Latest news with #TheSpectator
Al Arabiya
a day ago
- Politics
- Al Arabiya
Netanyahu rejects governing Gaza, Trump–Putin talks planned & UK migrant detentions
On W News Extra with Leigh-Ann Gerrans, we're joined by Freddy Gray from The Spectator and broadcaster and journalist Isabel Webster. We discuss Netanyahu's cabinet meeting to approve the full occupation of Gaza, President Trump considering the UAE for the upcoming meeting with Putin, and Trump's tariffs hitting over 90 countries.
Spectator
2 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Land value and the Somebody Else's Problem paradox
'The Somebody Else's Problem field can be run for years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting or can't explain.' The SEP, as I hope many of you remember, is a cloak of invisibility featured in Douglas Adams's Life, the Universe and Everything. It perhaps arises from a universal aspect of socially driven behaviour – one which encompasses the Bystander Effect, the Overton Window and the Too-Difficult Box. Strangely, Donald Rumsfeld misses out one of the four (un)known (un)knowns: he does not mention 'unknown knowns' – things that we know but aren't aware of knowing, or pretend not to know. Yet this quadrant is rich in information, from tacit knowledge (Michael Polanyi's 'we know more than we can tell') all the way to wilful blindness. One of my favourite instances of a tacit understanding being breached happened in 1999, when someone (perhaps a proud Australian) fired up a barbecue in the interval at Glyndebourne. Nowhere in the previous 75 years of opera-going had it been necessary explicitly to prohibit this; it was just something universally understood. Life here in the south-east is packed with such shibboleths. Having grown up in Wales, I rely on my English wife to navigate the many unwritten laws of our Saxon occupiers: had I first visited Glyndebourne on my own, I might well have rigged up an extension lead from a nearby building and started microwaving things. But there are weird blind spots and third rails of this kind in political thought. Strange as it may seem to read this in The Spectator, I am delighted that people are finally discussing wealth taxes. Not because I am an uncritical supporter of wealth taxes in general, but because the country is doomed unless we can at least start a wide-ranging discussion about the nature of taxation without a bunch of nerds at the Treasury closing down the debate. In particular we need to start considering the role of land as both an untaxed source of wealth and an obstacle to acquiring it, depending on when you were born. There is an obvious starting point: council tax has become an embarrassing absurdity, where the owner of a semi in Bolton can pay more than the owner of a mansion in Kensington. Stamp duty is similarly idiotic. While reading Mike Bird's excellent book The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset it struck me again and again that, as a Someone Else's Problem Field, land value is the Jimmy Savile of economic thought: a problem hiding in plain sight; something everyone can see yet which is filed in the too-difficult box to be conveniently ignored. Fans of Henry George and the Land Value Tax have included Milton Friedman, Richard Nixon, Winston Churchill, Sun Yat-sen, Vivienne Westwood, Joe Stiglitz and Martin Luther King, yet it somehow gets kicked into the long grass every time. If you want a further endorsement, Marx hated the idea. Land is not even included as a distinct asset class in the UK National Accounts, despite being one of the largest asset classes in the economy. Instead it is included in the value of houses and other buildings under 'produced non-financial assets'. This is clearly daft: houses haven't got much more expensive, land has. In these very pages, I recently explained that you could use land value capture to pay for the whole of HS2, while also creating much needed housing along the route. I expected someone either to prove me wrong, or else to discuss adopting the idea. Nothing. We'll just have to wait another few decades for the SEP to run out. After all, we kids could all tell Jimmy Savile was a perv back in 1975.
Spectator
2 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Welcome to the Age of Jerks
How screwed is Britain? I've checked with the Impartiality Police. They said stick to the facts. Like many ailing, ageing western democracies, we've had low growth, soaring debts and flat living standards for nearly two decades. Have our politicians met the moment? You tell me. Perhaps, as The Spectator has long advocated, we need some heretical and brave thinking to improve our prospects and make sense of the giant forces – of technology, ecology and demography – that are reshaping our world at a dizzying rate. For a decade, I have tried to rebalance the news, from events to trends. The result of all this: a new podcast from the Today franchise, called Radical. I've always had a soft spot for the word. When I was at Downing College, Cambridge, my don said that when he sat the All Souls exam in Oxford, where you write about one word for three hours, his word was 'radical'. It comes from Latin radix, for root. Though now associated with upheaval, the etymology carries a different sense, closer to 'the root of the matter'. If writing about the word today, I would argue that the radical spirit, long associated with the left, now animates the transatlantic right. On last week's episode, Dr James Orr, the Cambridge theologian and friend of J.D. Vance who is becoming to Nigel Farage what Keith Joseph was to Mrs Thatcher, described the ambition of his new thinktank, the Centre for a Better Britain. I reminded him of the lovely line from William Buckley, in his 1955 opening editorial for the National Review, that a conservative is one who 'stands athwart history, yelling Stop!' I suggested the elegiac conservatism of Michael Oakeshott and Roger Scruton has been succeeded by the missionary zeal of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who stand afore history, yelling 'Go!' Dr Orr believes this is not just because of the marriage between MAGA and assorted techno-utopians; nor is it a response merely to the rampaging globalisation chronicled in Vance's memoir, with its Scrutonian title of Hillbilly Elegy. He argues that 1789 to 2016 was an Age of Liberalism, and now we're suffering the birth pangs of a new epoch. What should we call it? Such is the rate of technological innovation today, some people call it The Great Acceleration. Sadly, that's been and gone. AI, which is underhyped rather than overhyped, will speed up history as never before. For instance, I suspect the future of work is Head (AI), Hand (Robots), Heart (Us, we hope). Acceleration is the rate of change of speed. The rate of change of acceleration is jerks. This is the Age of Jerks. At Lord's the other week, I spoke to a former prime minister. This kind soul wondered aloud if PMQs is the optimal use of a PM's time. It eliminates half of Wednesday and much of Tuesday, so around 20 per cent of the week. The arguments for PMQs are familiar. Of course PMs hate it, you may say. But would a monthly interrogation by the liaison committee, while annoying for bulletin editors and keyboard warriors, better serve democracy? I put this to Kemi Badenoch, whom I have just interviewed for TV. She said she likes the current arrangement. I shall remind her of that if she becomes prime minister. Watching the edit, I wondered if I am encouraging too many tears on television. Recently, in a BBC pilgrimage to India, I cried when thinking about my dear departed dad. Mrs Badenoch has a similar moment when talking about her late father. It was a revealing moment from a politician who's not normally known for her vulnerability. I strongly believe in rote learning poetry. I can recite, verbatim, most of Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard', Satan's unanswerable temptation in Book IX of Paradise Lost, and several of Shakespeare's sonnets. I do it partly to combat cognitive decline. In the week of BBC scandals about Gaza, Glastonbury and MasterChef, I dutifully turned my attention to a denser verse – the BBC editorial guidelines – but found the decline accelerated.
Spectator
2 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Inside the Mohammed Hijab trial
Mohammed Hijab sat at the back of the courtroom and ate doughnuts while his lawyer, Mark Henderson, delivered his closing submission. 'You will have seen that my client is argumentative, can be provocative,' said Henderson. 'Some people might think that he is a bit of a smart alec, a bit too cocky.' Hijab reclined in his chair and licked the sugar from his fingers. Hijab acted like a schoolboy throughout last month's four-day trial at the Royal Courts of Justice. He laughed and shouted while giving evidence. 'It's an unsalvageable case, Greg! It really is!' he yelled at The Spectator's legal counsel Greg Callus at the end of his second day in the stand, leaning over the side. Well, he lost. Hijab sued The Spectator and Douglas Murray over Douglas's column of 24 September 2022, claiming that Douglas had misrepresented what he said in a speech in Leicester during the sectarian disorder there three years ago. In his ruling this week, Mr Justice Johnson has confirmed that what Douglas wrote is 'substantially true'. We can now repeat it: Mohammed Hijab is a street agitator who whipped up his followers in Leicester during the unrest there between Muslims and Hindus. He mocked Hindus, and claimed that they must live in fear because they have been reincarnated as 'pathetic, weak, cowardly people'. On 18 September 2022, with Leicester in chaos, Hijab travelled there from London and made sectarian tensions worse. 'Let me tell you something,' he said to a gathered crowd of mostly masked Muslim men. 'All due respect, actually no due respect, yeah, if they believe in reincarnation, yeah, what a humiliation and pathetic thing for them to be reincarnated into some pathetic, weak, cowardly people like that. I'd rather be an animal.' In his column, Douglas said that Hijab had attacked Hindus in this speech; in court, Hijab said that he had only criticised Hindutva (extreme Hindu nationalists). Hijab tried to argue that it was possible that a Hindutva could be a non-Hindu. Therefore, Douglas had defamed him. When asked by Callus to name a non-Hindu Hindutva, Hijab struggled. In the moment, he could only think of one: Benjamin Netanyahu. He later remembered two others: Tommy Robinson and Douglas Murray. Hijab's case was a pile of unbelievable claims of this kind. At one point, the court was played a video of a seminar he hosted in April 2022, before the disturbances in Leicester, where he openly smirked while asking Hindus about their belief in reincarnation. The Spectator's lawyers wanted to show that he had form for ridiculing the religion. 'What would you choose to be? A bear or a gorilla?' Hijab said in the video. 'I would rather be a bear because if a bear and a gorilla had a fight, the bear would win.' 'Is she the one with the four arms?' he also said, when referring to a Hindu deity. Hijab continued to smile in the stand as these clips were played, then tried to claim to the court that they showed him a 'humble learner' making genuine enquiries. Of course he was not mocking Hindus. The judge did not buy any of it. Phrases such as 'not credible', 'not consistent', 'untenable' and 'confected' fill his judgment. He calls Hijab a liar. Hijab has previously tried to bully British publications who cross him, threatening them with lawsuits worth many hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages and legal fees. In this case, Hijab said that three contracts with three organisations had been cancelled because of Douglas's article. The Spectator argued, and Johnson agrees, that the messages showing that these unevidenced contracts were apparently cancelled as a result of the article in order that Hijab could claim damages were contrived and implausible. Hijab's evidence for these damages verged on comic. In one instance, a man who intended to 'cancel' Hijab's 'contract', who had known him for years and called him 'bro' over WhatsApp, informed Hijab of the news over email. He addressed him formally, as if they'd never met, with the formal salutation of 'Dear Mr Hegab'. (Mohammed Hegab is Hijab's real name.) It seemed Hijab and his mates wanted this flimsy evidence to look more official. When Hijab was not shouting, smirking, lolling in his chair or eating doughnuts, he looked at a printout of Douglas's column, the one he was suing over, with Douglas's caricature at the top. Hijab had been desperate to 'debate' Douglas for years, and had hoped that the two would meet in court. In the end, he didn't get the satisfaction, because Douglas wisely decided not to attend.
Spectator
2 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
My victory over Mohammed Hijab
One of the occupational hazards of being a journalist is being hounded by litigants. Indeed, one of the reasons why much of the media finds it easier to report fluff than to write about difficult issues is that the latter can be costly in terms of money, as well as time. Three years ago I wrote a column in this magazine about some of the downsides of diversity. At the time there had just been serious disturbances in Leicester between local Hindus and Muslims. One of the people who decided to throw himself into the middle of that trouble and to try to make things worse was an online pugilist known as Mohammed Hijab. Hijab had already been filmed intimidating Jews in Golders Green and whipping up a crowd of masked men outside the Israeli embassy in London. In Leicester he chose to make a derogatory speech about Hindus to a crowd of men and then picture himself leading a 'Muslim patrol' in the city. After I pointed this out, Hijab tried to sue me and The Spectator. I retained the excellent Mark Lewis as my lawyer and for years, along with the magazine's brilliant legal team RPC, we watched Hijab perform every known legal and rhetorical contortion. Hijab's lawyers repeatedly dragged out their case, avoided every opportunity to drop it and insisted not only that what I had written was untrue, but that Hijab had suffered serious emotional and mental distress, as well as financial loss, as a result. Hijab seemed to think that he could use the courts not just to pursue me but to debate me. Last month the case was heard in London before Mr Justice Johnson. Many of Hijab's witnesses failed to show up, claiming ill health or having appeared to have skipped the country. Hijab himself spent several days in the witness box. This week the judge delivered his verdict. Mr Justice Johnson found that what I had said in my article was accurate, that Hijab had hurt his own reputation more through his actions and social media posts than I could ever have done with my article, and that the number of lies Hijab told in court were so numerous that his 'evidence overall is worthless'. The judgment also noted that as well as being 'combative and constantly argumentative' when cross-examined by my barrister and The Spectator's barrister, Hijab also demonstrated a 'palpable personal animosity' towards your columnist. The judgment found that Hijab lied about events in Golders Green – which he refused to accept was a Jewish area. It found that he had lied about his demagogic and dangerous actions outside the Israeli embassy in London, that he had lied about events in Leicester, and that he had lied about – and indeed appeared to have concocted – his claim of lost earnings. These lost earnings were alleged to have come from three Muslim organisations, including a supplements company called Nature's Blends. All claimed to have been big readers of my Spectator column, as indeed, Hijab alleged – causing him yet more hurt – was a receptionist at his local gym. Witnesses to his alleged financial loss failed to attend court. Another – Mr Wasway from Nature's Blends – had to try to explain his recent conviction and time spent in prison for making false court claims after staging car accidents. Not many law case reports make good reading in their own right, but this one does. No doubt Hijab will bluster that the findings are unfair and anti-Islamic – just as he tried to claim in court that Tommy Robinson, Benjamin Netanyahu and myself are three examples of non-Hindu Hindu extremists. But the judge in the case said far more against Hijab than I ever did. In court Hijab boasted of having sued other publications. He seemed proud of trying to bully the press, as well as the courts. But time and again he could not stop himself from lying. He claimed that his demagogic street speeches were attempts to publicly debate 'theology' and 'eschatology'. The judge found they were no such thing. Hijab had gone to Jewish areas on the Sabbath and a Hindu area during a volatile moment to engage in a type of vigilantism. As the judge said, Hijab 'was deliberately acting irresponsibly, raising the temperature of a volatile and potentially dangerous situation with provocative and inflammatory language'. The judge found his denials of vigilantism to be 'self-defeating' and 'untenable'. In summary, the judge found that 'the claimant is a street agitator who has whipped up a mob on London's streets, addressed an anti-Israel protest in inflammatory terms, and exacerbated frayed tensions (which had already spilled over into public disorder) between Muslim and Hindu communities in Leicester by whipping up his Muslim followers including by ridiculing Hindus for their belief in reincarnation and describing Hindus as pathetic, weak and cowardly in comparison to whom he would rather be an animal'. The judge ruled that what I wrote three years ago was true and Hijab was a liar. What to conclude about all this? Only that the press in this country often has to put up with Hijab-like figures. Few readers will be aware of the fact that one of the perils of an otherwise wonderful profession is litigious individuals attempting to silence the press from saying things about them that are true. Indeed I know journalists who in recent years have had to spend more time dealing with their lawyers than dealing with their editors. It is inevitable that over time many editors, publications and journalists will decide to take an easier route. Hijab imagined he could use the court system to intimidate me and this magazine. He resolutely and comprehensively failed. It turned out that a London courtroom and a British judge are not X, YouTube or some other online echo-chamber. The court is a place where facts are able to come out and where lies can come out too. I am very proud that The Spectator stood up against this thug and bully, and that a judge has exposed him for everyone to see.
