The Trotskyists of the Right
The euro is back in the news and, if we accept conventional wisdom, that is bad for New Labour and good for the forces of conservatism.
Features
Saturday
Some are more guilty than other
Dig up the cricket pitch and chain yourself to the railings. Fling yourself in front of the monarch's horse. For the time has come to campaign for the release of Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare. You may hate the man and think him undeserving of your time and effort – but believe me, an injustice is being perpetrated. Archer is up for parole pretty soon, but he won't get it if David Blunkett and the Home Office have their way. Already Mr Blunkett's office has written to Martin Narey, the commissioner for corrective services, suggesting that Archer stay inside for a good deal longer – until December – and that parole be denied. Or at least this is alleged to have happened.
Saturday
Under the influence
HRH the Prince of Wales's two charities bearing his name rightly enjoy wide approval. Yet their work and the distinction between them is less than clear. The Prince's Foundation, a remarkably influential minnow, its turnover around £3 million, promotes improvement in the quality of urban life, the regeneration of cities and the teaching of traditional skills, some Islamic in origin. With human values in mind, it also plays a positive role in changing attitudes to education and the environment, many of the Prince's crusades now finding wide acceptance. Less complex, the Prince's Trust, with an impressive turnover of some £30 million and over 11,000 volunteers, offers support to disadvantaged young people in need of special help in education, training and business development.
Bad for business
Travel warnings are bad for business The Kenyan foreign minister, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, says that thousands are being laid off as a result of Britain's ban on flights to Nairobi Nairobi About four months ago I was invited as Kenya's new foreign minister to give a talk on the aims and goals of the new Kenyan government at Chatham House. My speech was an upbeat assessment of our future following one of the most peaceful and democratic elections in our continent's history. It was also an implicit appeal to our British, European and American friends to acknowledge that achievement and to recognise that Kenya has always been an unswerving friend of the West, first in the Cold War and today in the war against terrorism.
Is Saddam in Russia?
In Moscow on 19 March a press conference was held at the headquarters of the Interfax news agency announcing the results of a Muslim/Christian peacemaking trip to Baghdad, which had taken place over the previous few days. Among the returning dignitaries reporting on the outcome were the Orthodox Bishop Feofan of Magadan and Sinegorsk and the chairman of the Central Muslim Board in Russia, Supreme Mufti Talgat Tajuddin. But centre-stage at this Islamic/Christian peacefest was taken by a self-professed Buddhist, His Excellency Kirsan Ilumzhinov, President of the autonomous Russian republic of Kalmykia, who also happens to be president of Fidé, the World Chess Federation.
I am a Tory to my toes
It is modestly flattering to find one's views the subject of occasional comment by contributors to The Spectator. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is the latest to have a run at it ('A question of loyalty', 31 May). Perhaps I could assist future exegesis by setting out what my views actually are. First, I agree with Arthur Balfour that most human beings are capable of embracing a number of loyalties and identities at the same time. It is possible, for the sake of argument, to be a Canadian-born citizen with a British passport and a seat in the House of Lords. Churchill went further, arguing in 1930 that as international structures became more complex such overlapping loyalties would become not just possible but necessary.
The noble feat of Nike
Globalisation – otherwise known as 'ruthless international capitalism' – is enriching the world's poor, says Johan Norberg Nike. It means victory. It also means a type of expensive gym shoe. In the minds of the anti-globalisation movement, it stands for both at once. Nike stands for the victory of a Western footwear company over the poor and dispossessed. Spongy, smelly, hungered after by kids across the world, Nike is the symbol of the unacceptable triumph of global capital. A Nike is a shoe that simultaneously kicks people out of jobs in the West, and tramples on the poor in the Third World.
Why I quit teaching
I was on holiday when I read about my resignation as headmaster of St Edmund's. 'Head quits over Labour policies' read the headline. It came as quite a surprise. I knew I had resigned, but didn't think anyone would be interested. Then the story was mentioned on breakfast TV. A national paper took up the tale. Questions were asked in the House, and on Radio Norfolk. I began to wonder whether my obscure act of self-immolation might conceivably be noticed by the government. 'A very brave decision,' I was told time and again. It seemed to me, as Margaret Thatcher used to say, that there was no alternative. The spat between Charles Clarke and the Local Government Association, representing the nation's local education authorities, is very childish. Where are the missing millions?
The great pretender
Later this summer, on 2 August, Tony Blair's government will reach its most significant milestone yet. It will become the longest-serving Labour government in history, surpassing the record of six years and three months held by Clem Attlee between July 1945 and October 1951. There is no denying the magnitude of the achievement. Tony Blair has demonstrated that Labour can indeed be the natural party of government. He is already the first Labour leader to win two consecutive full terms, and there is little reason why he should not go on to a third. Blair has secured his electoral triumphs by creating a coalition around New Labour. His particular talent has been to draw together widely divergent and often contradictory interests.
Saturday
Figuration fights back
As art prizes go, the Jerwood Painting Prize is scrupulously even-handed: over the past nine years since its establishment, its shortlists have been models of inclusiveness. In particular, they have managed to strike a balance between figurative and abstract art, and this year's shortlist of six is no exception. It's split between three abstract painters in very different styles – John Hoyland, Marc Vaux and Suzanne Holtom – and three figurative painters ditto – Shani Rhys James, John Wonnacott and Alison Watt. As the UK's most prestigious painting prize, with the biggest pot, the Jerwood is an interesting index to swings in fashion between abstraction and figuration.
A victory for drug-pushers
This week Tony Blair was warned to brace himself for another huge increase in opium production in Afghanistan. Analysis of a harrowing United Nations report showed that the situation was catastrophically out of control. Inspectors surveyed 134 districts. They learnt that some 23 were planning to plant poppies for the first time in 2003, while another 50 were expecting to increase production. There were some successes for Afghan government-led attempts at elimination. In 28 districts, poppy eradication schemes had worked and production was falling. But these falls were minor compared with rises elsewhere. The report simply confirmed what UN officials have been saying privately for months.
The taste of freedom
Michael Wigan says that British farmers and consumers would be better off – and better fed.
Land of the free
Paul Robinson says we can learn a lot about decency and independence from plucky Canada You've probably heard that story about the Inuit having 50 words for snow? Well, the sign of a genuine Canadian is that he has 50 words for doughnut. When a glacial wind is howling through Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat and it has been dark for five months in Tuktoyaktuk, Canadians head for Tim Horton's, Dunkin' Donuts, Robin's Donuts, Country Style, Coffee Time, Baker's Dozen, and all the rest of them. When it comes to the perfect doughnut, Canada is the unquestioned world leader. In the less important matters of world politics and military strategy, Canada is rarely seen as a leader. Indeed, Canada-bashing is now very much in vogue, especially in right-wing circles in Britain and America.
A question of loyalty
Brussels When push comes to shove, I think I know which side Neil Kinnock is on. Eight years in Brussels – as propriétaire of Boris Johnson's crummy old digs at 76 rue van Campenhout – have not really gone to his head. Yes, he appears dutifully on the BBC as vice-president of the European Commission to justify persecution of the Metric Martyrs, while spitting off-air at the madness of hounding a Newcastle grocer for selling bananas by the pound. Just as dutifully, he once upheld the Labour policy of British withdrawal from Europe, against his better judgment, waiting until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 before committing his party to the position that served it so well – until this week. But that is because he is a man who values loyalty and discipline.
They love to hate us
We are going through one of those horrible and debilitating periods in our history when we are convinced that everybody hates us. Racked with grief, we may even begin to hate ourselves – and thus climb into bed at night praying that we might wake up as Turks. Or Irishmen. It is partly the Eurovision Song Contest. For years we have foisted jaunty, sub-American pop pap on our European neighbours and watched as they lapped it all up, imitated it and vomited it back across the North Sea with Scandinavian or German accents. The more inane our pop exports, the more the Europeans loved them; hence that memorable high-water mark of 'Making Your Mind Up', by Bucks Fizz: a Song Contest winner, a Continental number one, and possibly the most stupid song ever written.
Television creates terrorists
Driving through the streets of Baghdad last week, I was struck by the number of satellite dishes for sale everywhere. After years in which the appliances were banned by Saddam, freedom is sprouting all over the skyline. There is still an almost total absence of local media, so that Iraqis know nothing of what is going on in their own country except by rumour. But those who can afford a dish are eagerly beginning to learn about the world. They can get the BBC, CNN and even the Fox Channel; though these are not, alas, the only ones they are watching. Unless we are careful, we are about to lose a crucial propaganda war. I myself flicked through the channels on the rather antiquated television set in my room at the Baghdad Sheraton and found broadcasts from Abu Dhabi and from Iran.
Saturday
Quick-fix solutions
Here's a random sample of my postbag: an invitation to a mixed exhibition of nine artists' interpretation of 'focus' through painting, photography, digitisation and computer manipulation; notice of a show of photo-text, photo-document and photo-juxtaposition-cum-montage pieces about HIV and place; and the press release for an installation of scarlet mobility scooters which is supposed to be 'a reflection on age, youth and contemporary Britain'. Clearly Britain is in a bad way. A watered-down conceptual art is the current orthodoxy. Much of what looked new and radical when it first emerged in the 1960s is now being run past us again, and it's limping badly. And so much of it is the same.
‘I let go of life’
A purple-coloured Korean saloon was gaining on us fast as we zigzagged the wrong way up the motorway. My toes ached as I forced the accelerator into the floor. The jeep gamely shuddered and rattled as the exhaust dropped off, the whine of the engine turning into a desperate roar. When I was growing up, my mother had always insisted that passengers in her car clench their buttocks to squeeze a few extra miles out of the tank. It often seemed to work. Now I was cramping my backside for dear life – literally. Groaning with fear, I couldn't get more than 90mph out of the coughing jeep. The purple car swept past, swerved in front, then three guns popped out of its windows. After two months in Iraq, we were just a few hours' drive from sanity at the Jordanian border.
Growing old gracelessly
My parents died quickly and hygienically, without any sort of precursory illness. I have no siblings, aunts, uncles or cousins whose descent into sordid infirmity might have obliged me to visit them. I have a small platoon of children, it is true, but they all live with their mothers and have saved me from childhood mewlings and pubescent messiness. As a teenager and famed walker of hills, I piled humiliations on the heads of less robust friends, but at night I would steal across the fields in search of a private latrine pit. In my last summer before university I spent months hefting cast-iron dustbins full of wet ash for Liverpool Corporation, before heading off to Switzerland and attacking the Bernese Oberland like a hardened stormtrooper.
British churchmen back Mugabe
It is remarkable for Britain to be visited by a saint. But that was surely our good fortune last week, when Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, passed through London. This gentle and soft-spoken former goatherd is a man of great holiness. In a country where churchmen have kept quiet, Ncube has consistently spoken out with extraordinary courage and firmness against the near-genocide that Robert Mugabe is visiting upon the Zimbabwean people. Week after week, from the pulpit of Bulawayo Cathedral, Ncube uses his sermons to make a Christian protest against the torture, intimidation, rape, murders and forced starvation that are part of the daily rigours of Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF regime.