The Spectator

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 17 September 2005

From our UK edition

Pro-God, anti-religion Theo Hobson makes some interesting points in his article about ‘literary atheism’ (‘Writing God off’, 10 September) but his case is fatally flawed by his repeated tendency to assume that ‘religion’, ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ are somehow synonymous. They are not. It is, in fact, perfectly possible to reject religion without rejecting God; one can be anti-religion without being an atheist. In many minds, especially today, ‘religion’ has come to mean the kind of established and organised institutions, be they Christian, Jewish or Muslim, noted more for their intolerance of dissent — or much, much worse — than for anything positive.

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Feedback | 17 September 2005

From our UK edition

Comments on The grim lessons of Katrina by Walter Ellis What a ridiculous negative article. We get hit by a level 5 hurricane. What do you know? There's death and destruction. Mr Ellis notes the fact that there is a black underclass in New Orleans, which has been there for 200 years, and in other major American cities as well, which have been there for 150 years. If this is a measure of our inherent racialism what does he say about the growing black middle and upper class, the phenomenon of the browning of American society, the tremendous influx of Hispanics and Asians, all attracted by the relative political and economic and social freedom which exists in this country more than any other major country in the world, including his beloved Europe.

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A fair tax

From our UK edition

It is tempting to sympathise with the hoary mob of farmers and hauliers, collectively known as the Fuel Lobby, who as we go to press are threatening to blockade motorways and oil refineries in an attempt to force the government to cut the duty on petrol and diesel. As we have frequently argued in these pages, Gordon Brown’s eight-year programme of stealthy tax rises has raided our pockets, yet failed to produce any corresponding improvements in public services. Given that the farmers and hauliers have provided the most vociferous and powerful protest against Labour’s excessive taxation, it is easy to understand why ordinary motorists should be moved to toot in solidarity.

Saturday

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Portrait of the Week – 10 September 2005

From our UK edition

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, flew off to China and appeared at a press conference with the Chinese leader, Mr Wen Jiabao, where it was said that there had been a resolution of the dispute over European Union import quotas, which had seen 80 million items of clothing of Chinese manufacture piling up at docks. Mr Wen said that Mr Peter Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, had spent a ‘sleepless’ night on the matter; next year’s quotas are to be cannibalised, although this requires agreement from each EU country. Petrol rose above £1 a litre. Twenty-four new companies were given licences to explore for oil off the coast of Britain.

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 10 September 2005

From our UK edition

RSPCA is off target Simon Heffer was right to warn about the danger to shooting, and Charles Moore was equally right last week (The Spectator’s Notes, 3 September) to point to the real issues that shooters must address. But whatever its position on shooting, it is clear that the RSPCA has already utterly corrupted the public’s understanding of what constitutes real animal welfare. Their aggressive campaign to ban hunting seduced many members of the general public into thinking that fox-hunting is the worst form of animal cruelty imaginable. Many people now assume that they are ethical animal lovers just because they oppose hunting. At the same time they quite cheerfully keep their dogs locked away in tower blocks or buy battery chickens at £2.50 from Tesco.

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Feedback | 10 September 2005

From our UK edition

Comments on Triumph of the poms by Michael Atherton Like Mike Atherton, I would like to see England win the Ashes. However, I would urge caution. The balance in the current Test series has shifted to England, but it is not all over yet and I cannot be totally confident that England will wrap up the series at the Oval next week. Despite having lost the first test at Lords (cause for Australian complacency perhaps?), England should have wrapped up the Headingley Test and not allowed the Old Trafford test to end as a draw with four overs remaining. At Trent Bridge, a mature team would have easily knocked off the required 129 runs without losing seven wickets, but England has not yet acquired that traditional Australian confidence and has not yet got the killer instinct.

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Turkey must relent

From our UK edition

The issue of how best to approach a friend who has badly let you down is one more commonly dealt with at the back of this magazine, by our agony aunt on etiquette, Mary Killen. But this week it is one that needs to be addressed here. Over the past years this magazine has been a staunch defender of Turkey and its right to join the European Union, negotiations for which begin on 3 October. We have praised its economy, its founder-membership of Nato, and condemned the many Turkophobes within the EU — most notably Frits Bolkestein, the EU internal market commissioner, who last year fatuously claimed that the liberation of Vienna from the Ottoman Turks in 1683 ‘would have been in vain’ were Turkey allowed to join the EU.

Saturday

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Portrait of the Week – 3 September 2005

From our UK edition

The Home Office proposed a new offence of having images from the internet of serious sexual violence and other obscene material; it would be punishable by three years in jail. The presumed murderer of an 11-year-old boy in West Lothian was found dead, hanged in his house; the man was on bail awaiting trial on charges of sexual offences against young girls. A woman was shot dead with a baby in her arms at a christening party in Peckham, south London; a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old black youth were arrested. A survey of 9,700 children aged 11–15 found that 9 per cent of them had said they had been able to buy alcohol in a pub or bar. Last year there were 44,488 cases of Clostridium difficile in England, against 35,536 cases in the previous year, before reporting became mandatory.

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Letters to the Editor | 3 September 2005

From our UK edition

Strange customs Having suffered similar humiliation and over-zealous inanity at the hands of British immigration, I can only sympathise with James Hughes-Onslow’s friend (‘Hop off, you Aussies’, 27 August). However, I do have to point out that this is neither a new phenomenon following an increased threat level, nor is it specific to Australians. It happened to me in 1996. I was an American citizen, an 18-year resident of Switzerland, who as the child of a former diplomat had lived abroad my whole life, and had been travelling back and forth to Britain since I was a child. I simply wished to visit my British boyfriend for a couple of weeks.

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Feedback | 3 September 2005

From our UK edition

Comments on The last days of the Tartan Raj by Andrew NeilI agree wholeheartedly with Andrew Neil's comments. The devolution settlement is an absolute disgrace.England has been left out in the cold. The West Lothian Question remains unanswered, and MPs representing English constituencies sit on their hands.May I suggest a follow-up article featuring the Campaign for an English Parliament, whom you will find very vocal in their demand for an English Parliament? They can be found at www.thecep.org.ukDerek Marshall Comment on lettersThree weeks ago I was sitting in a cell in a Pakistani military jail, after being rounded up with my film crew, while travelling from India to Afghanistan to make a documentary for British TV.It was a pretty grim experience - very thin on luxury.

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Why ‘Europe’ matters

From our UK edition

The Conservative party talks about Europe so little these days that it is becoming unnatural, rather as if the Lib Dems had decided that the issue of PR was irrelevant. Ostensibly, this is because Europe is no longer a ‘live’ issue. It is no longer conceivable that we are going to join the euro, goes the argument, and the European constitution is dead. What, then, is there left to discuss? Eurosceptics can satisfy themselves that they can still stare longingly at the Queen every time they hand over a fiver; while the Tories’ pro-Europe wing can be grateful that the handbag-waving has come to an end. Conservatives, therefore, can call a truce and get on with fighting the government over what really matters: schools, hospitals and the like.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 27 August 2005

From our UK edition

The news blackout that Downing Street had asked newspapers to impose about the whereabouts of Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, on holiday, supposedly for reasons of security, was broken by the man himself when he popped up at a VJ Day commemoration on Barbados, where he had stayed previously at a house belonging to Sir Cliff Richard, the 64-year-old singer. There was a shuffling about for reasons to ask for the resignation of Sir Ian Blair, the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. The brother of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian shot dead on 22 July by police who took him for a suicide-bomber, criticised the police for offering his family an ex gratia payment of £15,000; ‘They thought we were poor people, stupid people,’ he said.

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Letters to the Editor | 27 August 2005

From our UK edition

Scotch myth Andrew Neil’s lament at the decline of the so-called ‘Tartan Raj’ (‘The last days of the Tartan Raj’, 20 August) is a Scottish view of what, to the rest of the country, is a non-phenomenon. Englanders aren’t looking jealously over their shoulders at Scottish success, and never have done. Gordon Brown will be a wildly unpopular leader, not because he is Scottish, or Scotland-educated, but because he is surly and tax-happy, more concerned with shafting his ‘Scot-lite’ boss than doing his own job. Brown might resent Oxbridge, but Oxbridge is broadly indifferent to him. If the Raj was really as all-powerful as Neil suggests, then why didn’t it do anything to arrest the decline in elite education in Scotland and elsewhere?

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Tolerating terror

From our UK edition

‘My point to you is this,’ Tony Blair said of terrorists last month, ‘It’s time we stopped saying “OK, we abhor their methods but we kinda see something in their ideas or maybe they’ve got a sliver of an excuse or justification.” They’ve got no justification for it.’ The Prime Minister’s words must sound pretty hollow to the Hall family of Newchurch, Staffordshire, this week. The Halls have been driven to close their farm, which breeds guinea pigs for medical research, after a six-year sustained campaign of terror by animal rights extremists. Over that time they have been subjected to numerous death threats, a firebomb attack and hundreds of acts of criminal damage.

Saturday

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Portrait of the Week – 20 August 2005

From our UK edition

British Airways flights to and from London Heathrow were brought to a standstill for a day, and disrupted for days afterwards, by unofficial strikes by ground staff in sympathy with 700 staff sacked by a company supplying airline meals. Leaked documents showed that the Brazilian man shot dead at Stockwell in London by police seeking suicide-bombers had not vaulted over a barrier at the station, nor had he been wearing a baggy jacket. Mr Omar Bakri, a radical Islamic cleric who had left Britain after 20 years to visit his mother, he said, in Lebanon, was barred from returning by Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, who declared his presence in Britain ‘not conducive to the public good’. Police held four people in Manchester under the Terrorism Act 2000.

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Feedback | 20 August 2005

From our UK edition

Comments on Don’t blame religion by Theo Hobson 15/08/05It is not the belief in an afterlife that is the problem, it is the absolute belief in God, the Fuhrer or the working class or whatever else. Once you have that belief it is a short step to being willing to kill those who are not part of the group. George Bush’s ‘if you are not with us you are against us’ attitude is the basis of all religious violence and oppression through the ages. The current spate of Islamic violence is not an odd aberration. This is what the religious do, and have done, for thousands of years. Jeff Tyler What a load of waffle!

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PCC adjudication on Rod Liddle’s blog-post ‘Benefits of a multi-cultural Britain’

From our UK edition

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”.

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor

From our UK edition

A plague on the new Puritans Tories beware! Roundheads are infiltrating the party of the Cavaliers. The six new MPs (Letters, 13 August) who issued a tirade against contemporary decadence claim to be ‘unencumbered by the political baggage of the past’. They are not, for they sing an old song. Their proposed new moral order is full of the dire warnings and prohibitions dear to the heart of Cromwell and his Puritans. Nothing less than a return to the bleak years of the ‘Rule of the Saints’ is proposed. New moral gendarmeries succeeded the Puritans, all self-appointed moral elites who assumed the right to tell others what to do, read and think.

The Spectator

A necessary betrayal

From our UK edition

Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, deserves praise for forcing the settlers in Gaza off the land and out of the homes that he encouraged them to settle and to build over 35 years ago. As he admitted in his televised address to Israel on Monday evening, he ‘hoped we could forever hold on’ to the settlements in Gaza — and he certainly encouraged the unfortunate settlers he sent there to share his hope. Until very recently, Mr Sharon was one of the leading advocates of the policy of settling Jews in the areas occupied by Israel after its victory over its Arab neighbours in the 1967 Six Day War. In Gaza, however, the costs of defending an archipelago of 8,500 settlers in a sea of over a million hostile Palestinians have proved to be too great.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 13 August 2005

From our UK edition

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, floated all kinds of schemes to counter terrorists, with legislation to be introduced in the autumn, including the amendment of the Human Rights Act in respect of the provisions of the European convention on human rights. Involvement with extremist websites, bookshops or centres would be used as grounds for deporting foreign nationals; bilateral arrangements would be made to protect deportees from torture in their native lands. Mr Blair predicted ‘a lot of battles’ with the courts. ‘Let no one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing,’ he said, before going off on holiday, leaving Britain under the notional care of Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister.