I witnessed an instructive but depressing little scene three days ago. I was on an escalator in the Paris Metro at quite a busy time of day when a young man in international slum-costume and face as malign as the late Mark Duggan’s who was standing a few steps ahead off me used a spray gun to scrawl his initials … [Read on]
Members of our political class believe in elections as peasants believe in saintly relics, though with rather less reason. Perhaps they cannot believe that a method that brought them to the top of the national pile, to fame and fortune, is not of universal human application, nor is it the solution to all human problems. I thought this when I … [Read on]
Some words, printed in red in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal, caught my attention: Being at the receiving end of charity can be stigmatising… And, as everyone knows or by now has accepted as an unassailable orthodoxy, to stigmatise is both morally wrong and disastrous in its effects. Ergo charity is reprehensible and ought to be stamped … [Read on]
For French newspapers Britain means either riots or royalty, that is to say bad news or soap opera; and I was intrigued the other day to see in Le Figaro an article about Prince William’s recent interview with CNN about his accession to fatherhood. What intrigued me about the article was the photograph that accompanied it. It showed Prince William … [Read on]
If anyone doubted the complete destruction of British bourgeois civilisation, he could not find more convincing evidence of it than by travelling from Calais to Folkestone on the Eurostar. The vast majority of people taking it with their cars are British, of course; and they are not a pretty sight or a grateful sound. They are, by definition, not poor; … [Read on]
In Samuel Butler’s satire, Erewhon, crime was illness and illness was criminal. In at least one small respect we have taken the book as a model and put it into practice. While in our hospitals nurses are enjoined to address patients, however old and venerable, by their first names, or even by diminutives of their first names, in our prisons … [Read on]
The Times of 29 January led with a story about National Health Service managers who received large redundancy payments and then found employment in the service immediately afterwards. The article was at pains to point out that the individuals involved had done nothing illegal, without fully grasping that it was the very legality of the proceedings that was their most … [Read on]
‘I cannot fiddle but I can make a great state out of a little city.’ Themistocles. Ferocious protests from the Left greeted the appearance of the Salisbury Review in 1982. Fury erupted at the audacity of publishing a journal which not only challenged the Left’s ‘smelly little orthodoxies’, but did so with intellectual brilliance and panache. High intelligence could never, … [Read on]
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