The Spectator

Thursday

September 27, 2012

Proud to be plebs Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell denied calling policemen in Downing Street ‘plebs’. The term has its origins in ancient Rome but was also used as a badge of pride by members of the workers’ education movement in the early 20th century. — The League of the Plebs grew out of a power struggle at Ruskin College, the institution founded in Oxford in 1899 to provide opportunities for academic education for trade unionists, and later alma mater to John Prescott. — In 1908 a group of students, supported by the principal Dennis Hird but opposed by the governing body, protested that the education on offer was too timid, and began lectures in Marxism.

The Spectator

Letters | 27 September 2012

From our UK edition

Bureaucratic excesses Sir: Your otherwise excellent leader on the billions wasted by Department for International Development (22 September) fails to mention the duplication and excesses in the department and its parent Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Around the world there are only three classes of country: those whose money we want, those who need our money and those to whom we are indifferent, at least financially. In the first group we need embassies or high commissions but no DfID, in the second we need DfID but no FCO, and in the third we need neither. It is absurd to send aid to India, for example, a country richer than ours. It offends the Indians and implies we know how India should be run better than they do.

The Spectator

Israel alone

From our UK edition

This week, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again attended the United Nations in New York. Again, his visit was laced with controversy. He denounced the state of Israel as a ‘fake regime’, claimed that a threat of an Israeli strike on Iran’s facilities was ‘bluffing’, yet warned of Iranian retaliation should Israel carry out such a strike. Israel will be a blip in the region’s history, he predicted, causing ‘minimal disturbances’ before being ‘eliminated’. And should Israel try to pre-empt this elimination, then Tehran would hold the United States responsible. It is hard to know what more Ahmadinejad needs to do to be taken seriously. For seven years, he has been talking about taking Israel ‘off the map’.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 27 September 2012

From our UK edition

Home The European Court of Human Rights approved the extradition of Abu Hamza al-Masri, Babar Ahmad, Syed Talha Ahsan, Adel Abdul Bary and Khaled al-Fawwaz to the United States, where they are wanted on suspicion of terrorism. The BBC then had to write to the Queen to apologise for Frank Gardner, its security correspondent, reporting what he said she had told him in a private conversation about her anxieties over Abu Hamza before his arrest. A 49-year-old man, transferred to a London hospital by air ambulance from Qatar, was found to be suffering from a viral disease similar to Sars; another man with the disease died in Saudi Arabia. Hundreds of houses were flooded, and England was cut off from Scotland by the east coast rail line. The streets of Aberdeen were filled with sea foam.