Society

Thursday

Peter Oborne

Did Yemen’s intelligence service collude with Al Qaeda?

Al Qaeda terrorists have never had good press. For sound reasons they are always represented as evil, nihilistic, faceless murderers. There are certain interesting signs this is starting to change. This is happening in part because the emergence of Isis has shown that there is something worse than Al Qaeda. It is in part because the West has joined forces with Al Qaeda in some of its wars. The Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra, for instance, seems to have become a western ally in the war against Assad. Tonight Al Jazeera presents an intriguing portrait of an Al Qaeda terrorist. The documentary Al Qaeda Informant tells the story of the life of

Douglas Murray

A conversation with Jonathan Sacks

The former Chief Rabbi, Lord (Jonathan) Sacks, is one of the most interesting thinkers, writers and speakers about today.  His interventions into the public debate rarely fail to encourage thought, knowledge and indeed wisdom.  I had the pleasure of interviewing him last year for the magazine just before he was due to give a major lecture in London titled ‘Confronting violence in the name of God’. The themes of that interview and talk are now significantly expanded into a book due to be published later this month.  It is called ‘Not in God’s Name: confronting religious violence’. And just as his earlier books ‘The Dignity of Difference’ and ‘The Home

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the high priests of health and the collapse of Andy Coulson’s perjury trial

Is the NHS bossing around the British people too much? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Douglas Murray and Christopher Snowden discuss this week’s Spectator cover feature on the high priests of health and how the NHS is telling us how to live our lives. Does this level of continued intrusion show that the NHS is unsustainable on its current form? And what are the myths of the so-called obesity epidemic? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also discuss the latest in the Labour leadership contest. Why has Yvette Cooper struggled to define what she stands for? Can Liz Kendall make up the lost ground to the other candidates? And is there anything that will harm Andy Burnham’s chances? We also look back on

Ella Whelan

Drugs are a waste of time, but so is the Psychoactive Substances Bill

The Conservatives might have gone in softer than Russell Brand and the gang predicted, with very little change announced in the Queen’s Speech last week, but they didn’t fail to cause a stir. The proposed ‘Psychoactive Substances Bill’ is designed to provide a blanket ban on all substances which produce a mind-altering effect, with several allowances made for booze, fags and chocolate. The idea is to protect the public from any psychoactive substance that ‘affects the person’s mental functioning or emotional state’. Rather than replying to a public demand for such drastic measures, the Home Office stated the purpose of the bill was simply to ‘protect hard-working citizens’. Admittedly, most of my knowledge of

Steerpike Steerpike

Tea is back on the menu at the Guardian

Last week the Guardian‘s food police turned their attention to tea. After the publication declared war on HP sauce in January, they have now vetoed tea. The writer Joel Golby claims that liking tea is ‘the worst possible English trait, up there with colonialism and the class system’. All very… Guardian. Only the tea memo has yet to reach the Guardian shop, which is selling t-shirts for any of their readers who still love tea: Be wary before purchasing though. Mr S suspects it could be an elaborate trick to whittle out ‘undesirables’ from their readership.

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Financing the fight

From ‘The Financial Emergency’, The Spectator, 5 June 1915: In these columns the late Government have often been criticized for the way in which they permitted the national expenditure to grow in time of peace. Let us admit, however, quite frankly that the nation before the war began was so rich that it could afford without serious injury even the enormous growth in expenditure which has characterized the last five or six years. To that extent the authors of that expenditure are justified in arguing that their policy was not necessarily injurious at the time to the country as a whole, and that it did attain certain social objects which

Mark Mason

Father’s Day

No man ever watched a £20 note flutter from an opened Father’s Day card and thought: ‘How disappointing — not enough thought has gone into that.’ If you’re a son, you’ll know this already. But if you’re a daughter, remember that the sexes are different. Women want presents, actual objects, things that show your loved one has gone to the trouble of visiting a shop and making a choice, no matter how ill-advised and instantly destined for Oxfam. But men are a different country: we do things differently here. For a start, many men don’t want any more possessions, full stop. One of the experiences nudging them in that direction is

Danny Alexander

Highland star

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thehighpriestsofhealth/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss Charles Kennedy’s career” startat=1211] Listen [/audioplayer]Charles Kennedy’s eloquence, intelligence and humour were famous in the Highlands long before his election to the Commons at the age of 23. When I started at Lochaber High School, the prizes he had won as a school debater adorned the walls; as pupils knew, at university he had gone on to win the national championship for Glasgow. It was clear that he was a phenomenon. Charles knew, perhaps better than anyone in British politics today, that how you say something is critical to being understood. Politics is the art of making and winning arguments. He was

Cristopher Snowdon

Big fat myths

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thehighpriestsofhealth/media.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Christopher Snowden discuss whether the NHS is too bossy” startat=35] Listen [/audioplayer] Like all failing projects, or popular cults, the NHS needs scapegoats. Britain’s health service is plagued by an endless stream of deviants who are a ‘burden’ on its resources. Otherwise known as patients, they are the drinkers, smokers and fatsos who, we are told, will bring the NHS to its knees unless lifestyles are regulated by the state. Smokers were a useful scapegoat for a while. Now it’s the obesity ‘time bomb’. As Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, recently put it, ‘The new smoking is obesity.’ He claims that fatties

Bruce Anderson

Claret and blues

There is a dive near St James’s which could claim to be the epicentre of international reaction. It is also a temple of pseudo–anti-intellectuality: the only club in London where chaps pretend not to have read books. Always a cheerful place, that is especially true at the moment. Its members still find it hard to believe that they survived 13 years of Labour government and had no wish to push their luck with another instalment. The late Frank Johnson once said that although the Labour party had given up on nationalising the economy, it was still determined to nationalise people. Once inside this delightful refuge from the 20th century, let

Douglas Murray

Doctors’ orders

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thehighpriestsofhealth/media.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Christopher Snowden discuss whether the NHS is too bossy” startat=35] Listen [/audioplayer]On a radio discussion show shortly before the general election I made the not terribly original point that the NHS had become our national religion. The first caller immediately objected. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘The NHS is far more important than a religion — it’s about life and death.’ Ignoring the theological presumption for a moment, this view is common enough. Even when not ‘in crisis’, the NHS is now perennially said to be ‘under pressure’ and so becomes an ever-larger part of what government does and the public expects. George Osborne refuses

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

In praise of the ‘Don’t know’ voter

I am scraping the edges of my memory here, but I am fairly sure that opinion polls in my childhood (for the elections of 1970, 1974 and 1979) quoted four percentages: Conservative, Labour, Liberal and ‘Undecided’. Nowadays no figure is quoted for ‘Don’t knows’, and party support is contrived to add up to 100 per cent. Undecided respondents are variously treated according to each polling company’s methodology: a few ignore them completely; others apply a supplementary question such as ‘Which way would you vote if voting were compulsory?’ Their answer to this may be statistically downweighted, but it will still be added to the total for one party or another,

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Degrees of bureaucracy

It took Oxford 40 years to catch up with Cambridge in appointing a woman vice-chancellor, but Louise Richardson — ex-St Andrews, Irish, Catholic, terrorism expert — is to take over from the chemist Andrew Hamilton. He is leaving early to head New York University for an eye-watering £950,000 a year. His successor will inherit a more modest but still whopping £442,000 a year. That’s what happens when a university is run like a biggish corporation — the head is paid like a chief executive. (A professor gets around £65,000 a year: once, Louise Richardson would have been on something similar.) Chief of the problems Richardson has to get to grips

Philip Delves-Broughton

Running wild | 4 June 2015

 New York It takes a strange bird to run for the White House. To think you’re worth all the fund-raising, the protection, the applause, the haters, the heel-clicking Marines. But with a mere 18 months till the next election, the field is taking shape: Hillary Clinton, still pitching herself as the nation’s benevolent grandma even after it emerged that she and her husband had in the past year raked in $25 million in speaking fees; Jeb Bush, 30 pounds lighter on his ‘paleo’ diet, trying to prove he’s not the Pete Best of the Bush family; and tucked in behind, various curiosities from the Senate (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Migrants face many dangers. Are we one of them?

A few weeks ago someone very dear to me passed on a question about The Spectator, asked them by a friend. The friend, who I know and like, had read Douglas Murray’s recent report from Lampedusa about the poor Med-faring migrants, and her question was this: ‘Is everyone at The Spectator a racist?’ Some insults brush past without leaving a mark, others pierce the skin and sink in. This one sunk like a splinter, and like a splinter I’ve been worrying away at it ever since, turning what was a small injury into a painful, bloody mess. I can dismiss the accusation easily enough — the Spectator office is multi-racial,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The Fifa case: American justice at work as the world’s CCTV system

‘In matters of criminal justice,’ said NatWest Three defendant David Bermingham after a London court extradited him and his co-defendants to face Enron-related US fraud charges even though nothing they were accused of looked like a crime under UK law, Britain was becoming ‘the 51st state of America’. Many Swiss citizens must have felt they were living in the 52nd when Department of Justice agents decided, as I put it in 2013, to ‘topple a whole bowling alley of gnomes of Zurich’ in an assault on Swiss banking secrecy that forced the closure of the country’s oldest bank, Wegelin. The catalogue of US fines imposed on non-US banks for money-laundering,

The Spectator

National mood

From ‘Depression and its Causes’, The Spectator, 6 June 1915: The British nation have still great possessions in the way of liberty of action, of liberty not to fight for their country, of liberty to spend their money in the sedative of drink, the sedative which slows down the pace and energy of the human machine — liberty to go on money-making as usual, liberty to spend time in amusements which might be spent in putting energy into the war, liberty to grumble and to criticise those who put us to shame by their cheerful self-sacrifice. All these seem ‘great possessions’ to the popular mind. At any rate, they are great

Lucy Vickery

Sauce material

In Competition No. 2900 you were invited to write a short story that ends on a condiment of your choice. The germ of this comp was the writer Richard Brautigan’s wish to end a short story with the word ‘mayonnaise’, an ambition he fulfilled in his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Actually, strictly speaking, he didn’t. As an eagle-eyed friend and self-confessed pedant pointed out to me, the word that appears in most editions is the deliberately misspelt ‘mayonaise’. The pun-merchants had a field day this week and there were several Cluedo- and Wodehouse-inspired entries. The winners take £30, D.A. Prince pockets £35. Keith hadn’t listened properly. It was

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

I second that emoji

On the way home from dinner with girlfriends I composed my usual thank-you text. Smashing company, delicious food, must see you all again. A couple of kisses. Feeling this wasn’t enough, I added a line of coloured pictures: an ice cream in a cone, a slice of cake with a strawberry on top, a bar of chocolate, a cup of steaming coffee — near enough representations of the puddings we had shared. The replies came back: smiley faces, rows of hearts, bowls of spaghetti (it had been an Italian), martini glasses. My friends and I are in our late twenties and early thirties, yet we communicate using emoji: the sort

James Delingpole James Delingpole

This is Leveson’s legacy: a great new way for bullies to muzzle the press

One of the fundamental principles of English common law is that you are innocent until proven guilty. And rightly so, for imagine how unfair it would be if any old loon with an axe to grind had only to lodge a trumped-up complaint with the relevant authorities in order to have you punished for no reason whatsoever. Actually, though, this cruel and capricious system exists in Britain. It’s called the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) and, as might be expected of the bastard offspring of the Leveson inquiry, it’s doing an absolutely first-rate job of empowering bullies and curbing freedom of speech in order to assuage the spite of that