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Thursday 4 December 2008

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore reflects on the week's events

Another rule of thumb for political appointments is that ex-clergymen, or clergy, like Mr Lewis, no longer in good standing with the ecclesiastical authorities, tend to be people who need a bit of watching.

When Labour invented the term ‘fuel poverty’, they must have considered it politically astute. One of the great uses of the word ‘poverty’ in modern political discourse is that, having identified it, you can then claim to have ‘lifted millions of people’ out of it. Fuel poverty is officially defined as the condition in which a household has to spend more than 10 per cent of its income on fuel to maintain ‘a satisfactory heating regime’ (a temperature of 21°C in the main living area and 18°C in other rooms). In 2001, which was still the era of cheap oil, a UK Fuel Poverty Strategy was unveiled and soon people were being lifted out of it like anything. The three key factors making people fuel-poor were solemnly identified by experts as ‘the energy efficient status of the property’, ‘the cost of fuel’ and ‘household income’. The last two of these three are now getting dramatically worse, so, just as Mr Brown tells us to eat every scrap in our larders, we must expect him soon to urge us to wrap up warm. He could also introduce heating regime change and reduce the level of ‘satisfactory’ to 1947-style bracingness. Then he could claim that he was saving the planet, and avoid the otherwise inevitable dragging down into fuel poverty of the millions he previously ‘lifted up’.

One feels a bit inhibited about being a spoilsport, but I am getting more and more depressed by the thought that London will be the host of the Olympic Games in 2012. In the days of really good television pictures, is there really much advantage in having the Games in one’s own country? It is inevitable that the costs will overrun (they already have), that they will exceed the return, and that they will suck up (as they are already doing) Lottery money for clearly good causes such as building new village halls. The accompanying Cultural Olympiad is dire, and the sought-after ‘legacy’, except, perhaps, for a terrifyingly enormous mosque, will not materialise. Terrorist threats, traffic jams and political stunts will. How long ago it seems since we were all invited to go wild in Trafalgar Square because Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone had ‘won’ the Olympics for London, beating Paris. All political leaders, including Mayor Boris, who surely does not really think it, have to say they are in favour of the London Olympics because of the vested interests now involved. But we, the people, are not thus constrained. Let’s spend the next four years thinking of clever ways to stop them.

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