05/04/2014
5 Apr 2014

Global healing

5 Apr 2014

Global healing

Featured articles

Features
Liam Halligan
Michael Lewis vs Wall Street’s new predators

‘The US stock market is rigged.’ That’s the j’accuse headline that screams out from Flash Boys, the new book by Michael Lewis. It’s a very big claim, made by America’s foremost financial writer. It’s also a claim that, after years of accumulating evidence, warrants extremely close and sustained official scrutiny. Lewis produced Liar’s Poker, his first bestseller, in 1989 — after a four-year stint as a fresh-from-the-Ivy-League bond dealer at the now defunct firm Salomon Brothers.

Michael Lewis vs Wall Street’s new predators
Douglas Murray
We’ve got gay rights, now let’s have gay responsibility

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="Douglas Murray and Julie Bindel discuss monogamy in gay marriages" startat=665] Listen [/audioplayer]As inexorably as night follows day and push comes to shove, so the words ‘Tory’ and ‘scandal’ seem destined to conjoin with ‘Brazilian’ and ‘rent-boy’. Yet the main response to the allegations about Mark Menzies MP last weekend was neither laughter or condemnation, but pity.

We’ve got gay rights, now let’s have gay responsibility
Bjørn Lomborg
How green policies hurt the poor

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="Matt Ridley and Fraser Nelson discuss the IPCC's latest report" startat=67] Listen [/audioplayer]Advocates against global warming often frame the issue in terms of helping the poor. ‘You’re right, people dying thanks to climate change is some way off...’ ran one fairly typical advert recently, ‘about 5,000 miles, give or take.

How green policies hurt the poor
Matt Ridley
We have a new climate change consensus — and it’s good news everyone

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="Matt Ridley and Fraser Nelson discuss the IPCC's latest report" startat=67] Listen [/audioplayer]Nigel Lawson was right after all. Ever since the Centre for Policy Studies lecture in 2006 that launched the former chancellor on his late career as a critic of global warming policy, Lord Lawson has been stressing the need to adapt to climate change, rather than throw public money at futile attempts to prevent it.

We have a new climate change consensus — and it’s good news everyone
Clarissa Tan
The Visit

Clarissa Tan, who wrote articles and TV reviews for The Spectator, has died of cancer aged 42. She came to London from Singapore after winning this magazine’s Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing and over the next seven years wrote about a great many things: Asia, race and the East; also smartphones, Sienna and socks. Clarissa paid attention to prose and all her pieces were beautiful and funny but, perhaps most unusually, they rang true.

The Visit
Aidan Hartley
Before you talk about ‘Lessons from Rwanda’, read this

In Rwanda I was an ant walking over the rough hide of an elephant — this time 20 years ago I had no idea of the scale of what I could see on the ground. Trekking with a column of rebels from the Ugandan frontier south towards Kigali, we came upon the early massacres of Tutsis, hysterical survivors, flames leaping above huts, mortars roaring down misty valleys. But we had seen a lot of this across Africa in the 1990s. We visited a Catholic pastor in his rectory and I suppose at that point I and my Tutsi guides still respected the priesthood and could not imagine their complicity in murder.

Before you talk about ‘Lessons from Rwanda’, read this
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