Society

I used to enjoy ‘giving feedback’ in the glory years when nobody wanted it. Now, upon completing a routine transaction, the customer is bombarded with breathless demands for response. The neurotic corporate catchphrase is ‘How was it for you?’ The world is now in feedback frenzy. Companies endlessly prod us for our views so they can brandish positive statistics at each other — or sack somebody. A new app, called Impraise, even invites workers to evaluate their own colleagues anonymously. You could spend your whole day just rating every interaction as something between poor and excellent. From Uber drivers to call-centre workers, everybody’s chasing a tick of recorded acclaim. I

Well at least we all know the form by now.  This morning Islamist suicide-bombers struck one of the few European capitals they haven’t previously hit in a mass-casualty terrorist attack. The standard response now goes as follows.  First the body parts of innocent people are flung across airport check-ins or underground trains.  Briefly there is some shock.  On social media the sentimentalists await the arrival of this atrocity’s cutesy hashtag or motif and hope it will tide them over until the piano man arrives at the scene of the attack to sing ‘Imagine there’s no countries’.  Meantime someone will hopefully have said something which a lot of people can condemn

Nuisance calls are up there with spam emails and junk mail as one of the scourges of modern life. Whether it’s an automated voice urging you to claim compensation for payment protection insurance or a message from an accident claims company, cold calls are insistent and incessant. If you’re sick of these unsolicited calls then you’re not alone. A new report from AXA Insurance has found that one-in-five people receives a nuisance phone call each day. As someone who works from home for some of the week, I know that my landline rings at least twice daily with these unwanted advances. As for my mobile, there’s a minimum of one compensation-chasing claimant

In one of the most extraordinary political interviews of recent times, Iain Duncan Smith has warned that the government ‘is in danger of drifting in a direction which divides society rather than unites it.’ He repeatedly, and pointedly, argued that in drawing up policy the Tories have to have a care for those who don’t, and will never, vote for them—a remark that everyone in Westminster that will see as being directed against George Osborne. Explaining his resignation, IDS that he was ‘semi-detached’ from decisions taken in government, and that his department was being forced to find savings because of the welfare cap which had been ‘arbitrarily’ lowered by the

Earlier, I republished my interview with Stephen Crabb, the new Work and Pensions Secretary. He was, then, Wales Secretary – not all of his (many) thoughts on welfare reform made the cut. So I’ve been through the transcript, and posted more of this comments below: they give a better idea of what the new welfare secretary is like. At the time, benefits had been cut in the post-election Budget. Crabb was a bit nervous, saying-: ‘You have always got to handle the issue of welfare with care because you are dealing with support mechanisms for Britain’s most vulnerable people. That’s what welfare is. You’ve got to take care of the issue. But we should take

I am incredibly proud of the welfare reforms that the Government has delivered over the last five years. Those reforms have helped to generate record rates of employment and in particular a substantial reduction in workless households. As you know, the advancement of social justice was my driving reason for becoming part of your ministerial team and I continue to be grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to serve. You have appointed good colleagues to my department who I have enjoyed working with. It has been a particular privilege to work with with excellent civil servants and the outstanding Lord Freud and other ministers including my present team,

The Candidates tournament to determine the challenger later this year to world champion Magnus Carlsen is now well underway in Moscow. Early indications favoured the former champion Viswanathan Anand, the new young talent Sergei Karjakin, and Lev Aronian, Olympiad gold medallist, all of whom scored in the opening rounds. The main victim of their initial surge was Vesselin Topalov, the former Fidé champion, whose conduct in his games at the start was unrecognisably supine. This week’s puzzle features his loss to Anand. An instructive element of the official website (moscow2016.fide.com) is a potted history of previous Candidates tournaments and their winners, including such luminaries as David Bronstein, Vassily Smyslov, Tigran Petrosian