17/03/2007
17 Mar 2007

17 March 2007

17 Mar 2007

17 March 2007

Featured articles

Features
Austen Ivereigh
Let’s sort out the migration mess

Austen Ivereigh says that illegal immigration is both a symptom and a cause — of British economic success. The dead hand of the state is getting it wrong, as usual: time for a total rethinkSo, the government gets tough on illegal immigrants. The UK Borders Bill currently before Parliament plasters the cracks in our borders, imposes zero-tolerance for unscrupulous employers and gangmasters, and restores discipline to the nation’s frontiers by text-messaging Johnny Foreigner to remind him his visa is about to expire.

Melanie Phillips
The wizards of Oz have got it right

Coming from Britain to Canberra to interview members of the Australian government is like leaving a fetid malarial swamp to be douched with fresh cold water from a mountain spring. These guys are so onside in the great fight for civilisation against barbarism that they make ‘Bush’s poodle’ Tony Blair sound like a Harold Pinter wannabe on a bad day in Basra.As Britain impatiently awaits the disappearance of the Prime Minister it has impaled on the turnpike of Iraq, as it pulls troops out and as both Gordon Brown and David Cameron delicately signal that they will distance themselves from US foreign policy, John Howard’s government is increasing the number of Australian soldiers in Iraq and its ministers remain passionately committed to the battle for democracy in the Arab and Muslim world.

Fraser Nelson
Blair’s guru gives Brown advice

Anthony Giddens tells Fraser Nelson that the Labour  project has to ‘restart’ and that Gordon Brown can no  longer afford to be a ‘closeted Machiavellian figure’Professor Anthony Giddens, author of The Third Way and intellectual godfather of New Labour, is a hard man to pin down. After days of radio silence an email arrives confirming he can be interviewed; it’s just that he’s tied up in meetings with Colonel Gaddafi.

Rod Liddle
QPR have walloped the Chinese

A few weeks ago the Chinese national youth football team arrived in London to play some matches against the capital’s clubs as part of a historic, groundbreaking, goodwill visit ahead of the Olympic Games. A chance for our two nations to foment sporting respect for one another, despite our profound political differences. Sort of like Nixon’s visit to Peking in 1972, except with the top referee Dermot Gallagher in attendance, rather than Henry Kissinger.

John Casey
The revival of Tory philosophy

I hear that the Conservative Philosophy Group is about to be revived after a hibernation of about 15 years. The group, in so far as it has been heard of at all, has the reputation of being a collection of Thatcherite ideologues, exercising an arcane influence over policy. In fact it had no discernible influence over Tory policy, and was never meant to. One or two members (it must be admitted) wanted to give the impression that we were a think-tank with the usual ambitions.

Martin Gilbert
Churchill was ‘too fond of the Jews’

In a press release announcing a book by Richard Toye on Churchill and Lloyd George, Cambridge University Press put its main emphasis on the discovery of a previously unknown article written by Winston Churchill in 1937, containing considerable anti-Semitic imagery.In fact, not one word of this article was written by Churchill. Nor did the article ever appear in print, either under his name or that of any other. The article was written in its entirety by a British journalist, Adam Marshall Diston.

Michael Moorcock
How I learned to love the Lords

Lost Pines, TexasWhen I first moved to America in the early 1990s I arrived as a republican, full of a furious rhetoric about the end of monarchy and the abolition of hereditary privilege. I’d sent a hefty donation to Charter 88, who wanted to see PR, a written constitution and an elected second house. Social justice could not be improved by traditional methods and all the Lords Temporal were good for was raising prize pigs and holding the hands of serial killers whom they visited in jug.

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