The Spectator

Saturday

The Spectator

How to beat the BNP

The investigation of the battle between the BNP and Labour in the local elections by Peter Oborne in last week’s Spectator has triggered a furious controversy about the threat of the far Right. Jon Cruddas, the MP for Dagenham, told this magazine that the BNP ‘are on the verge of a major political breakthrough’; New Labour’s fixation with middle-class voters in swing constituencies had, he claimed, created an angry tribe among the white working and lower-middle classes. Margaret Hodge, the employment minister, subsequently told the Sunday Telegraph that eight out of ten of her constituents in Barking, east London, were threatening to vote BNP on 4 May.

Saturday

The Spectator

Our own Cuban missile crisis

Iran’s leaders may be crazed and dangerous fanatics, but they are not stupid. That is why President Bush is right to show the Iranian regime that he is serious about containing its undisputed ambition to go nuclear in flagrant defiance of the international community. Nobody in their right mind — including President Bush — wants to go to war, let alone launch nuclear missile strikes, as some overexcited headlines in the American and British media have suggested over the past few days. But the White House, as well as Downing Street, would be delinquent if they were not busily reviewing all possible contingencies to deal with Iran.

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 8 April 2006

Blair is no Thatcherite From Lord TebbitSir: I am not sure whether in his review of the programme Tory! Tory! Tory! (Arts, 25 March) Simon Hoggart is expressing his own view or that of Edwina Currie, that ‘by 1990, Thatcher had become the greatest obstacle to Thatcherism, which had to be rescued ... by Tony Blair’. Whoever’s view it is, it is clearly a most outrageous, patently untrue statement. The obstacles to Thatcherism were Heseltine and Howe, not Thatcher. I know of no Blair achievement of any kind which could be described as ‘Thatcherite’. She did not throw money at public services without achieving a commensurate improvement in public services.

The Spectator

How about asking us?

In his 1997 manifesto Tony Blair described New Labour as ‘the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’. Nine years on, it more closely resembles the ‘political arm’ of an Asbo family, at war with itself and indifferent to the feelings of others. Rarely has a government seemed so introspective, selfish and out of touch. ‘Social exclusion’ has come to mean the government’s exclusion of everyone else from its deliberations. Socialism has been replaced by antisocialism. Mr Blair used to make pledges about health and education; now the only pledge that consumes his colleagues is his promise to step down before the next election and — more importantly — when, precisely, he will ‘deliver’ on that promise.

Saturday

The Spectator

The task the Israelis have set us

The performance in the Israeli elections of Kadima, the new centrist party founded by Ariel Sharon, is almost as remarkable as the survival of the state of Israel itself in the 58 years since its foundation. True, Kadima did not secure the clear mandate for which the acting Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, had hoped. Turnout was also disappointingly low. But Kadima, the breakaway group formed after Mr Sharon dramatically left Likud last year, has emerged as easily the biggest single party and will lead a coalition to form the next government. As The Spectator goes to press, the precise complexion of that coalition is impossible to judge. Mr Olmert faces an unenviable task in cobbling together an administration. The right-wing Likud, under Benjamin Netanyahu, has been humiliated.

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 25 March 2006

The neocons’ Iraqi ‘vision’From Correlli BarnettSir: Surely Con Coughlin (‘A bittersweet birthday’, 18 March) is in error when he states that it was only after the fall of Saddam that Washington adopted the neocon vision whereby Iraq should be ‘a beacon of democracy that would shed its light throughout the tired autocracies of the Arab world’. Surely Bush and co. came into office in January 2001 having already bought the idea of ‘the American century’, and having already committed themselves to a mission to spread democracy round the world, starting with the Middle East, and with Iraq as the first target.

The Spectator

Big Brother would be proud

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, when the Party said ‘peace’ it meant ‘war’, and when it said ‘freedom’ it meant ‘slavery’. Listening to Gordon Brown’s tenth and possibly last Budget speech on Wednesday afternoon, it seemed at times as if he had mistaken Orwell’s fictional masterpiece for a manual for chancellors of the exchequer in trouble. Mr Brown’s central theme that he is working night and day to equip Britain to face the challenges of globalisation was a brilliantly executed yet meretricious exercise in Orwellian Newspeak. The truth is that his record on competitiveness has been abysmal, as demonstrated by Britain’s relegation on every respectable economic league table.

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 18 March 2006

Schools aren’t clubsFrom Nicholas NelsonSir: Have you given proper thought to the reason that we have an education system (Leading article, 11 March)? Our schools have an essential list of objectives which includes ensuring that young people absorb a body of knowledge and acquire skills that match their potential, and emerge as adults with an ability to assess their world critically and communicate with their fellow human beings. The way you would do this is to hive off 25 per cent or so into exclusive clubs so that they leave school with a strong body of knowledge but no clue about how to communicate with the other 75 per cent.

The Spectator

Time to think small, Mr Brown

Someone should remind Gordon Brown of the Hippocratic Oath before he stands up on Wednesday afternoon to deliver his tenth Budget to the House of Commons. Taking his cue from all good doctors, the Chancellor should above all strive to do no harm; in his case that means no new taxes and no more grandiose schemes to save the world. Such a plan of non-action would be a tall order for a Chancellor addicted to social engineering — but it would at least represent a first step towards the radical change of course that will be needed if the British economy is ever to be rescued from its slow but inexorable descent into mediocrity.

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 11 March 2006

What sells winsFrom Peggy HatfieldSir: How exciting and unusual to see people in the media advising sexual restraint (‘Anyone for chastity?’, 4 March)! As Piers Paul Read reminds us, our culture is up to its eyeballs in sex — in films and also on the high street. But though I’m quite sure that most normal British people could secretly do without a bonking scene in every film, or vibrators in front of children’s noses in Boots, they daren’t say so, even to their friends, for fear of appearing ‘repressed’. How have we got ourselves into this unsettling state of affairs? Read suggests that feminism and the decline of religion are to blame, but I have a slightly different answer.

The Spectator

Whose schools are they anyway?

As so often, Norman Tebbit has a point. ‘Three of my grandchildren have gone to grammar schools, as I did,’ he told the Observer recently. ‘Now it looks as if we are going to cut off that route in the interest of something probably called social cohesion. But we’re not going to cut off the route to go through Eton. Come on, chaps. Fair’s fair!’ Lord Tebbit is the opposite of chippy, a Tory Titan who helped to make the politics of envy disreputable. His point is not that private schools are bad — far from it — but that pupils at state schools deserve much better than the often scandalously poor education they receive.

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 4 March 2006

Genghis was a leftieFrom Daniel Hannan, MEPSir: Paul Johnson demolishes the ludicrous expression ‘to the right of Genghis Khan’ and wonders what the Mongol leader’s true politics might have been (And another thing, 25 February). I’d have thought Genghis was a clear-cut leftie. His tactic, on conquering a tribe, was to liquidate the aristocracy and elevate the lower orders. He was a proto-Europhile, mingling his subject clans so as to prevent the development of a sense of national identity. Where modern socialists want to use the education system to cut high achievers down to size, the Khan was more literal, forcing his vassals to walk under a yoke and decapitating those who were too tall.

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 4 March 2006

Mrs Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, said that she had signed without asking any questions a form that her husband, Mr David Mills, used to gain a mortgage for a house, which he repaid a month later with an alleged bribe of £340,000 from Mr Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy. Mr Mills denies receiving such a payment; an Italian prosecutor is investigating the allegation. Mr Ken Livingstone was suspended for four weeks as Mayor of London by the Adjudication Panel for England when it found that he had brought his office into disrepute by saying to a reporter who had told him he was Jewish and worked for the London Evening Standard, ‘Actually you are just like a concentration camp guard. You are just doing it because you are paid to, aren’t you?

The Spectator

Policies, please

For a politician to invite the television cameras into his home is a risky business. An inexperienced Mrs Thatcher in 1975 merely had to open her larder to the nation to find herself accused of hoarding food. Tony Blair was criticised for the heavily draped curtains in his former Islington home, and John Major’s conservatory impressed nobody but the double-glazing industry. Some Conservatives will have been dismayed that David Cameron, too, has fallen for the temptation to be filmed in a domestic situation, even if his kitchen has proved to be a model of sensible, restrained taste. They will argue that it confirms their concerns that the new Conservative leader is a triumph of style over substance. We do not share this view of David Cameron.

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 25 February 2006

Jackboots of New LabourFrom Philip FreemanSir: I expected a more robust defence of our liberty from the Spectator (Leading article, 18 February). Just because a majority of the snivelling puritans who populate Parliament today voted for the smoking ban does not mean we should shrug our shoulders and accept it meekly. Individual freedom and liberty are more important than democracry, which is more like mob rule in this country. I am a committed non-smoker, but I have a quaint belief in ‘live-and-let-live’. What’s it got to do with me if somebody smokes in a pub? I’ll go elsewhere if necessary. Are we really going to tell a war veteran that he may no longer smoke in his British Legion club?

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 25 February 2006

A clause to criminalise the ‘glorification’ of terrorism, which had been removed from the Terrorism Bill by the Lords, was reinstated when the Bill was passed in the Commons by a majority of 38, with only 17 Labour MPs voting against the government. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said after the vote, ‘The type of demonstrations that we saw a couple of weeks ago, where I think there were placards and images that people in this country felt were totally offensive, the law will allow us to deal with those people and say, “Look, we have free speech in this country, but don't abuse it”.

The Spectator

Lock up your chickens

A grim inevitability hangs over the country as we go to press. Some time over the next week or two the first dead swan of spring will be pulled from the rushes in the south of England, taken to a laboratory and declared to have perished from the H5N1 virus. From that moment on, the news virtually writes itself. Exclusion zones will be formed, schools and businesses closed, bridleways sealed off. Poultry farmers will be imprisoned in their homes, children’s budgies seized and put to death before their wailing owners. Country fairs will be called off, hunting and shooting will cease, and there will be demands for the Grand National and the Cup Final to be cancelled.

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 18 February 2006

A ‘Rhineland moment’? From David Jones OwenSir: You claim you will not publish the Danish cartoons because they are ‘juvenile’ and offensive (Leading article, 11 February). Does that mean that The Spectator will no longer publish silly cartoons with religious content, as it has done so often in the past? Or could it be that it is really the reaction to the offence that is causing you concern? You seem to allude to that when you refer to the risks not only to editorial staff but also to others who would be in the firing line in such circumstances. So there we have it: liberty is precious and must be defended, but not at the cost of life.

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 18 February 2006

Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, began speaking about all sorts of things outside his ministerial responsibility: security, identity cards, patriotism, a proposed Veterans’ Day each 27 June. The phrase ‘dual premiership’ came up in a question put by the Observer to Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary; in answer to which he said, ‘That’s what Tony would always want, what Gordon should do.

The Spectator

A bit of a drag

Much though we value the liberty of the individual, it would be futile to mount a last-gasp defence of the right to smoke in public when a motion to ban the activity has just been passed by a majority of 200 in the House of Commons. While it says little for the Prime Minister’s remaining powers of persuasion that he has been forced by his backbenchers to go beyond the partial smoking ban promised in last year’s Labour manifesto, it would be perverse of us, who have long championed the supremacy of Parliament over Mr Blair’s toadying ministers, to protest against the result of what was a free vote. Neither can it be said, unlike those other great issues of conscience, hunting and hanging, that MPs have overridden the wishes of the public.