Society

Wednesday

Matthew Dancona

Charlie does surf. Meet the new wizard of the web

Charles Leadbeater tells Matthew d’Ancona about the riches to be mined from online collaboration — and says that the Conservatives have a chance to launch a new form of politics The man who brought you Bridget Jones is, you might think, an unlikely guide to the deeper philosophical and cultural meaning of the web. But, as he sips his tea in the kitchen of his Highbury mews home, Charles Leadbeater makes an extremely convincing magus of the online revolution and the new world of Web 2.0. ‘The thing that interests me is not the technology, but what people try to do with it,’ he says, ‘and why they want to

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Not all roads lead to London

Megan notes that there are now more than three million Britons living abroad and argues: I assume this has something to do with the fact that it is very easy for Britons to go to wealthy, English-speaking countries, and also that there’s a relative lack of migration opportunities in Britain. If you’re American or Australian, you can always pick up and try another city, but in Britain, you mostly move to London or you . . . move to London. This is an exaggeration, of course, but there’s nothing like the ability to say, “You know what, things aren’t going so well in Boston, so I’m moving to LA.” If

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Country for Old Men?

Looking at Americans’ desire to elect a 72-year old John McCain president, David Harsanyi digs up the story of William Henry Harrison – the President who one may fairly say obeyed the First, Do No Harm principle. True, Harrison neglected to look after himself but his administration did less damage than any other in American history: At 68, William Henry Harrison was the country’s second-oldest president. A war hero, “Granny Harrison,” as his opponents called him, was a tough cat. After winning the presidency, he stood outside on a miserably frigid and damp Washington day to deliver the longest inaugural address — more than 8,400 words — in American history.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Fidel: Forever In Our Hearts…

Commenting on this post about Fidel Castro’s welcome retirement, a reader wrote, quoting part of my argument: “If conservatives – on both sides of the North Atlantic – were too ready to turn a blind eye to Pinochet’s crimes, left-wingers have been equally credulous with regard to Castro’s Cuban dictatorship.” When Pinochet died, Jonah Goldberg and I had an email back-and-forth about this very claim. I dispute that the level of admiration for Castro on the left is anything approaching the right’s support for Pinochet. Only among the most extreme, throwback lefties would you find a good word for man. Compare with Pinochet, who received so many kind words from

The Spectator

Intelligence Squared debate: All schools, state as well as private, should be allowed to select their own pupils

Just a reminder that the latest Spectator/Intelligence Squared debate – “All schools, state as well as private should be allowed to select their own pupils” – begins at 18:45 tonight. The speakers for the motion are Professor Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools; Martin Stephen, High Master of St Paul’s School; and the Rt Hon Lord Tebbit.  Whilst those against it include the renowned journalist Fiona Millar; William Atkinson, the Headteacher of Phoenix High School; and the Rt Hon David Blunkett MP The debate will be chaired by the broadcaster Joan Bakewell.  Spectator.co.uk visitors will be able to listen to live audio of the event.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Splitting Brownies

We’re on the last couple of days for collecting entries for the Gordon Brown’s book of fibs, but we haven’t quite decided what to call his embellishments. Many of you say he lies, and we should call a lie by its name. But Brown normally operates by the misleading presentation of a real fact. Unemployment is at a 30-year low, for example, if you just look at claimant count and forget the 5m languishing on other benefits. (This is Brown’s “false proxy” technique, where he gives claimant count as a proxy for joblessness when this long ago ceased to be the case.) So are we talking about Fibs? Brownies? Porkies?

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Building Down

There’s a fascinating piece in The Times today arguing that rather than building ever upwards in London we should bore down. Certainly, the idea of putting some of London’s hideously congested roads, the slowest in Europe, underground is appealing.  Kit Malthouse points out that if the Hyde Park interchange was to go below ground then “the three great parks of Central London could be united. You could walk from Parliament Square to Queensway, about three miles, without crossing a road. Park Lane would be freed up for redevelopment, and a grand new public square could be created at Marble Arch.” My reservation is that we don’t do big projects particularly

Peter Hoskin

Fixing the Prozac Nation

“Anti-depressants don’t work” is the message splashed across the front pages this morning, after a research team from the University of Hull discovered that: “The difference in improvement between patients taking placebos and people taking anti-depressants is not very great ….   There seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients.” The finding isn’t too surprising.  In 2004, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) said that antidepressants shouldn’t be prescribed in the case of mild depression, as the “risk-benefit ratio is poor”.  So why has the prescription of antidepressants soared, until significant numbers of children and even pets are using the drugs? On

Monday

Peter Hoskin

A mobile police force?

Reading the news release, I initially thought that Gordon Brown’s “new kind of policing” – by which every household in England and Wales will be given e-mail/mobile phone details to contact “neighbourhood police teams” – sounded like a good idea. But then two figures jumped out at me.  The first is the cost of the scheme – some £325 million.  And the second is the percentage reduction in crime that the pilot version brought about in Clapham – some 0.9 percent. Of course, falls in crime shouldn’t be sniffed at.  But £325m is a not-insignificant 3 percent of total spending on police in England and Wales.  It’s a large commitment to make – especially on the back of so slim a crime-reduction. The

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 25 February 2008

Be sure to check out some of the posts made over the weekend: Fraser Nelson sets out the Coffee House ethos, and also charts Britain’s spiraling drugs problem. Peter Hoskin suggests that Gordon Brown should shift into “short-term mode” in order to regain credibility. James Forsyth reflects on how the Tories can seize the political initiative. And, over at Americano, James also writes on how Barack Obama can shake the charge of being too “liberal”.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Harriet Harman needs a moral compass

Harriet Harman comes out with one of the most disgraceful statements by a government minister in a while, in today’s Independent. Here’s the exchange: Now, Castro is not some cuddly Marxist but a brutal dictator. Harman’s statement is either an expression of extreme ignorance or of a double standard which sees no evil on the left.  The Freedom in the World survey gives a few examples of the kind of regime that Castro ran: All political organizing outside the PCC is illegal.Political dissent, spoken or written, is a punishable offense, and those so punished frequently receive years of imprisonment for seemingly minor infractions. … Access to the internet remained tightly

Peter Hoskin

The protective cloak

After the events of the weekend, all eyes will be on Michael Martin.  Will he buckle under the media’s relentless pressure?  Or will he dig in his heels, and continue to stress the legality of his actions?  The way things have gone so far, I’d put money on the latter scenario. The most worrying feature of this episode is the protective cloak that MPs have drawn around the Speaker.  Most criticism has been dismissed as snobbery, even though the left-wing papers have also taken Martin to task.  And – as Nick Robinson put it on this morning’s Today programme – numerous MPs blindly regard the allegations as “nonsense”.  Tim Hames gets it

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

News from the front

Anthony Cordesman, the respected US military expert, has an important piece in the Washington Post today on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he reports, both conflicts are at a critical moment: “No one can return from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, as I recently did, without believing that these are wars that can still be won. They are also clearly wars that can still be lost”. Cordesman is more optimistic about the situation in Iraq than Afghanistan, but he argues that neither conflict will end anytime soon.  “What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common is that it will take a major and consistent U.S.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The cost of drugs

To clarify my earlier blog, I certainly did not mean the murdered prostitutes in Suffolk were “victims” of the government’s failed war on drugs. They were born free and chose drugs. My point is how much cheaper and easier it has become in the last ten years to take such a choice. The point of prohibition is to make heroin unaffordable, or very difficult to get hold of. Of course this price collapse started before Labour came to power – the earliest figure I have is £88/gram for July 1995 v £40 now. It was even higher in the 1980s – I have no idea how Zammo afforded it.  

Peter Hoskin

The right long-term decisions?

Just in case anyone still believed Gordon Brown’s “right long-term decisions” claim, then the Observer’s interview with Anne Owers – the chief inspector of prisons – should set them straight.   Owers stresses that the the current prisons crisis is down to past (in)action on the part of the Government: “You wouldn’t start from here if you wanted to create a decent prison system ….  This is a result of decisions taken – or not taken – a long time ago.” And who – in the past – refused to put up the money for increased prison-building?  That’s right – Chancellor Brown. If he’s to regain any credibility, Brown needs to rapidly shift into

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Victims of a failing war on drugs

As the Suffolk Stranger was being sentenced, the Home Office slipped out this written answer on the street price of heroin. It’s almost halved from £74 a gram to £40 a gram. The symmetry was chilling: all the murdered women were addicts. As I write in the News of the World today the government is losing its “war on drugs” (price falls reflect softening of availability constraints) – and in Suffolk we had a glimpse of the human cost.   UK Average Drug Prices 1997-2007 £ As at December: Cocaine (per gram) Heroin (per gram) 1997 71 74 1998 77 74 1999 75 65 2000 65 70 2001 60 63

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 February 2008

This turbulent priest Sir: Seeing that it was I who wrote the article in The Spectator five and a half years ago advancing the case for choosing Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury the week before he was actually shortlisted for the job, I have something of an obligation to ask myself whether I got it right (‘Just a posh version of Prescott’, 16 February). The answer, I think, is yes. Let’s remember, amid all the kerfuffle, that Jesus himself also prevaricated on the tricky issues of the day, included the excluded and overrode doctrine. How enraging it all was to the righteous, to those fearful for their identity and

Alex James

The name of the game | 23 February 2008

I’ve realised I don’t have a game, a sport. A man needs a game. It’s important. Says a lot about him; more than his car or his clothes. I asked the builders if they wanted to start a football team. ‘We’d have enough for six-a-side,’ I said. ‘Come on, it’ll be great! …Wednesday?’ But I could tell they lacked commitment. There wasn’t so much as a ‘Bagsy not in goal’ from any of them. They’ve all got their own stuff going on, I suppose. Blackham and Doe, the groundworks guys, are anglers. They’re always showing me pictures of barbels and roaches on their phones and telling me where and how.

Jeremy Clarke

Tough competition

‘Whatever happens,’ said a bloke on the team at the next table rancourously, ‘we mustn’t let the students win.’ I’d not taken part in a pub quiz before and I’d always imagined them to be polite, melancholy affairs. This one, when we arrived ten minutes before the start, was noisy, chaotic and overcrowded. The students were staying at the field-study centre on the outskirts of the village and were out celebrating the end of a project. The locals were annoyed with the students for monopolising most of the tables. Also, perhaps, for being younger, better-looking and better-educated.  Well, an education is one thing, and general knowledge another, and the man

Carla Powell

Diary – 23 February 2008

Carla Powell on the joys of the internet and the politics of Italy I am a late convert to the internet, but it has changed my life. I can sit here in my little farm in the Roman countryside and cultivate my olives — or, to be truthful, watch Dario the farm manager cultivate my olives — while keeping up with the world’s press, receiving photos of my newest granddaughter in Hong Kong and bombarding my friends with mis-spelled emails. Who needs the hassle of the big city, congestion charging, airport security or a social life? I can live my rural idyll while still feeling a part of what’s happening in