Daniel Jackson | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

Can the liberal worldview survive?

There is a latent consensus among political scientists and highbrow columnists that the liberal era is over and that, following Brexit and Trump, we are entering a period of neo-nationalism. This consensus will develop further if, as I suspect she will, Marine Le Pen wins the French presidential election next May. Two recent editorials in the Economist demonstrate how quickly this is happening. In July, it was argued that ‘the new divide in rich countries is not between left and right but between open and closed’. Last week, we were told that ‘the long, hard job of winning the argument for liberal internationalism begins anew’. The challenge to liberalism is still seen as an argument to be won rather than an irreversible sea-change.

Daniel Jackson

Atheists are embracing Gods and creationism

Daniel Jackson

Atheists are embracing Gods and creationism

Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor and entrepreneur, the twenty-first century’s answer to Howard Hughes, believes we are living in a computer simulation. The chances that we exist in ‘base reality’ are billions to one, he says. Last week he told an audience of Silicon Valley tech evangelists: ‘Forty years ago we had Pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were.’ ‘Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality.’ ‘If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now.

Daniel Jackson

There’s a reason why Prince didn’t release his archive – most of it isn’t very good

Daniel Jackson

There’s a reason why Prince didn’t release his archive – most of it isn’t very good

Prince’s vast archive of unreleased music is legendary. The ‘vault’ in Paisley Park, the late musician’s home-cum-studio complex in suburban Minneapolis, contains thousands of hours of recordings that have never seen the inside of a tape deck. The unpublished music tells a story. Material was shelved when band members left, after the tragic death of his newborn son, and at the end of his first marriage. Some projects were cancelled for more prosaic (commercial and legal) reasons. The Black Album, which was abandoned in mysterious circumstances a week before it was due to be released, became one of the most bootlegged records of all time. Because so much of the vault’s contents have leaked over the years, fans with realistic expectations know roughly what will be available posthumously.

Daniel Jackson

Spain has just experienced a very modern revolution

Daniel Jackson

Spain has just experienced a very modern revolution

Graffiti artists have added social commentary to many of the billboard advertisements in Madrid, and election campaign posters are no exception. The improbably smooth forehead of Albert Rivera, who leads Ciudadanos, has ‘fascista’ written all over it. The would-be Banksy of the Madrid metro doesn’t elaborate, but the charge seems unlikely. Rivera’s party is, by (almost) anyone’s definition, firmly in the centre ground; it’s endorsed by Guy Verhofstadt, the former Prime Minister of Belgium and one of Europe’s leading federalists. Images of Pablo Iglesias, who leads Podemos, are mostly left alone. Perhaps the vandals like his pony tail, or his parties proposal of a universal ‘citizen’s wage’. After all, spray paint isn’t cheap.

Daniel Jackson

Labour, Prince Charles and homeopathic quacks: Andy Burnham has some explaining to do

Daniel Jackson

Labour, Prince Charles and homeopathic quacks: Andy Burnham has some explaining to do

Obfuscation is an important tool in the kit of any snake oil salesman, which helps to explain why the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital has changed its name. It’s now known as The Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine. In this context the word ‘integrated’ is used because it’s suitably vague. It’s a catch-all term to describe any treatment ‘outside of mainstream healthcare’ – or in other words, treatments that don’t work. Homeopathy is a huge embarrassment to the NHS, but it’s not nearly as maligned as it should be. In fact it has one very prestigious backer, with a direct line to the Cabinet and the Prime Minister. Prince Charles’ ‘black spider memos’ reveal the extent of his lobbying for the widely discredited practice.

Daniel Jackson

Big Tobacco and the smugglers: do you believe this conspiracy theory?

Daniel Jackson

Big Tobacco and the smugglers: do you believe this conspiracy theory?

In an information sheet on its website, the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association draws a link between the illegal cigarette trade and prostitution, arms trafficking and terrorism. Given the number of people killed by their trade, it’s hard to believe that the TMA is motivated by altruism. So why do these companies campaign against black-market cigarettes? One answer is that they eat into profits. But the scale of the problem also allows Big Tobacco to argue for lower taxes on its products. From the TMA’s website: The UK’s high tobacco tax policy has provided economic incentives for criminals to meet the demand that exists for cheap tobacco products. This has implications for Government revenue and for law and order.

Daniel Jackson

The Stalinist logic behind the SNP’s approach to education

Daniel Jackson

The Stalinist logic behind the SNP’s approach to education

Early in the campaign for Scottish independence the SNP commissioned a party political broadcast called Two Futures. It told the story of Kirsty, a baby due to be born on polling day. ‘What kind of country will I grow up in?’ she asks in a childish falsetto. One vision of the future is full of colour and gap-toothed smiles, with children skipping and laughing on their way to school. A nuclear family sit around the breakfast table in a sun-kissed kitchen eating fruit (this scene acts as a useful reminder that the broadcast is set firmly in the realm of fantasy). The alternative is a future in which Scotland votes to remain in the United Kingdom. In this monochrome dystopia the Palace of Westminster looms above an innocent child.

Daniel Jackson

Why are ordinary British women blowing their savings on gruesome facelifts?

Daniel Jackson

Why are ordinary British women blowing their savings on gruesome facelifts?

A ‘jobless mother of four’ from Cumbria has jetted off to Budapest for another round of cosmetic surgery. Andrea Dalzell has been saving child benefit money since 2003 for a string of procedures including face and eyebrow lifts, botox injections and a ‘designer vagina’. At that price the question on my lips is ‘designed by whom?’ On Facebook the 48-year-old grandmother said her latest trip to Budapest (for a cheek and brow lift) cost £3,500. The package included flights, food and accommodation. Without wishing to cast aspersions on her particular surgeon, at that price there's a huge danger of corners being cut, so to speak. ‘Package surgery’ is still a relatively new phenomenon. The deals are targeted at web users who search for terms like ‘budget plastic surgery’ or ‘affordable boob job’.

Daniel Jackson

Dying Without Dignity: a report on end-of-life care that shames the NHS

Daniel Jackson

Dying Without Dignity: a report on end-of-life care that shames the NHS

The name says it all. 'Dying Without Dignity' is the parliamentary health ombudsman's report into over 300 complaints of the neglect of terminally ill patients by the NHS. The BBC this morning highlights two horrible examples. One mother had to call an A&E doctor to come and give her son more pain relief because staff on the palliative care ward he had been on had failed to respond to her requests. A 67-year-old man's family learned of his terminal cancer diagnosis through a hospital note – before he knew himself. This 'failed every principle of established good practice in breaking bad news', says the report. Julie Mellor, the ombudsman, uses uncompromising language: 'Our investigations have found that patients have spent their last days in unnecessary pain, people have wrongly been denied their wish to die at home, and that poor communication between NHS staff and families has meant that people were unable to say goodbye to their loved ones.

Daniel Jackson

Women drivers could force a draconian drink-driving limit on us. Why not set a higher limit for men?

Daniel Jackson

Women drivers could force a draconian drink-driving limit on us. Why not set a higher limit for men?

Drink-driving is back. Which isn’t to say it’s on the rise – quite the contrary –but it’s high on the agenda at every level of government. The Department for Transport has recently stopped offering an alternative to the notoriously inaccurate roadside breathalyser. In Scotland the limit was reduced last year from 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood to just 50. This was controversial because it means that a pint, depending on alcohol percentage, could put you over the limit. Now the Police Federation has called for the drink-drive limit to be similarly lowered in England and Wales – and it’s all the fault of women, apparently. The organisation believes that the law needs to be strengthened to deter the fairer sex from committing the offence.

Daniel Jackson

Worried about your weight? Check your waistline, not the bathroom scales

Daniel Jackson

Worried about your weight? Check your waistline, not the bathroom scales

Daniel Jackson

Horrible diseases are being ‘edited out’ of the human body

Daniel Jackson

Horrible diseases are being ‘edited out’ of the human body

Some exciting news about the future of medicine was announced today. Unfortunately, you really need a degree in biochemistry – which I certainly don't have – to understand it. But we'd better get used to that, because the eradication of nasty diseases is increasingly a project for geneticists whose findings are difficult to grasp (but easy to misunderstand). Editas, described as a 'leading genome editing company', has announced the highlights of the 18th annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) in New Orleans. Here's just one of them: Gene conversion of the hemoglobin locus: Several CRISPR/Cas9 construct variants were evaluated in vitro to target the human hemoglobin beta gene (HBB) in the region mutated in sickle cell anaemia.

Daniel Jackson

New gene therapy for heart disease and diabetes: how will hypochondriacs react?

Daniel Jackson

New gene therapy for heart disease and diabetes: how will hypochondriacs react?

Daniel Jackson

Scotland is on the verge of becoming a one-party state

Daniel Jackson

Scotland is on the verge of becoming a one-party state

My constituency is one of the SNP’s most coveted prizes. If they win in Midlothian they can win almost anywhere. This is Gladstone’s old seat, where the modern political campaign was born. He wrested it away from the Conservatives in 1880, after a series of stirring speeches on the government’s foreign policy failures. On Thursday the SNP are hoping to pull off a similar upset. The momentum behind the nationalists is incredible. Everything I’ve seen and heard in the last couple of weeks points to an SNP victory here. My entire family is voting for them. My mother suggested that I should do the same. ‘Give your dead grandfather a vote,’ she said without irony. A straw poll of my neighbours reveals that the rest of my street have become nationalists too.

Daniel Jackson

Apple and IBM may just have changed the future of personalised medicine

Daniel Jackson

Apple and IBM may just have changed the future of personalised medicine

As the FT reports, Apple and IBM have got into bed together. The deal they've struck has major implications for the growing number of people using wearable tech (and indeed mobile phones) to monitor their health. Here are the details. IBM has entered into partnership with Apple and other manufacturers of medical devices to make health data from wearable tech available to doctors and insurers. One outcome will be personalised treatments for diabetics. But that's only part of the picture. This is how it will work. If you're self-monitoring your heart rate, calories and cholesterol levels – as more and more of us are – you will now be able to use an IBM app to store it in a cloud. To quote the FT: The agreement is the latest instance of deeper ties between the healthcare and technology sectors, in anticipation of an explosion in the amount of medical data that people collect using their smartphones or 'wearables' like the Fitbit or Apple Watch.

Daniel Jackson

Low income damages children’s brains, says study. If so, that’s a tragedy

Daniel Jackson

Low income damages children’s brains, says study. If so, that’s a tragedy

The link between wealth and attainment is a subject that’s close to my heart, or perhaps more accurately my cerebral cortex. Like 20 per cent of the population I was raised in technical poverty. My first home was a touring caravan. It’s safe to say that no statistician would have expected me to amount to anything – especially if they’d had access to the findings of a new study in Nature Neuroscience. Researchers have found that there is an association between low family income and the structure of the brains of children. The study looked at the relationship between wealth and the size of the brain’s surface area. The measurements were derived from a method of analysing of biological form called morphometrics. I can't stress too strongly that this has nothing to do with the pseudoscience of phrenology beloved by racists.

Daniel Jackson

Why liberals want us to act like children

Daniel Jackson

Why liberals want us to act like children

Have you noticed how often adults – particularly of the earnest, nagging variety who work in the public sector – are behaving like children? I don't mean acting childishly, but literally behaving like children. Last week delegates to the NUS women’s conference were using ‘jazz-hands’ instead of clapping – in case it should trigger an anxiety attack. I can think of five-year-olds who would squirm at that spectacle. Meanwhile, Brown University in America recently debated sexual assault on campus. A serious topic, but the authorities deemed it necessary to create a 'safe space' full of play-doh, bubbles, calming music and colouring books. Yes, colouring books. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. As the New York Times reported at the weekend, an 'adult' colouring book called Secret Garden – 96 pages of twee black-and-white ink drawings of flowers, trees and birds – has sold 1.

Daniel Jackson

Scottish nationalism is hypersensitive and insular. So is the newspaper it has spawned

Daniel Jackson

Scottish nationalism is hypersensitive and insular. So is the newspaper it has spawned

Last year Russia Today launched a poster campaign with a fanciful strapline: ‘This is what happens when there is no second opinion’. The extraordinary implication is that the conflict could have been avoided, if only we had listened to Putin. This is such an obvious fallacy that it’s hardly worth dwelling on. But RT (as it now likes to be known, as if people don't know what the 'R' stands for) is producing lightly disguised state propaganda. The viewers know it and so do the mercenaries that make it. In contrast, Scotland’s new pro-independence daily newspaper – ‘The National’– is written with earnest conviction. Its contributors are devout believers, and that’s what makes it so hilarious. The paper’s response to the budget was typical.

Daniel Jackson

Telescopes in contact lenses: a brilliant idea after the fiasco of Google Glass

Daniel Jackson

Telescopes in contact lenses: a brilliant idea after the fiasco of Google Glass

Yesterday at SXSW, the world's grooviest 'interactive festival', the head of Google X – the company's mysterious research lab – finally admitted it. Google Glass was one gigantic embarrassment. Or, as Astro Teller put it, 'We allowed and sometimes even encouraged too much attention for the programme'. You don't say. For a glimpse of the sort of attention Google didn't want, just look at the photograph above – some poor sap on the subway using Google Glass and a smartphone. It went viral on Twitter. The guy was dubbed 'the glasshole', a pun that works in both American and English accents. Google Glass has given wearable tech a bad name: it's raw material for standup comics. You do have to wonder whether something went wrong when Google was downloading its sense of humour, given that Astro Teller's official title is Captain of Moonshots.

Daniel Jackson

Lib Dems are promising to revolutionise mental health care. This is opportunism, pure and simple

Daniel Jackson

Lib Dems are promising to revolutionise mental health care. This is opportunism, pure and simple

Given their record in government, any sane person would regard a pledge by the Liberal Democrats with a healthy dose of cynicism. Their latest hobby-horse is mental health; it has been the subject of several recent speeches and the issue has a dedicated page on their website. The ‘mental health action plan’ consists of seven pledges, most of which are pitifully vague. For example, the pompously named 'Crisis Care Concordat' is about 'making sure no one experiencing mental health crisis is ever turned away from services'. I'm not being flippant when I ask: what do they mean by 'mental health crisis'? It's not like diagnosing pneumonia or a broken leg. People manifesting symptoms of clinical depression or schizophrenia should obviously not be turned away, any more than anyone posing a suicide risk – and one hopes they aren't.

Daniel Jackson

MPs back plain cigarette packets. Smokers, get over it. Or switch to pretty e-cigs

Daniel Jackson

MPs back plain cigarette packets. Smokers, get over it. Or switch to pretty e-cigs

MPs are voting today in favour of the introduction of standardised cigarette packaging. There hasn't even been a debate on the issue and the BBC thinks the result is a foregone conclusion. That's bad news for the tobacco industry, hardline libertarians and Nigel Farage. It's been amusing watching the Tobacco Manufacturer's Association carve out its nuanced – almost schizophrenic – position on the matter. Smoking is bad for our health and it is impossible to argue otherwise. So they don’t. Theirs must be the only industry which is resigned, ostensibly at least, to deterring potential customers. Big tobacco firms have an obligation to their shareholders, so they have to say something in their own defence. Their position is that plain packaging will make it easier for criminals to produce and sell counterfeit cigarettes.

Daniel Jackson

The Apple Watch could have been a proper health-monitoring device. But the FDA won’t allow it

Daniel Jackson

The Apple Watch could have been a proper health-monitoring device. But the FDA won’t allow it

Apple’s new smart watch, unveiled by Tim Cook yesterday, had incredible potential. But its functionality has been hindered by technical hitches – and, especially, overzealous legislators. Their cloying presence must have been felt at every product meeting. Engineers working on Apple’s watch did so with the rasping breath of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the back of their necks. The result? Apple is nowhere near giving us a device that allows comprehensive self-monitoring of health – thanks to federal regulations. Public health services everywhere tell us that prevention is better than cure. But the FDA doesn't trust Apple, or any manufacturer of wearable tech, to gather the sort of intimate and precise medical data that could actually prolong your lifespan.

Daniel Jackson

The Taylor Wessing Prize has no future if it continues to be so insipidly PC

Daniel Jackson

The Taylor Wessing Prize has no future if it continues to be so insipidly PC

We know what to expect from the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize. Africans in tribal dress. Flame-haired girls posing with animals. Nudes, generally grotesque: obese hanging bellies, a limb missing here or there. Wizened (but wise!) faces. Low-level child pornography. In 2012 the National Portrait Gallery was fortunate to avoid the wandering gaze of Operation Yewtree. Certain archetypes always seem to make the grade. Perhaps the judges have finally woken up to the clichés, because the choice of finalists this year is not predictable but baffling. The first prize was awarded to David Titlow for a photograph of his nine month-old son. Imagine The Creation of Adam, with a dog in place of God and a baby in place of Adam.

Daniel Jackson

How independence will impoverish Scottish culture

Daniel Jackson

How independence will impoverish Scottish culture

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_11_Sept_2014_v4.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson, Tom Holland and Leah McLaren discuss how we can still save the Union" startat=50] Listen [/audioplayer]An explosion of confetti will greet the announcement of Scottish independence. This isn’t another one of Alex Salmond’s fanciful promises, but an installation by a visual artist named Ellie Harrison. She wants Scotland to become a socialist republic. She has placed four confetti cannons in Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery. They will only be fired in the event of a Yes vote. Most artists in Scotland favour independence. Harrison’s installation is typical of the pretentious agitprop they produce. This isn’t a uniquely Scottish problem.

Daniel Jackson

The SNP’s ‘cybernats’ are a modern political scourge – with the zeal of converts

Daniel Jackson

The SNP’s ‘cybernats’ are a modern political scourge – with the zeal of converts

The first ‘yes’ campaign volunteer knocked on my door towards the end of last year. She was a member of the Scottish Socialist Party. I glanced at her dog-eared tally sheet — in my old block of 40 flats, only three residents had said they would vote no. In this neglected pocket of Edinburgh there are men who roll up their tracksuit bottoms to show off their prison tags. It is made up of decaying towers and pebble-dashed tenements. The people here are going to vote for change. Who can blame them? Now that I have moved to a more genteel suburb outside of the city, a further three yes activists have attempted doorstep conversions. I have heard appeals to my head, my heart and my wallet from nationalists who are as dogged as Jehovah’s Witnesses.