to the Institution of Civil Engineers (Ice), Britain is heading for a repeat of the 1974 three-day week, with the government forced to impose power cuts and homes left without light and heat. Ice says these problems will be upon us by 2020, but many industry experts think this is too optimistic.

Andrew Gimson

Let’s hear it for traffic wardens

They are among the most hated people in urban Britain and – because many of them are from west Africa – often the victims of racial abuse. But, says Andrew Gimson, without their bravery and dedication our civilisation might collapse Get a proper job, get a life, sod off back to Africa, black monkey, African prick, storm trooper, German scum. These are among the many insults thrown at parking wardens as they go about their daily work. The jibes about Africa reflect the curious fact that in London about 60 per cent of traffic wardens are from west Africa, while the jibes about Germany reflect the German ownership of Apcoa, one of the main companies in the parking business.

Saturday

Peter Williams

Pedantry and philistine parsimony

The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) was established five years ago to support research and postgraduate study within the UK's higher education institutions. But to read its website or its voluminous guides to applicants is a depressing experience – even if it is only to familiarise oneself with the hurdles colleagues have to jump to get a bit of money most would not need if they were properly paid in the first place or did not have their creativity consumed by overlarge student bodies and by work assessments of various specious kinds. I am deeply sorry for younger academics today, who will never know how wonderful it used to be to work in a university. Of course, the AHRB is not the only instance of the degradation to which academics and real scholars have now to submit.

Jo Johnson

French farce

It is Hollywood's most predictable script. 'Dazzle foreign investors, force them to spend as much as possible and then drive them out once they're broke.' For the third time in a decade, the French are beating a humiliating retreat from Beverly Hills. This time the French national champion in question – Vivendi Universal, a once mighty conglomerate run into the ground by a megalomaniac called Jean-Marie Messier – has taken such a drubbing, it is doubtful that there will ever be a sequel. For the past 12 months, a company that was once the undisputed flagship of French capitalism has been on its knees begging its banks for mercy. France's largest private-sector employer has escaped bankruptcy thanks only to the embarrassed intervention of the French establishment.

Richard Branson

Come fly with me

Most Spectator readers no doubt know that this is the 100th anniversary of aviation and that the patriotic American brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, flew the world's first aeroplane. I would imagine most of the readers have also heard of Charles Lindbergh, who was the first man to fly across the Atlantic in 1927. These names, along with Chuck Yeager, Buzz Aldrin and most recently Steve Fossett, join a host of other Americans who had 'the Right Stuff' and are etched into both the history of aviation as well as the imagination of every child enthusiast who looks up at the sky. Sadly, virtually no one realises that this year is really the 150th anniversary of aviation.

Richard Comber

It could be you

Do you suspect you soon may be going to lose your marbles? And are you over 65? Or do you suspect your elderly parents may be going to lose theirs? Is this loss of faculties likely to be a serious one? Then do not inquire in New Labour's New Britain for whom the bell of despair tolls. It tolls for thee. The care of the elderly mentally ill is in meltdown in much of the country and can only get far worse. It is a national disaster, made worse by the old and infirm who lack the energy and means to defend themselves. It is callous and shameful. I was a community psychiatric nurse until I retired earlier this year with exhausted relief. Every day I came across tragedies which make the admirable Dr Theodore Dalrymple sound like an optimist.

John Sweeney

The first casualty of Pilger…

The Americans are making a hash of rebuilding Iraq, but one of the not so bad things they have done is to give Iraqis the freedom to scribble. On the wall outside the Baathist ministry of health the other day, a graffiti artist had scrawled in perfect English, 'We need a health ministry free of corruption.' For years John Pilger – 'one of the world's most renowned investigative journalists', it says on the back of his latest book – has been insisting that the West, not Saddam, is to blame for the crisis in Iraq's public health; that 5,200 Iraqi children were dying every month; that Western depleted-uranium weapons were to blame for an epidemic of cancers; that sanctions crippled Iraq's doctors.

Sean Thomas

Self abuse

I never used to like pornography – not really. Yes, in my teens in the Seventies I used to have the odd copy of Mayfair under my pillow; yes, as a student in the Eighties I used to filch the occasional Fiesta from my flatmates. But on the whole I didn't really go for jazz mags or blue movies. I found them tedious, repetitive, absurd and very embarrassing to buy. There was also a certain bleakness about the harder, nastier porn videos: all those sad and sorry women; all those contrived and silly poses. And as for the guys with mullets and thick moustaches: ugh! In 2001 I went online. A few months later, sitting idly at my laptop feeling a bit bored of typing my own name into Google, I decided to have a peek at all this porn that was supposed to be saturating the Net.

Ross Clark

Public scandal

To get elected in 1997 Tony Blair championed the cause of 'Mondeo Man', a hard-working, hard-driving travelling salesman who had suffered from years of negative equity and suppressed bonuses. It is not Mondeo Man, however, who has ended up as the beneficiary of Labour's six years in office. It is Principal Project Delivery Officer Person. That antihero of Chekhov, the white-collar government employee, is emerging as the hero of Blair's Britain. Forget the corporate fat cats supposedly draining the British economy dry through their self-rewarding of failure; it is the public sector that is enjoying the explosion in pay.

Rod Liddle

Back to basic instincts

Few people are entitled to more compassion than young men thus affected [by love]; it is a species of insanity that assails them, and it produces self-destruction in England more frequently than in all the other countries put together.William Cobbett, 1829 What on earth is the Conservative party going to do about sexual intercourse? People are having it off all over the place, willy-nilly, apparently oblivious to the possibility that one day Hell may swallow them up and devour them for such libidinous recklessness.

Saturday

Clive Davis

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Mark Glazebrook

Chaos in Venice

A couple of vaporetto stops in the direction of the Lido, from near Piazza San Marco – fortified, perhaps, by a cold glass of wine and some lively light music from the immaculately dressed band outside Florians – and you are in the merciful shade of the public gardens, where some of the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale have stood, designed like temples, for a hundred years or so. Here, every two years, you can be sure that, in the form of chaos, all hell will break loose. ,img>It will break loose quite soon during your passionate search for a glimpse of up-to-the-minute visual delight or significance. Visual art is the focus in theory, but other issues compete for the viewer's attention.

Angela Ellisjones

The year aliens became alien

Uncontrolled immigration? A burden on the taxpayer? Terrorists in our midst? The current immigration crisis echoes events of 100 years ago which led to the passage of Britain's first piece of immigration law. From the 1880s onwards, increasing numbers of Russian and Polish Jews sought refuge from pogroms in their homelands. With its long tradition of admitting refugees, Britain was a favoured destination. Germans, Americans and other nationalities also came in their thousands. Between 1891 and 1901, Britain's alien population grew by nearly 70,000, to reach a total of 286,000. Of these, 135,000 lived in London. At this time, there was no British legislation on immigration. Britain was the only country in Europe which had no means of excluding any foreigner who wished to enter.

Christopher Howse

Piano-player in a brothel

Christopher Howse says that Malcolm Muggeridge, born 100 years ago, was very much a man of the 20th-century world – but rebelled against it Twenty years ago Malcolm Muggeridge, with a grimace of welcome, met me at Robertsbridge station, like many another. To reach the Sussex cottage that he shared with Kitty, his wife of 50 years, he had to drive across a fast main road, down which articulated lorries careered. Without slowing down he continued straight across, looking neither to right nor to left. This Russian roulette driving, like his tolerance of curious visitors to Park Cottage, betrayed an underlying trust in an unknown providence that he had spent a lifetime tempting. Muggeridge, born 100 years ago, embodied Western man in the 20th century. And he became its contradiction.

Tim Butcher

How shellfish is that?

Hermanus You can forget car-jacking, mugging and necklacing. In South Africa the worst crime problem centres on an oddly shaped bottom-dweller. Known locally as perlemoen but elsewhere as abalone, the seawater shellfish has sparked a poaching and smuggling racket that is outgrowing all other crime in a country widely held to be the world's most criminal. Poachers have been drowned by rivals, gun battles have erupted in supposedly sleepy seaside resorts, and customs officials have been bribed on an industrial scale. And the whole thing is being choreographed by Chinese triads. The situation is so critical that a joint police, coastguard and army task-force has been set up under Operation Neptune to deal with the crisis.

Simon Heffer

Dumb and dumber

At the end of January the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, declared that 'Education for its own sake is a bit dodgy'. 'The idea,' he went on, 'that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right. You need a relationship with the workplace.' He also said that he didn't care too much whether anyone studied the classics any more, and even added it might not be such 'a bad thing' if there were to be a decline in highbrow subjects at university altogether. So, nearly 150 years after Charles Dickens invented – and pilloried – Mr Gradgrind, with his 'facts, facts, facts', hard times are back in English education. Only 0.2 per cent of GCSEs taken in this country are in Latin, and only a fraction of that in Greek.