Society

Saturday

Patrick Sookhdeo

Will London burn too?

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, has warned recently of ‘sleepwalking our way to segregation’. Although he was not speaking principally about Muslims, they have become perhaps the most dominant group in British society. Divided along ethnic and sectarian lines, Muslims are nevertheless united by their creed, their law and the powerful concept of the umma, the totality of Muslims worldwide. The process of migrating and establishing a Muslim community in a non-Muslim context has an important place in Islamic theology. The word hijra is used to describe such a migration, in particular the migration of Mohammed and his followers in ad 622 from Mecca, where they

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The crescent of fear

As France burned, the mullahs arrived on the scene, shook their heads sadly and immediately issued a fatwa. However, for the many Frenchmen who may have shuddered inwardly when they heard the term so invoked, this was a good fatwa, a nice fatwa, a fatwa to be proud of. The mullahs swung by and ordained that Allah would be extremely cross if Muslims torched any more cars, shot any more policemen, lobbed any more petrol bombs or murdered any more elderly white people. Allah wanted Muslims instead to stay at home, potter about the house, maybe watch a little TV. The fatwa was issued on day 11 of the rioting,

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 5 November 2005

Nuclear hedge fund Andrew Gilligan (‘A terrifying plan for nuclear strikes’, 29 October) is being unduly alarmist about the future of Britain’s small nuclear deterrent. The development of so-called ‘usable’ nukes does not imply a wish or intention actually to use them, but rather is an essential element of effective deterrence. If you rely simply on the sheer awfulness of nuclear weapons for their deterrent effect (‘existential’ deterrence in the jargon), the person you’re most likely to deter will be yourself. You won’t then deter anybody else, which defeats the whole purpose of a deterrent in the first place. However remote and awful the prospect, you have to come up

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 5 November 2005

The word panjandrum has been popping up recently. I have noticed it from the pens of Andreas Whittam Smith, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Brian Sewell, Simon Hoggart and funny old Roy Greenslade. It sounds like a proper word, one with an ancient etymology, although it is fairly widely known that it was invented in 1755 by Samuel Foote, the actor and satirist (1721–77). It came in a piece of nonsense that he invented to test a claim by the actor Charles Macklin (1699–1797) that he could repeat anything after once hearing it. Behind the challenge was a feud that Foote had begun with Macklin in December 1754. Macklin, who had been Foote’s

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 5 November 2005

Mr David Blunkett resigned as the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions after it was revealed that he had taken a directorship in a DNA-testing company called DNA Bioscience, after resigning from his previous Cabinet post, without consulting the independent Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, as the ministerial code of practice stipulates. He had sold some shares he’d bought in the company, saying he wanted ‘to protect family and friends from further intrusion’. After a delay caused by a rift in the Cabinet, the government announced a Bill to criminalise tobacco-smoking in enclosed public spaces, apart from pubs not selling food and private clubs. Mrs Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 5 November 2005

After a week in Florence, astonished all over again by the unsurpassed beauty of its painting and architecture from 1350–1550, I wonder about the odd mixture of features which characterises a high civilisation. This includes: 1. A respect for what appears to be ‘useless’. Greek was barely known in the city until a teacher called Manuel Chrysoloras arrived at the university in the late 14th century, and even Latin was not commonplace. Someone somehow decided that learning what appeared to be dead would make people more alive. High learning was an innate good. This appears not to fit with … 2. Vulgarity. The unbelievable effusion of artistic display in Florence

Frank Keating

Dance macabre

Having cruelly blackwashed the combined British Isles Lions tourists just four months ago, New Zealand’s athletic young rugby sadists are back in the old country intent on inflicting further pain with a Grand Slam against the four ‘home’ nations on successive weekends, beginning today in a defiantly hyped-up Cardiff. It is a centenary show: on almost the same Taff patch in December 1905 Wales famously, disputedly, inflicted the solitary defeat on the fabled first All Black ‘Originals’ — a 3–0 whisker of a victory which has lodged enduringly in Welsh legend because in the following 100 years, club and country, New Zealand and Welsh XVs have played each other 73

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 5 November 2005

Dear Mary… Q. You suggest (22 October) that scrap suppers be served on site following private views in art galleries. May I suggest the very same practice might well reverse the decline in numbers of young people attending classical concerts? For friendless, new to London perhaps, but unpushy lovers of classical music, it would surely be an incentive to know that, for an extra £10 on their ticket, they could eat a simple hot supper with a glass of wine, meet and chat to the musicians and mingle in like-minded civilised company following a performance. M.M., London W8 A. Of course you are right. Some administrators are already cottoning on

Taki

The right woman

Unlike Peregrine Worsthorne, I thought the Duff Cooper diaries were interesting and terrific, and also made me envious as hell. Oh, to have lived back then. People sure had fun. I particularly liked the part where Duff puts down a certain party as boring because of the presence of spivs. Well, lucky old Duff. If he were around nowadays, he’d be writing about some sponsored event where among the spivs he might run into a gent of sorts. Of course, one could have fun back then, because the barbarians were still outside the gates. No journalists, no people in trade, no cheap celebrities, no It girls, no New Labour. One

Jeremy Clarke

Off night

The active volcano Stromboli, one of the Aeolian islands, rises out of the sea off the north-east coast of Sicily. It is forbidden to make the three-hour trek to the top without a guide, so I signed on with a chaperoned party of 30 tourists for a night climb. Our piratical-looking guide was a fierce disciplinarian. At each resting place he issued very specific instructions in harsh and oddly guttural French. Here we must drink something. Now we must put on our anoraks and hard hats. Here those that need to must urinate. Now we must eat something. And then, about halfway up, just before darkness fell, he ordered us

Lucy Vickery

Hot Property | 5 November 2005

These days the most conspicuous presence on the gritty streets of King’s Cross is not call girls and crack dealers but buttercup-yellow huddles of hard hats. Through the clouds of cement dust you can just about make out signs explaining that the hat-wearers are ‘considerate constructors’, motto: ‘Improving the image of construction’. This attempt at what psychiatrists like to call ‘impression-management’ has echoes in the project on which the men are engaged — to liberate the area from its sordid past and transform it from a place where people don’t linger if they can help it into somewhere they choose to settle. The industrial age turned semi-rural King’s Cross into

Owen Matthews

Diary – 5 November 2005

Baghdad Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, and someone’s definitely out to get us. Last week the Palestine hotel, home to many journalists here, was almost demolished by a particularly telegenic truck bomb. The neat mushroom cloud rose a thousand feet into the sky, shedding a geometrically near-perfect ring of falling debris about halfway up. It was terribly beautiful. Our security minders tell us that the attack was a sign that all journalists in the city are now fair game. Some of us have reacted by going into lockdown mode, retreating behind the walls of the world’s greatest fortress, Baghdad’s Green Zone, guarded

Jaspistos

Special reduction

In Competition No. 2416 you were invited to reduce the life story of a famous person or a fictional character to three limericks. I was strict about metre and rhyme. A limerick is technically a very conventional form of poetry, and so when my ear was offended I turned my thumb down. And I was certainly not going to countenance ‘neuralgia’ rhyming with ‘Trafalgar’! A third criterion was the necessary biographical element demanded by ‘life story’. Iain Crawford wrote tellingly about John Lennon, but spleen overwhelmed history. Commendations to him, Bernadette Evans, Brian Murdoch and Dominica Roberts. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver is Colin

Christopher Fildes

Dalai Alan and Helicopter Ben may propose, but the markets dispose

I have long thought that Alan Greenspan would have made a passable Dalai Lama. Those gnomic utterances, that air of inner calm, that instant access to a deep well of understanding…. The faithful have come to accept that the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board is the embodiment of power and wisdom, and they are now preparing themselves for his next incarnation. Ben Bernanke, sometime winner of the South Carolina state spelling-bee, then professor of economics at Princeton and authority on the Great Depression, is told that he will soon be the most powerful man in the world, and is so wise and clever that all will be

Paul Johnson

Science can be just as corrupt as any other activity

My old tutor, A.J.P. Taylor, used to say, ‘The only lesson of history is that there are no lessons of history.’ Not true. History does not exactly repeat itself, but there are recurrent patterns. And the historian learns to look for certain signs. He asks, What is the prevailing orthodoxy, in any field, at a particular time? And his training teaches him: it is almost certain to be wrong. That is one reason why I am so suspicious of the Darwinian establishment today, and in particular its orthodoxy that natural selection is the sole form of evolution. This establishment still has enormous power. It controls the big university biology faculties,

Richard Ehrman

A dying breed

By mid-century, the world’s population will be 50 per cent higher than it is now, says Richard Ehrman, but the boom will come from developing countries, not Europe, and that’s very bad news indeed If demography is destiny, then, on the face of it, Britain should be feeling pretty smug. In late May the number of people in the UK finally passed the 60 million mark. By 2031, according to official projections released last month, there will be 67 million of us. While populations across most of the rest of Europe are stagnating, and many will soon be shrinking, ours is booming. So why does this bountiful prospect make so

Saturday

Taki

Female spat

Washington DC As far as catfights are concerned, this one cannot compare with, say, Bette Davis v. Joan Crawford, or even Crystal v. Alexis Carrington, but it will do for the rainy season. Maureen Dowd, a 55-year-old New York Times columnist known for her hysterical outbursts against George W. Bush, has taken an 800-word swipe against her Times colleague Judith Miller, fresh out of jail for refusing to reveal her so-called sources. This is the kind of fight where the fans root for a double knockout. It’s more Paris Hilton v. Nicole Ritchie, if you know what I mean. The more blood spilled, the better. If any of you have

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 29 October 2005

In the Lozells district of Birmingham, Isaiah Young Sam, a black man aged 23, was fatally stabbed as he returned from the cinema in an attack by ten or 11 men. The murder came amid fights and rioting by black Caribbeans and South Asian youths. The violence came after a rumour had gone round, and was retailed on a pirate radio station, that a 14-year-old black girl had been raped by 19 Asians after being caught shoplifting. Another man was shot dead nearby the next day. A White Paper on education set out plans to free schools from the control of local authorities and give them power to expand, change

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 29 October 2005

In email addresses we find a punctuation mark /. There is a widespread and strong feeling against calling this a forward slash or just slash. The / once languished like the @ on the typewriter keyboard, seldom used except by the billing department (‘To one gross wingnuts @ 1/3 a dozen … 15/-’). It was from its function of separating shillings (solidi) from pence (denarii) that the sign acquired its name of solidus. In the Middle Ages the same sign had been used in manuscripts in much the same way that we use a comma, and in this function it was called a virgula in Latin, because it looked like

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 29 October 2005

Power to the locals Leo McKinstry takes a dim view of the new localism (‘Local schmocal’, 22 October), but most of the new intake of Conservative MPs have signed up to the localists’ ‘Direct Democracy’ charter. We have done so because we believe Britain’s centre-right needs a strategic rethink. Why? First, because we recognise the government has failed to improve public services because it has tried to micro-manage them from Whitehall. Second, because we realise that no matter who wins elections, power will still reside with unelected and unaccountable quangos, judges and Eurocrats. Only by making the public services downwardly accountable to the people they are meant to serve, as