Society

Thursday

Edward Boyd

Philip Hammond has reached out to an ignored class of workers

Not that he made much of a fuss about it, but Philip Hammond made a bit of history in his Budget speech yesterday. He spoke, as usual, about the main rates of tax. But then he mentioned a different one: the taper, or the effective tax rate, that faces those in low paid work. It was 65 per cent, he said, and he wanted it cut to 63 per cent. It was significant: a single parent with one child (with no housing costs) on £15k will be £170 a year better off. A couple with two children, with one parent earning £30k (with housing costs) will be £425 a year

Helen Nugent

Insurance costs to rise again thanks to the Chancellor

While there were plenty of people-pleasers in yesterday’s Autumn Statement, it’s safe to say that insurance companies were not happy. Yes, there will be a crackdown on fraudulent whiplash claims, and yes, there is another freeze on fuel duty (all good news for insurers and their customers). But these aren’t the issues clogging my inbox this morning. Insurance Premium Tax (IPT), that’s what’s got them all going. This is the crux of the matter: the former Chancellor George Osborne announced an increase in IPT from 6 per cent to 9.5 per cent in the Summer Budget in July 2015 which came into effect in November of the same year. The

Helen Nugent

Autumn Statement, Black Friday and consumer credit

So, no more Spring Budgets. In one of the most surprising announcements in yesterday’s speech, the Chancellor revealed the abolition of the traditional March Budget and Autumn Statement. From 2017, there will be a single Budget in Autumn, along with a ‘Spring Statement’ with no major policy announcements from 2018. In truth, the final Autumn Statement held few headline-grabbing stories. Many had been trailed in advance, including a ban on letting agent fees and a £1 billion boost for broadband connections and speed. Previous announcements also featured heavily, including an increase to the National Living Wage to £7.50 an hour and a crackdown on fraudulent whiplash claims. Other key points were a

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 27 November

We’ve a really strong selection this week from Tanners of Shrewsbury. In fact, I was so impressed that it took a heck of a lot of swilling, swirling and spitting (well, not so much of the latter to be honest) to whittle the wines down to six. Tanners’ Robert Boutflower even put up a deliciously tasty South African Pinotage, and that’s not a phrase I’m used to typing. Pinotage, a cross between Pinot Noir and Cinsault, is a grape with which I’ve always struggled, but this example (from Doran Vineyards, since you ask) had none of those characteristic burnt-rubber notes; it was just joyously juicy and very drinkable. Anyway, it

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Abandon dope, all ye who enter here

The World Anti-Doping Agency has just called on Russia to confront its wrongdoing and generally shape up. Well, good luck with that boys. The great and good of Wada would be better advised to visit a sharp and troubling new play at the Park Theatre in London. It’s called Deny Deny Deny (standard advice to athletes accused of doping before they come up with some hitherto unknown medical condition) and is by a former TV journalist, Jonathan Maitland. It tells of a young star athlete called Eve (Garden of Eden anyone?) who as she aims for Olympic gold falls under the influence of a ferocious female coach who persuades her

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Prisons should be nicer places? Nonsense

Now that post-Marxian vacuous liberalism is over, it is surely about time that we revived the vigorous writings of Thomas Carlyle and made him fashionable once again. He is too little read and admired these days, perhaps partly on account of his arguably controversial treatise ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849) — which, while well intentioned, may nonetheless these days ruffle one or two feathers on our university campuses, or within the BBC. But there was of course a lot more to Thomas Carlyle than simply a benign, if misguided, wish to abolish slavery while keeping a few blacks on as indentured house servants. He was very astringent on

Lucy Vickery

Changing fashions

In Competition No. 2975 you were invited to supply your own nine-line twist on Robert Herrick’s ‘Upon Julia’s clothes’:   Whenas in silks my Julia goes Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows That liquefaction of her clothes.   Next, when I cast mine eyes and see That brave vibration each way free, O how that glittering taketh me!   In a large and somewhat raucous entry, Herrick’s 17th-century restraint was cast aside in favour of full-on 21st-century vulgarity. Honourable mentions go to Basil Ransome-Davies, John Whitworth and Josh Ekroy. The winners, printed below, take £15 each. Whenas in shorts my Julia plays A set or two on summer days I

Anne Jolis

Permanent ink

 Brooklyn Shall I have my sister’s skin peeled off for display after she dies? Specifically, the tattooed bits — the swatches on either forearm adorned with foliate designs by her favourite artist, and the patch on her wrist inked in her own handwriting with transliterated Hebrew. I’ve always liked them, and not just because they annoy Mother. Should they be separated from her mortal remains, preserved through the wonders of mortuary science, and mounted in a shadow box to grace my bookshelf in her memory? I ran the idea by her the other day while lounging in her Brooklyn garden. Without looking up from the barbecue where she was grilling

The Spectator

War and votes for women

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 25 November 1916: We admit that before the war we should have placed, and indeed did place, Female Suffrage in the catalogue of ‘no compromise’ subjects. The war, however, has modified our view by altering our belief that some fundamental difference of opinion might arise between the sexes upon an issue where action must be confined to the male — i.e., military action. Our acknowledgment of mistake here does not of course exhaust our objections to Votes for Women, but, rightly or wrongly, it does in our opinion render them non-fundamental.

Cosmo Landesman

Class act | 24 November 2016

I wish I could say that some of my best friends are working-class, but it’s not true. I do have Dave — my plumber and political sparring partner. Bright and well informed about politics, Dave loves to tease me because I live in Islington, I read the Guardian, I eat organic food and I was against Brexit. In the Dave scheme of things I represent Islington Man — one of those snooty, sneery liberal elitists who looks down on people like Dave. Actually, Dave looks down on people like me. He’s a plumber who earns far more money than I do. Dave does not have a white van; he has

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

In praise of Advent

The first Sunday of Advent is 27 November this year. For those of us who prefer Advent services to Christmas ones, the earlier the better, frankly. I relish the frisson of gloom, foreboding and fear of judgment you get at Advent, alongside the hope. ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ is all very well, but it’s the minor chord at the end of ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ that I crave. So do thousands of others, it seems. The Advent service at Salisbury Cathedral, for example, is so oversubscribed these days that it’s repeated on three consecutive evenings, starting on the Friday before Advent Sunday. So, tears barely dry from the

Colin Freeman

Exodus from Gambia

A ticket to paradise comes very cheap in Gambia — as long as you’re headed in the right direction. Thomas Cook charges just £230 for the six-hour flight from Gatwick to West Africa, and in the cheaper hotels along the cream-white palm beaches, a week’s stay costs even less. For the 100,000 Europeans who flock here each year — half of them Brits — it’s a much loved, if slightly tatty, African Benidorm, where donkeys can be found not in the souvenir shops but grazing rubbish on the streets outside. For the equally large numbers of Gambians seeking desperately to go the other way, however, the ticket is far pricier.

Melanie Phillips

The devil they know

You will, by now, be familiar with the argument: that Donald Trump’s triumph in the American presidential election represents a kind of social and political apocalypse. That his victory came at the hands of fundamentally irrational, bigoted, disgusting extreme right-wingers beyond the pale of civilised values. It is axiomatic that there can’t be any good reason behind voting for him, so it is assumed that 60 million Americans were duped by ‘fake news’ which must now be suppressed altogether. In fact, the real ‘fake news’ was pumped out relentlessly by publications such as the New York Times, CNN, the Guardian and many other similar left-wing outlets which descended into hysterical denunciation

Lee Langley

Joking apart | 24 November 2016

A horse walks into a bar.… David Grossman takes the opening line of an old joke for his title, which could be a signal of comedy to come; and indeed he strews his novel’s pages with punchlines — good, bad-taste and groan-worthy. But this is gallows humour at its darkest: Grossman beckons us into a basement comedy club in an Israeli town, and uses the world of stand-up to explore not jokes but the nature of guilt. We stick with the comedian Dovaleh G from the moment he stumbles on to the stage till he exits two hours later. There are Israeli in-jokes — ‘How do paratroopers commit suicide? Jump

Wednesday

The Spectator

Philip Hammond is just about managing

From the moment she arrived in 10 Downing Street, Theresa May has been commendably clear about her economic priorities for Britain. She wants the country to be a beacon of free trade, at a time when protectionism is on the rise the world over. She is annoyed at the way in which quantitative easing has manipulated asset prices, making property unaffordable. And while David Cameron was very successful in raising the incomes of those at the bottom, she is concerned that those in the middle have not fared as well. She wants a ‘country that works for everyone’ — that is to say, one where effort is always rewarded. This

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Chancellor’s rabbit in hat misjudges public mood

Despite promising no rabbits in hats or displays of showmanship  — unlike his predecessor — Philip Hammond managed to offer up a few surprises in his first Autumn Statement. For one, that this will be his last — with the Chancellor putting an end to the annual event. Secondly, he chose one project to give a special shout out — a £7.6million grant to save Wentworth Woodhouse, the stately home in Yorkshire which has fallen into disrepair: ‘Mr Speaker I have deliberately avoided making this speech into a long list of projects being supported. But I am going to make one exception. I will act today with just seven days to

The Spectator

Full text: The Autumn Statement

Mr Speaker, It is a privilege to report today on an economy which the IMF predicts will be the fastest growing major advanced economy in the world this year. An economy with employment at a record high – and unemployment at an 11 year low. An economy which, through the hard work of the British people, has bounced back from the depths of recession. And an economy which has confounded commentators at home and abroad with its strength and its resilience since the British people decided, exactly five months ago today, to leave the European Union and chart a new future for our country. That decision will change the course

Vicky Spratt

Moaning millennials have just made the rental market fairer

Online petitions don’t actually change things, do they? What a silly waste of time. Politicians don’t actually listen to…the people, right? Millennials are so naïve, look at them indulging their narcissism with online clicktivism. Or not. After seven months of campaigning to Make Renting Fair at The Debrief, working with the likes of Lib Dem peer Baroness Olly Grender (whose Renters’ Rights Bill is in its committee stage in the House of Lords), and delivering a petition signed by a quarter of a million people to Downing Street, we’ve won in our aim: the Government has announced a ban on letting agency fees for tenants in what can only be described

Helen Nugent

Don’t be too quick to applaud the Chancellor’s ban on letting fees

If there’s one thing sure to get estate agents’ knickers in a twist, it’s a threat to their income. And so the news that Philip Hammond will use the Autumn Statement to announce a ban on letting fees has sparked a tirade of protestations and a bumper crop of press releases lamenting their lot. But letting agent fees have been a thorn in the side of renters for some time. Young people in particular complain that charges, such as £420 to change the name on a tenancy agreement and £330 to set up a tenancy, hamper their efforts to save for house deposit. But it’s not just the young who

Helen Nugent

Autumn Statement, food prices, BHS and mortgages

One story dominates the financial news this morning: the Autumn Statement. A slew of predictions, speculation and leaks feature in newspapers and websites, including yesterday’s widely trailed announcement of a £1 billion boost to improve broadband speeds for up to 2 million homes and businesses. Other measures expected in Philip Hammond’s first Autumn Statement include ways to increase workers’ incomes and a £1.4 billion package aimed at delivering 40,000 new affordable homes.  Also on the cards is a rate reduction for the withdrawal of benefits when people start work and an increase in the National Living Wage to £7.50 an hour. The Times reports that the Chancellor will ban letting agents from