The Spectator

Scuzz Nation: Britain’s slow and grubby decline. If you want to understand why voters flocked to Reform last week, Gus Carter says, look no further than Goat Man. In one ward in Runcorn, ‘residents found that no one would listen when a neighbour filled his derelict house with goats and burned the animals’ manure in his garden’. This embodies Scuzz Nation – a ‘grubbier and more unpleasant’ Britain, ‘where decay happens faster than repair, where crime largely goes unpunished, and where the social fabric has been slashed, graffitied and left by the side of the road’. Carter lists the symptoms: ‘Twice the number of shops are empty compared with 2007’, ‘fewer than one in 100 car break-ins in London result in charge’, and ‘there’s a burglary every three minutes, yet 96 per cent go unsolved’. Voters have lost trust in the police, councils and politicians. ‘No one in authority wants to do what is necessary to upset the scuzzy, unhappy decline of Britain’, so it’s not a surprise ‘that the public vote in such numbers for those who say the system is broken’.

 

James MacMillan: how music bridges sceptics and believers. When the composer James MacMillan told friends and colleagues he was heading to the US for three and half weeks’ work, the responses were incredulous. ‘What!? But they won’t let you in!’ and ‘What!? But they’ll detain you at the border!’ were just two of the surprised cries. But, according to MacMillan, ‘my visa was valid and accepted at passport control’, and ‘the people with whom I met and worked with were perfectly sane, perfect hosts, and a perfect delight’. The trip took him back to his childhood; conducting Wagner’s Parsifal reminded him of his ‘strange childhood encounters’ with the composer. Visiting a Catholic university, he remembered how, as a boy, ‘music was an important ingredient’ in his local religious life – not ‘just an extra’ but ‘the core of everything’. Music ‘is the most spiritual of the arts’ as it ‘brings sceptic and believer together’. MacMillan hopes that the next Pope ‘will emphasise and elevate the role of beauty, as well as truth and goodness’. The world needs all three.

 

How Pakistan’s most powerful man provoked India’s missile attack. ‘From a western perspective,’ Francis Pike notes, ‘memorising all 114 chapters of the Quran might seem an unusual qualification for a national leader.’ Yet this is a ‘defining feature’ of the CV of General Syed Asim Munir, Pakistan’s army chief of staff and the country’s most powerful man. In Pakistan, ‘ultimate political power’ is ‘de facto vested in the head of the army, not the prime minister’. Munir is ‘responsible for what happens next in the conflict’ with India. Many Indians ‘fervently believe’ a recent speech by Munir inspired the jihadist attack which killed 26 Indian tourists in Kashmir. Munir’s parents were displaced from their home in eastern Pubjab during India’s partition and that has left a legacy of ‘indelible familiar resentment against India’. Pike describes Munir as a ‘religious zealot’ who was appointed to ‘suppress dissent in both the public and the military’. Yet those who put Munir in power ‘got more than they bargained for’ – a fanatic ‘ideologically disposed to a conflict with India’. Can he be restrained from starting a full-scale war?

 

Rod Liddle: The Reformation is here. ‘These are dark and bewildering days,’ writes Rod Liddle, ‘for Britain’s community of Good People’ who ‘believe that everything can be accomplished simply by being kind’. These are the people ‘who could not possibly vote Reform UK’ out of ‘a terror that that the established order of things might be overturned if Nigel Farage’ ever got into power. Reform ‘offers an entirely different society, where the lazy and discredited tenets of the past 40 years are swiftly abolished’. For Liddle, this is the start of ‘a Reformation’. Reform’s advance is ‘exponential’ as more voters realise that ‘voting for them doesn’t mean that you are a Quran-burning fascist who keeps canisters of weedkiller in his basement’. The Reformation’s next stage entails identifying ‘a very clear difference between the deserving poor’ and those on benefits. Against Farage, there is little chance of Labour ‘finding its mojo’, even if the party ‘has made a few genuflections toward common sense when it comes to the trans rubbish’.

 

Mary Wakefield: Question time. ‘I’ll bet that most women under 50 in relationships with men have found themselves wondering’ when he is going to get round to asking them a question, Mary Wakefield wages. ‘Tears are pooling on your collarbones again,’ her husband observed ‘quite regularly’ on early dates. ‘Is it because I should be asking a question?’ Wakefield learnt not to say yes. ‘What men seem to enjoy is communication like Jack-in-the-boxes’ – each ‘popping up in turn to have their say with almost no cross-examination at all’. In the strange days before ‘the mad idea that men and women were basically the same, we understood each other much better’. Take Mr Knightley – ‘for centuries England’s idea of the perfect man’. He ‘never asks Emma a thing about her inner life’ but he knows her well. Women ‘crave a man who asks the most insightful probing questions’, but he won’t appreciate ‘the complex interplay of personalities’ as they would.  He’s just ‘deploying a successful strategy, enjoying the chase’.