Society

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

However you look at it, divorce is a disaster

I went to Relate once, the counselling service formerly known as the National Marriage Guidance Council. I wasn’t married at the time — this was about 25 years ago — but in a long-term relationship. Or at least it was long-term for me at the time. My girlfriend went with me and I rather hoped they might say to her: ‘Stop shagging that man called Raymond, you little whore.’ But they didn’t at all. They kind of noted the existence of Raymond in what seemed to be a slightly approving manner, and suggested it was probably for the best if we all moved on, separately, away from each other. Relate

The Spectator

Revenues past

From 12 July 1828: The Chancellor made his financial statement on Friday, in a style of candour and clearness which pleased all men. Its substance was this: that the state of the revenue is flourishing; that there will neither be new taxes imposed nor old ones reduced; and that the sinking-fund shall be limited to three millions: not the real, but the desired actual surplus of revenue, which it is not in future years to exceed. The expenditure of 1828 is, in round numbers, 32 millions for the permanent charges, and 18 millions for the military establishments, the latter being one million less than the amount of last year. Sir

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Ga Ga Land

Los Angeles stinks. Not just of the usual things: sex, money, suntan oil, hipster food, surfer wax — odours that I like. There’s a new whiff in town, and it’s a bad one. Weed. The smell of marijuana hangs over LA like an invisible menace. It’s an omnipresent fug. To walk from one end of a street to the other, whether it’s along the chaotic Hollywood Boulevard or the half-gentrified, half-terrifying Broadway in downtown LA, is to risk developing a skunk habit. I swear I almost got high popping out for a bottle of Dr Pepper. It’s such an awful smell. It’s the smell of a Nietzsche-reading teenager’s bedroom, the

Lucy Vickery

Let us pray

In Competition No. 3025 you were invited to submit a Lord’s Prayer for the 21st century.   One of my favourites, among the many parodies of the Lord’s Prayer already out there, is Ian Dury’s ‘Bus Driver’s Prayer’: ‘Our father,/ who art in Hendon/ Harrow Road be Thy name./ Thy Kingston come; thy Wimbledon…’.   The challenge drew a smallish but pleasingly varied entry. Bill Greenwell’s ‘The Refugees’ Prayer’ started strongly — ‘Half-hearted, we chant/ in haven, harrowed by the numb;/ deny kin can come,/ deny well, be dumb…’ — but then puzzled in parts. A.H. Harker, Alan Millard, Paul Carpenter, David Silverman and Meg Muldowney were also strong contenders.

Wednesday

Rupert Harrison

Are the Tories giving up on balancing the books?

Today’s budget forecasts a £20bn reduction in the tax receipts by 2021-22. That’s the cost of the productivity downgrade: The Treasury got a £9bn windfall this year from a lower borrowing forecast. That’s the same as the £9bn peak fiscal loosening in 2019-20: The £14bn higher borrowing by the end of the period is roughly the same as £13bn higher borrowing in 2019-20. But in 2019-20, most of that is £9bn of giveaways (which fall away in the final two years). By the end, the fiscal deterioration is, basically, lower tax receipts as a result of slower growth: So we have fiscal loosening and higher borrowing. Still, the deficit is

James Lewisohn

Amazon seems to be intent on utter domination in every market. Perhaps that’s its mistake

Are the giant ‘Technology Trusts’ – Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google – on the road to the monopolists’ breakers yard?  It’s received wisdom they soon will be. As Edward Luce writes in the FT, ‘Big Tech is the new big tobacco in Washington. It is not a question of whether the regulatory backlash will come, but when and how.’  Delving into United States trust-busting history can help answer that question. Back in 1900, the Rockefellers pooled their copper mining interests with my (sadly, distant) cousin Adolph Lewisohn and a few others, founding a vehicle which would control an epic 70 percent of US copper output. And they trumpeted their rationale in

Matthew Lynn

Stamp duty was already a mess – but we just made it worse

We could have given them free Spotify subscriptions. Or Just Eat vouchers. Instead, the government’s pitch to Jezza-loving twenty-somethings was a cut in stamp duty for first-time buyers. The levy on buying a home will be abolished completely up to £300,000, and, for the trainee bankers and tech moguls buying in the better parts of London, the first three hundred grand when you are spending half a million will be let off the tax. On the surface, that might seem like a good wheeze. If young people are angry that they can’t get a first foot on the housing ladder, then it will now be a little easier for them.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The Budget shows the Tories are still ignoring some big problems

On Budget Day, MPs and journalists joke about it being a ‘quiet day’ and ‘not much going on’ as they pass one another in the corridors of Westminster (this is an accurate representation of how utterly hilarious the corridors of power normally are). Today’s Budget was in a number of respects rather quiet, especially in the things it totally missed out.  Philip Hammond didn’t even mention social care, despite the sector’s concerns about whether it can afford a massive back pay bill that has come up partly as a result of a court judgement and partly as a result of government dithering. This comes on top of the long-term sustainability

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Philip Hammond’s fiscal fix? A tax on cheap cider, fags and diesel cars

So where are the nasties? Philip Hammond’s Budget speech can be summed up as follows:  £2.8 billion for the NHS, £44 billion of capital funding and loan guarantees for housing, £400 million for a new charging infrastructure for electric cars, £2.3 billion investment in research and development, £1.5 billion worth of changes to Universal Credit, an extra £2 billion for Scotland – all to be paid for, apparently, with higher taxes on super-strength cider, fags, a few of the smokiest diesel cars and the end of indexation for allowances on corporate capital gains tax. A modern Budget would not be a Budget, of course, if it didn’t partially unravel thanks to

Toby Young Toby Young

Why did Paperchase bow to a few bug-eyed Corbynistas?

Last Saturday, the high-street chain Paperchase ran a promotion in the Daily Mail offering two free rolls of wrapping paper. Nothing objectionable about that, you might think, even if the design was migraine-inducingly awful. I have lost count of the number of times I have been dragged into this ghastly emporium by my daughter on a weekend in pursuit of some overpriced piece of tat. Not recommended if you are nursing a hangover. Later that day, the left-wing lobby group Stop Funding Hate launched a fusillade against Paperchase on Twitter for having the temerity to advertise in Britain’s second-best-selling daily newspaper. ‘Is a Daily Mail promotion what customers want to

The Spectator

Live: Autumn Budget 2017

Philip Hammond avoided any disasters in his second budget of 2017. Here are the headline announcements: Growth forecasts downgraded: Britain’s economy is now expected to grow by 1.5 per cent in 2017, down from the prediction of 2 per cent made in March Stamp duty scrapped for first time buyers on homes costing up to £300,000 £3bn set aside for Brexit preparations Millenials’ railcard confirmed; National Living Wage up; VAT threshold for small businesses maintained; £2.8bn more for the NHS; 100 per cent council tax on empty homes; target to build 300,000 new homes by 2020s Tobacco duty up; beer and wine duty frozen; No fuel duty rise for petrol and

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Hammond must beware the danger of playing it safe

Philip Hammond’s second Budget of the year will mean that the Chancellor has another ‘bite at a not especially flavoursome cherry’, says the Daily Telegraph. The last time, his announcements ‘misfired’; since then Hammond’s ‘room for manoeuvre’ has become even more limited. This means that many in the Tory ranks are not filled with ‘great expectations’ about what Hammond might say and instead, says the Telegraph, they ’are just anxious to see Mr Hammond through the day without mishap’. But playing it safe won’t be enough for the Tories, according to the paper, which argues in its editorial that it doing so would ‘throw away the opportunity’ for the government to

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: Universal Credit director wins award for… project management

You don’t have to be a member of Her Majesty’s Opposition to conclude that something has gone wrong with the Universal Credit rollout. After a series of issues including a six week wait for first payment and an expensive helpline to supposedly deal with said issues, the government is under pressure to put the scheme on pause. Matters weren’t helped in recent weeks when Neil Couling – the man in charge of the Universal Credit programme – tweeted pictures of cakes celebrating the scheme at a time when some claimants on are said to be living on the breadline as a result of the bungled rollout. So, Mr S was curious

Tuesday

Andrew Chamberlain

Are the self-employed facing another Budget bombshell?

Philip Hammond and this government seem to have something against the UK’s 4.85 million self-employed people. Over the last year they have introduced a whole raft of measures to squeeze the self-employed sector, from damaging reforms to dividends taxes to the disastrous changes to IR35 tax laws in the public sector. Even as the UK prepares to cut itself loose and sail into uncharted waters outside the EU, instead of supporting one of our most productive sectors, the Chancellor seems determined to suffocate it. Most recently, in the run-up to the Autumn Budget, he announced that the scrapping of Class 2 National Insurance Contributions would be delayed – a move

Spectator Money

Best Buys: 5 year fixed rate mortgages

If you’re on the hunt for a mortgage, a fixed rate one will ensure that your repayments stay the same. Here are some of the ‘best buys’ for five-year fixed rate mortgages on the market at the moment: Data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why the millennials’ railcard isn’t such a bad idea

It’s Budget day tomorrow and there’s growing concern among Tories that the Chancellor may be about to bungle the Budget. Only rather than housing, the NHS or education, the issue that has got everyone hot and bothered is a plan for an 18-30 railcard. Nicknamed the millennials’ card, the Chancellor is expected to announce that discounted train travel will be extended to people up to 30-years-old. Currently, the young persons’ railcard – which costs about £30 and means a third off ticket fares – is just for the 16-25 age bracket. The move comes after a trial of the 26-30 year-olds card took place in East Anglia which led the Treasury

Joanna Williams

The #MeToo witch hunt comes back to bite Lena Dunham

Let’s take a moment to celebrate Lena Dunham. OK, so she stinks as an actress and her brand of self-indulgent, pity-me feminism leaves me cold. But credit where it’s due: she’s now managed to unite America’s culture-warring and politically divided population. Surely a Nobel Peace Prize nomination can’t be far behind. Loathing for Lena has gained such momentum it has spawned its own insult. It’s the worst insult that could possibly be levelled against a white, bourgeois but self-berating, feminist-identifying and politically ‘woke’ woman: ‘hipster racism’. For those struggling to keep up (aren’t we all nowadays?) Dunham has, over the years, fuelled panics about campus rape culture, suggesting ‘sexual assault

Douglas Murray

Beware the modern-day heretic hunters

One of the most sinister noises in the world is that of dumb officialdom groping around to find some reason for a verdict that has already been arrived at. A Canadian university has just given the world a particularly fine example of the genre. Wilfrid Laurier is a university in Ontario, Canada with a surprisingly high employment rate among its graduates. Surprising because the university’s authorities would appear to be working hard to make their students utterly unemployable. Earlier this month, the university censured a 22-year old graduate teaching assistant called Lindsay Shepherd. Ms Shepherd’s crime had been to show a video of the Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson debating the

Monday

Spectator Money

Taxing the railways

Southern Railway train drivers accepted a 28 per cent pay rise over five years, taking their basic salary for a four-day week to £63,000 and putting them in the top 7 per cent of UK earners. With overtime, they get £75,000, lifting them into the top 5 per cent. How much pre-tax pay is needed to reach each stage of the top 10 per cent?   10% £51,400 9% £54,000 8% £57,000 7% £60,700 6% £65,400 5% £71,700 4% £80,300 3% £92,900 2% £112,000 1% £162,000 Source: ONS

Jamie Bartlett

Can you distinguish between a bot and a human?

We’ve all gone a bit bot-mad in the past few weeks. Automated accounts have invaded our civic life – especially pesky Russian ones – and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have woken up to the fact that a new propaganda war is taking place online. Bots – which is of course short for robot – are essentially accounts which can be programmed to automatically post, share, re-tweet, or do whatever the programmer chooses. Creating a bot is extremely easy, and huge amounts of cheap bots are available on dark net markets for next to nothing. There are millions of harmless bots out there doing all sorts of helpful