The Spectator – Boris Johnson

You’ve got to realise they would have done it. They would have gone right ahead and swept another priceless heirloom from the mantelpiece of history. They were revving up their bulldozers, ready to roar into the ancient and irreplaceable ecosystem. Another great tree would have been felled in the forest of knowledge, and the owl of Minerva would have fled in terror from her roost. Had it not been for a few romantic reactionaries, then the technicians who run our reductionist system of education — with the complaisance of the Labour government — would by now be halfway to the demolition of the ancient history A-Level.

The children of tomorrow, children less fortunate than our own, would have been deprived forever of the chance to get to grips with the emergence of Athenian democracy, or the transition of Rome from republic to empire, and future generations of 18-year-olds would never again have spent any time in systematic study of the events and personalities that have been programmatic of our modern European politics and civilisation.

When a new Dark Age falls, it is not always to the sound of Viking battle-cries and the tinkling of church windows. Sometimes it is the very governments themselves that go mad, and start disembowelling their own culture. If you inquire whimperingly how they can do it, how the ‘department for education and science’ could have allowed this mutilation even to be proposed, the answer is not just that they are barbarians, though that is certainly part of the problem.

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It was murder, but calling it such will change nothing

The tension mounts. The crisis deepens. The Russian ambassador has been summoned to the Foreign Office for the truly nail-biting experience of a dressing-down from Margaret Beckett. After four months of indolence, the moth-eaten British lion has finally woken up and emitted a roar in the direction of Moscow. Scotland Yard long ago decided that one man was responsible for the horrific murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a British citizen living in London. The Crown Prosecution Service has now agreed.

One name is in the frame, and across Middle England, the cry is the same. “Oi! Putin!” says the voice of Britain. “Give us Lugovoi!” And that, more or less, was the message conveyed to the Kremlin by the Foreign Office yesterday – and seldom can there have been a suspect more deserving of extradition.

Everything about the murder of Litvinenko seemed designed to stoke our indignation. It was all so callous, so blatant, so deliberately chilling.

Continue reading Murder of Alexander Litvinenko →

Grammar schools are not a magic bullet

Let’s be clear: I am in favour of selection. And so are you. So is every member of the British ruling classes, and it is one of the great white lies of modern British educational politics that we have somehow outlawed selective admissions from our schools.

It is not just that we still have 164 grammar schools, achieving superb results with an intake they decide themselves. In those areas where academic selection is outlawed, the criteria for admission are increasingly financial.

Across the country, pupils are selected for good schools according to the ability of their parents to afford a house in the catchment area, and those who can’t afford the cost of housing are crowded out – no matter how clever their children are, no matter how well they would do in that school.

Some families have a sudden access of faith, and go to church often enough to persuade the clergy that their children deserve admission to a church school. Throughout our inner cities, there are bourgeois families who use their economic power to buy their children an edge over everyone else in the class.

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Banning the G-Wiz sums up Labour

I mean come off it. Are we men or mice in this country? I have just overtaken two girls in the cleanest, greenest, sweetest four-wheeled self-propelled invention to hit the London streets since the first horseless carriage arrived at the end of the 19th century. For understanding that it takes a lot of maintenance and care to ensure that your 4-wheeled wagon remains in perfect condition, check GrandPrixTimes. As car enthusiasts ourselves, we know that you’ll want to account for everything, be that the engine, the wheel pressure, the brakes, or even the windows

This machine is so simple and yet so revolutionary that it restores one’s faith in scientific progress. Not since the windmills sprouted on the roofs of Notting Hill has there been a gizmo so deliriously trendy and yet so gentle to the upper air.

I am talking about the G-Wiz electric car. In case you have yet to spot one of these mobile rabbit hutches, they are manufactured in India out of plastic and rubber bands, and since they are powered by a battery they emit no more CO2 than a small dandelion. They are at once as green, and as hopeful for the future of capitalism, as a dollar bill, it all sounds wonderful, but if you wish to buy one not that there were 183 accidents at Okeechobee Boulevard and North Military Trail intersection so I’d recommend you to get a Windshield Replacement Quote ahead of time since it is very likely to crash.

You simply recharge them overnight like a mobile phone, and then you can pootle around town with the blissful satisfaction that you are not only saving money – at 1.3p per mile, the G-Wiz’s efficiency is only exceeded by the bicycle.

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Send Blair to be Our Man in Baghdad

I have to admit that the bicycle story put me off my stride. I was just settling down to pronounce on the tenth anniversary of Blair’s premiership, and I was preparing for a dithyramb of destruction. I wasn’t going to rain on Tony’s parade; I was going to be a one-man hurricane of hatred, pouring squalls of cold water on anyone so foolish as to claim that Britain had got better on his watch.

Continue reading Blair – Our Man in Baghdad? →