13 November 1998

We cannot go on like this

• 13 November 1998

Soviet communism collapsed because, among many other things, it had murdered millions, reduced whole peoples to poverty and degraded the environment. Nobody should mourn that monstrous system. Nor should anybody ...

7 Days

• 13 November 1998

Hasta la vista, baby Newt Gingrich, America's most unpopular politician, has finally got the message and stood down as Speaker of the House after the Republicans suffered an extraordinary ...

The Journal of Lynton Charles, Deputy Minister without Portfolio

• 13 November 1998

Friday My lower abdomen buzzes. Following the successful launch of our families policy discussion document on Wednesday, the Witchfinder General has set up a number of cross-departmental groups to look ...

Have the voters had enough sex?

• Steve Richards
• 13 November 1998

"It's bloody disgusting. Half the cabinet is gay." "Then there's Robin Cook, who left his wife for his secretary."

"And did you hear that Cherie Blair bought a German oven ...

Former prisoner Stephen Fry told Pentonville inmates that, after public school, jail was easy

• Stephen Tumim
• 13 November 1998

Seventeen ninety-eight was a marvellous year, the Lyrical Ballads and all. If we are looking at books and pictures, 1998 seems pretty good. In October we had Richard Holmes's second ...

The perils of a sound-bite health policy

• Neil Pettinger
• 13 November 1998

Whatever ministers say, smaller waiting lists do not make a better NHS, argues Neil Pettinger

The Secretary of State for Health is fond of likening the NHS waiting list to a supertanker. Frank Dobson introduced the analogy because waiting-list trends, like supertankers, take a long ...

Geri Halliwell may appeal to six-year-old girls, but that doesn't make her the right person to relaunch the Women's Unit

• Mary Riddell
• 13 November 1998

The relaunch of the Women's Unit got hijacked by Geri Halliwell. Despite some good initiatives on income, employment and domestic violence, the headline topic was Ginger Spice. In fairness, Halliwell ...

Why gays become politicians

• Simon Heffer
• 13 November 1998
• 1 comment

Pitt the Younger, Tom Driberg, possibly even Disraeli: Simon Heffer explains why homosexuality and a political career have long been natural bedfellows

Before modernisation caught up with the Palace of Westminster there were some old-fashioned shower cubicles near the barber's shop in the House of Commons. In the early 1980s a Tory ...

He's an awful gossip, I'm a historian

• Katie Grant
• 13 November 1998

Katie Grantthinks that Ron Davies' descendants will be delighted he got his name in the papers

Gossip, so the Bible tells us, is evil. However, Shirley Brooks, a 19th-century editor of Punch, hit the other truth when he observed that "the love of evil is the ...

The New Statesman Interview - Robin Cook

• Steve Richards
• 13 November 1998

"I never said there would be an ethical foreign policy" - and other myths dispelled by the Foreign Secretary

Amidst the large, imposing paintings in Robin Cook's office, there stands a more treasured work of art. It is a bust of the former Labour foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin. "This ...

Shock: King Herod turns green

• Michael Jacobs
• 13 November 1998
• 1 comment

Michael Jacobs thinks that, before very long, we really will have an energy tax

Lord Marshall of Knightsbridge makes an unlikely green hero. Chairman of British Airways (one of the biggest companies in one of the world's most polluting sectors), former captain of the ...

Poem - A Question of Architecture

• Bill Greenwell
• 13 November 1998

Prince Charles, 50, denied hoping the Queen would abdicate. Wembley's twin towers are to be demolished. "They're just concrete blocks - completely non-functional," said Tony Banks

My Mother The Queen - The Queen Mother -

Twin bulwarks and bastions bold -

Are not concrete blocks -

Nor disposable crocks -

But as ancient as Britain is ...

Having a fun time in New Orleans: the latest recruits (sorry, "alumni") of latter-day Reaganism

• John Pilger
• 13 November 1998

The meaning of the Pinochet affair appears to have been lost on some. Given critical support by the United States and Britain, the Chilean mass murderer was a beneficiary of ...

The New Statesman Profile - McKinsey Man

• George Lucas
• 13 November 1998

William Hague and Archie Norman are graduates. They know all about networks but will that help the Tories?

Management theory can suffer a bad name. Some Tories are ruing their party's apparent headlong dash into the very worst of business gurudom. There are those hateful weekends in Eastbourne, ...

The German who worries new Labour

• John Lloyd
• 13 November 1998

Peter Mandelson is keeping a watchful eye on Oskar Lafontaine.John Lloydexplains

The government is bending its efforts to support Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, against Oskar Lafontaine, his finance minister. The main agent in this intricate contest over ideology and for ...

Colonialism returns to South Africa

• R W Apple
• 13 November 1998

To fury from the left, big companies are moving from Johannesburg to London. R W Johnsonexplains the historic implications

As he announced the Anglo-American Corporation's merger with its Luxembourg-based investment company Minorco and their joint move to a new headquarters in London, the chairman, Nicky Oppenheimer, said it would ...

Instant Expert Kit - Outing

• 13 November 1998

I take it we're not talking about family trips?Certainly not: these outings are no picnic. The intentional and public disclosure of someone's homosexuality, without permission, can be very damaging ...

The scandal of the tax havens

• David Boyle
• 13 November 1998

Offshore financial centres, such as Jersey and the Bahamas, now play host to a third of the world's total wealth. David Boyleexplains why Britain must act

Where did all the money go? Not so much those billions that disappeared from computer screens when the stock market began its downward slide in the summer. Rather, I am ...

A majority of blacks say: racism is on its last legs

• Darcus Howe
• 13 November 1998

Here in these pages, I have bitterly criticised those who insist that there has been little or no progress in British race relations. My detractors have pointed to a series ...

The New Statesman Essay - The time is ripe for the Third Man

• Michael Lind
• 13 November 1998

Forget Marx and Smith. Friedrich List is the economist for us

The deepening global economic crisis - which has now spread from Asia to Russia and may hit Latin America next - has exposed the poverty of the laissez-faire economic approach ...

The city of buried secrets

• Christopher Hope
• 13 November 1998

Near your left foot, the Hitler bunker; by your right heel, the Gestapo torture chambers. Christopher Hope wonders if Berlin can ever lose its ghosts

A decade back - before the fall - Berlin was a stump of a city, heavy with history, noisy with ghosts. Squeezed tight into its concrete straitjacket - the Wall. ...

Thinker's Corner

• 13 November 1998

An Economists' Manifesto on Unemployment in the European Union (BNL Quarterly Review Sept 98 - contact Dennis Snower, Birkbeck College, 7-15 Gresse St, London W1P 2LL). As Europe is poised ...

Hague can't afford to miss this trick

• Tessa Keswick
• 13 November 1998

Find the heir to the House of Lords and save yourselves, Tessa Keswicktells the Tories

What on earth is the Conservative Party's policy on the House of Lords? No one seems to know. Yet here, in light of Labour's unclear plans for a second chamber, ...

Dinosaur man slips into oblivion

• Andrew Stephen
• 13 November 1998

Thank you, faithful New Statesman readers, for all the nice letters I've received in the past week. I have to confess that I rather agree with the reader who lamented ...

This Norway

• 13 November 1998

Hurricane Mitch is causing the worst catastrophe this century in Central America. The authorities estimate that more than 7,000 people have died, and there are fears that the number of ...

I'm a sucker for cereal packet special offers. The square Cadbury's mug was a particular disaster

• Sean French
• 13 November 1998

When you're sitting there in the morning, munching your cereal and reading the back of the packet, do you ever wonder whether anybody is actually pathetic enough to send off ...

Safety is for sissies

• 13 November 1998

Fireworks? It's all a matter of attitude (Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Arts, 30 October). The Fiesta del Elche concludes with three hours of pyrotechnics, a brief blackout is followed by the firing ...

Save our sixth forms

• 13 November 1998

Francis Beckett ("Shrink the school, save the child", 6 November) overlooks several advantages of retaining sixth forms in secondary schools. First, many students need or prefer continuity of education by ...

Not such a bad year for justice

• 13 November 1998

Bob Woffinden is a journalist who is entitled to great respect. It is not hard to find victims of grave miscarriages of British justice in recent decades. Many of those ...

Blasphemy revisited

• 13 November 1998

Joss Marsh's book Word Crimes is spoilt by factual errors; so is Adam Newey's review (Books, 6 November). The blasphemy law had not "become a dead letter" by the end ...

The meaning of Mitch

• 13 November 1998

John Polkinghorne castigates Richard Dawkins for his meaningless view of the universe (Books, 30 October). I wonder what he makes of the disaster in Nicaragua? One of the poorest countries ...

Why education leads to exclusion

• 13 November 1998

Nick Davies' essay ("There is nothing natural about poverty", 6 November) gave an interesting picture of what is now called "social exclusion" on some urban housing estates. It remains a ...

Italian curves

• 13 November 1998

Reading Cristina Odone's article "Ciao to la donna italiana" (30 October), I was annoyed at the comment about Italian feminists "who show off curves". Please try to be more culturally ...

Growing pains

• Colin Tudge
• 13 November 1998

Biotechnology alarms us: we fear Hitler clones and designer genes. Colin Tudge suggests we stop worrying and start trusting our instincts

For all the millions of words expended on Dolly the cloned sheep since her birth in the summer of 1996, most commentators have missed the main point. It isn't just ...

Reborn in the USA

• Richard Cook
• 13 November 1998

Music

For someone who once seemed inescapable, Bruce Springsteen has had a peculiarly quiet time of it in the 1990s. It's a long time since he was almost the hottest property ...

West of Suez

• Jonathan Romney
• 13 November 1998

Film byJonathan Romney

It comes as a shock to a British critic's habitual complacency, but every now and then you realise there are whole chunks missing from our map of the film world. ...

Playing at politics

• Kate Kellaway
• 13 November 1998

Theatre byKate Kellaway

There is a madwoman in the cellar of No 10 Downing Street. Her name is Margaret Thatcher. Her triple-stringed pearls are intact but her twin-set suit, though tightly buttoned, is ...

Sites of interest

• Andrew Billen
• 13 November 1998

Television

In their quest for demographic comprehensiveness, ITV's dramatists tend to turn to the eternal facts of life, love (by which they mean sex) and death (by which they mean murder). ...

Made for TV

• Charles Darwent
• 13 November 1998

Art

Anyone floundering for a clue as to what the Turner prize is about should make straight for Disappearance at Sea by Tacita Dean, one of the four short-listed entrants ...

Micro waves

• Andrew Brown
• 13 November 1998

Internet

The insecurity of e-mail can be a wonderful thing. Someone at Microsoft writes an ill-considered memo, and within days it is sitting on Eric Raymond's website for the world to ...

Peasoupers

• Bee Wilson
• 13 November 1998

Food

"In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled down upon London." Thus begins The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, though it could be ...

Spirit levels

• Victoria Moore
• 13 November 1998

Drink

"Nobody has ever been able to find out why the English regard a glass of wine added to a soup or stew as a reckless foreign extravagance," opines Elizabeth David ...

Tell us the truth: are the papers ruled by a mafia of gossips?

• Peter Wilby
• 13 November 1998

Media

Three weeks ago, Auberon Waugh wrote the New Statesman diary. Characteristically, he used it to make a very clever joke (at least, I think it was a joke; you can ...

Arsenal are posh: the fans include judges and lords

• Hunter Davies
• 13 November 1998

And so to Highbury, for my first Arsenal match of the season, in the flesh, or what passes for flesh. I parked outside the massage parlour off the Holloway Road, ...

Rural queen of the Nile

• James Buchan
• 13 November 1998

Cairo: The City Victorious Max Rodenbeck Picador, 395pp, £20

I first went to Cairo 25 years ago. There was a steel boom across the Nile to impede floating mines, concrete blast-shields before the doors of public buildings and police ...

A Tory Third Way?

• John Patten
• 13 November 1998

On the Right Lines: The Future of the Centre-Right in the British Isles Perri 6 Demos, 87pp, £7.95

Demos, those clever begetters of the Third Way endlessly jostling for intellectual headroom in Tony Blair's ante-chamber, are now keen to show their independence as occupiers of the radical centre ...

Waxing the corpse

• Natasha Fairweather
• 13 November 1998

Lenin's Embalmers Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson The Harvill Press, 215pp, £12.99

You have to squeeze past the crowds outside McDonald's, negotiating your way round the giant screen broadcasting pop videos and the street sellers hawking Disney balloons, to see Lenin these ...

Novel of the week

• Martyn Bedford
• 13 November 1998

The Metaphysical Touch Sylvia Brownrigg Gollancz, 444pp, £16.99

I was living in Norwich in 1994 when the city's central library went up in flames. There was something upsetting about this event; a feeling of loss, but also of ...

Commentary - Make it strange, make it new

• Scott Reyburn
• 13 November 1998

George Walden, writing in the NS last week, lamented the inertia of our contemporary culture. Scott Reyburn believes there is energy, but not in the world of letters

Art forms have to take their turns in the sun. Cultural studies departments and the weekend supplements might have us believe that the arts are some kind of homogenised, easily ...

Competition - Win a bottle of champagne

• 13 November 1998

No 3552 Set by Gordon Gwilliams

Cannabis is legalised. The advertising agencies go wild . . .

Report by Ms de Meaner

Apologies for setting 3554 twice. Apologies ...

On Bonfire Night Halifax looks like Beirut. Or so the papers say

• Paul Barker
• 13 November 1998

The pruning gang from the borough council are hoovering up leaves all round me. It is a little square garden with a cherry tree. It was laid out where Halifax's ...

In these days of orgasmic bliss for all, it's a relief to discover a healthy disgust of bodily fluids

• Laurie Taylor
• 13 November 1998

Helen doesn't like saliva. Whenever we accidentally meet in the basement room of Broadcasting House, which the BBC reserves for smokers, she somehow brings the conversation around to the way ...