Society

Thursday

17 Mar 2016

Why George Osborne’s sugar tax isn’t a ‘pious, regressive absurdity’

George Osborne’s announcement in the Budget that he wants to help fight childhood obesity through a tax on sugary drinks has provoked the usual grumbles. But this is not a ‘pious, regressive absurdity’, as some claim. It is practical action that will help to tackle an avoidable health disaster for the nation’s children, a quarter of whom from the most disadvantaged families are leaving primary school not just overweight but obese. This is double the rate for the most advantaged children and the inequality gap is rising every year. If that had no consequences for them, there would be no case for action, but obesity blights their future health and life chances.

Theo Hobson

How ‘damning’ is the report into the Church of England’s handling of sex abuse?

A ‘damning’ report has been published into the Church of England’s handling of a particular abuse case. Except it’s not very damning. In 1976 a 16-year old was abused by a priest called Garth Moore – an attempted rape took place. He kept quiet about it for a couple of years, then told various priests about it over the next few decades, including some bishops. Moore died in 1990. The Church did nothing about his claims until 2014, when it began an inquiry that led to him receiving some compensation last year. The report says that the Church was at fault for failing to advise him to report it to

Brendan O’Neill

RIP Paul Daniels: magician, light entertainer, sexual libertine

Which of us who grew up in the thrall of Paul Daniels’ magic, under the spell of his Saturday-night humour and charm, could have imagined he would spend his latter years as a kind of sexual outlaw? Not many of us, I would wager. But that’s what happened. When, in 2012, he bravely criticised the hysteria over the sexual behaviour of 1970s light entertainers, Daniels went from being viewed as a sweet, ageing refugee from the era of old-fashioned entertainment to being treated as a kind of magician version of the Marquis de Sade. One of the classiest purveyors of light-hearted, family-oriented TV culture in the late 20th century became

Helen Nugent

Budget 2016: the winners and the losers

Was it good for you? George Osborne’s 2016 Budget, delivered to a packed House of Commons on Wednesday, has drawn criticism over a looming £55 billion black hole in public finances. But what does it mean for your money? We published a guide to the main changes yesterday. Today Spectator Money looks at reaction to a Budget lauded for pleasing middle England. Income tax More than half a million people will save £400 a year thanks to a rise in the 40p higher rate tax threshold to £45,000 from next April (with the Chancellor sticking to a pre-election pledge to hike the threshold towards £50,000 by the end of the parliament). Iain McCluskey

Camilla Swift

The Spectator Podcast: Why political correctness is a good thing, George Osborne’s Budget, and the end of the rave

Is political correctness a good thing or a bad thing? As Simon Barnes writes in this week’s magazine, he used to think that people should be free to use whatever words they wanted to, in pursuit of truth and meaning. But having a son with Down’s syndrome has changed his mind. Now, he has seen the benefits that political correctness bring to society. On this week’s podcast, he and Isabel Hardman discuss whether being PC is a good thing with Tom Slater, Deputy Editor of Spiked. Yesterday’s Budget held a few surprises – but not that many. What it did do, as James Forsyth argues in his column this week, was bring the political

Jonathan Ray

Why isn’t George Osborne more supportive of the English wine industry?

Yet again wine drinkers get it straight in the goolies from the Chancellor. Duty on wine will rise with inflation while that on beer, cider and spirits will remain as it is, having been cut last year. We endure almost the highest duty levels in the EU (after yesterday’s announcement, duty has risen to £2.08 per 75cl bottle, up from £2.05) and when one tots up the fixed costs of a bottle of £4.99 wine – the glass, the capsule, the label, the import costs, the profit margin, the VAT, the new rate of duty and so on – the value of the actual wine inside will be no more

Andrew Taylor

Who killed murder?

Pity the poor crime writers. Our earnings, like those of all authors, are diminishing for reasons far beyond our control. Our fictional criminals and detectives are being outsmarted by genetic fingerprinting, omnipresent security cameras and telltale mobile phones. Who needs Sherlock Holmes to solve a tricky crime when you have computers, with their unsporting ability to transmit and analyse enormous quantities of data and identify culprits? But the bigger problem for us novelists (if not for everyone else) is that murder itself is dying. The official homicide rate peaked in 2002, thanks to Dr Harold Shipman, and has since fallen by half — from 944 then to 517 last year.

Gary Bell Qc

No hiding place | 17 March 2016

My first courtroom murder case could have come straight from one of Andrew Taylor’s novels. A gruesome crime — the death of a child. And the murderer was brought to justice by exquisite detective work: police established that the killer had dug a grave but then abandoned it. They also found a witness. That was 20 years ago. The prosecution for cases that I’m involved in now have changed beyond recognition. Take number-plate-recognition technology. Most murderers drive to their victim, but now cars are tracked by cameras across the country. The police can list vehicles seen near a crime scene, then trace them back. That’s how, in 2006, they caught Steve

Roger Alton

Jones the dragon-slayer

The return heavyweight bout between England and Wales lived up to its billing as the most thumping rugby match of the Six Nations. It was also the perfect result for both sides. England’s win brings the Grand Slam in sight, but Wales get to feel smug that they could have won if they had played on for a couple more minutes against an England team clutching at air with the bench emptied and the two leaders, Dylan Hartley and Chris Robshaw, withdrawn. There’s nothing the Welsh like more in the absence of a win than claiming the moral high ground. In a masterstroke of man-management, the England coach Eddie Jones

Laura Freeman

The London Library

Some rogue has been writing in my bedside book. A fastidious hand has crossed out misspelled words and written neat pencil corrections in the margin. ‘Dennis’ has become ‘Denis’, quotations have been reattributed and dates amended. More than one book scribbler has been at it. At times, the pedantic pencil becomes a biro, thrilled to have spotted mistakes the first reader missed. The book is The Golden Echo, memoirs of the Bloomsbury novelist David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, a scattershot speller and fact-checker. I say it is my bedside book. Really, Garnett belongs to the London Library. But for the two months that a London Library book is allowed to me, I

Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 19 March

This is being written before the budget and goodness knows what the Chancellor has in store for wine lovers. Yet another bashing, no doubt, hard on the heels of the chief medical officer’s doleful pronouncement in which she slashed the recommended number of units of alcohol per week we should all be consuming. Happily, Esme Johnstone of FromVineyardsDirect has promised that should duty go up, he’ll keep his prices firmly as they are for the duration of this offer. Not only that, even though FVD is celebrated for its cut-to-the-bone pricing, Esme has generously lopped a bit off the RRPs just for us. The 2014 Domaine de la Chesnaie, a

Simon Barnes

In praise of PC

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thespectatorpodcast-politicalcorrectness-budget2016andraves/media.mp3″ title=”The Spectator Podcast: Is PC a good thing?”] Listen [/audioplayer]Here’s another stock joke for your collection: Pembroke College, Cambridge, has cancelled a fancy dress party themed on Around the World in Eighty Days to ‘avoid the potential for offence’. One college has objected to the serving of sushi as ‘cultural appropriation’; another cancelled yoga lessons for the same reason. There is an inevitable backlash to this kind of puritanism — to ‘political correctness gone mad’. And it’s true: prissily expressed PC attitudes do often look silly. The problem is that, broadly speaking, they’re also right. I know this with immense certainty. Without the prevailing wind of political correctness

Martin Vander Weyer

Why Osborne’s Budget bolsters the case for leaving Europe

Give thanks for George Osborne — and I don’t say that because I happen to be writing this column on a slow train from Leeds to Manchester, a line that this Chancellor has just promised, for the umpteenth time, to upgrade. I say it because whatever flaws and gimmicks may have leapt out of Wednesday’s budget, however the actualities have drifted away from the forecasts, at least we have a finance minister who is on the front foot. Boost growth; balance the books; keep the state lean; devolve to the regions; nurture self-reliance and entrepreneurship; stay in Europe; succeed Cameron; win the next election. That’s the agenda. You may not

Hugo Rifkind

We’re swamped with nonsense gizmos and it’s all Steve Jobs’s fault

I keep being told that the big hot technological gizmo of the moment is a box that sits in the corner of your room and listens, and I don’t want one. They’re made by Amazon, largely, and the idea is that you tell them to order stuff — such as a pizza, say — by shouting: ‘Alexa! Order me a pizza!’ And Alexa, which is what the thing pretends to be called in this infantile, accommodating, psychotic age of ours, perks up and does so. Or orders books, or summons a taxi. Or it gets your phone to call somebody, or plays you a particular song. The rest of the

Rod Liddle

Why Joan Bakewell must be right about anorexia

You can always tell when a public figure has said something with the ring of truth about it by the abject apology and recantation which arrives a day or two later. By and large, the greater the truth, the more abject the apology. Often there is a sort of partial non-apology apology first: I’m sorry if I upset anyone, but I broadly stand by what I said, even if my wording was perhaps a little awkward. That, however, won’t do — by now the hounds of hell are howling at the back door. Social media is beside itself, wrapped up in its moronic inferno, the cybersphere splenetic with self-righteous outrage. People

Lucy Vickery

Preposterous pet

In Competition No. 2939 you were invited to submit a poem about a famous person and an unlikely pet. There’s plenty of inspiration out there in the real world. A photograph from 1969 shows Salvador Dalí emerging from the subway, his rather dejected-looking pet anteater in tow. And then there is Gérard de Nerval, who considered the lobster to be an ideal companion: ‘They are peaceful, serious creatures … and they don’t gobble up your monadic privacy like dogs do.’ He used to take his for a walk round the Paris-Royal in Paris on a lead made of blue silk ribbon. You more than matched these -bonkers pairings. Theresa May’s

Jason Webster

One of history’s saddest chapters

One afternoon in the early 1990s, an elderly gentleman from Alicante told me of the tragedy that had occurred at his city’s port on the last day of the Spanish Civil War. He pointed towards the docks and in a hurried whisper spoke of the many thousands of desperate Republicans who had gathered there at the end of March 1939, their eyes searching the horizon for the promised ships meant to carry them to safety abroad. The rest of their territory had fallen to Franco, his execution squads busy eliminating remnants of the ‘anti-Spain’; Alicante would be the last corner to fall into the caudillo’s hands. Yet as the hours

Wednesday

16 Mar 2016

Eleni Courea

Osborne’s new sugar tax is a tax on the poor

The fat man of Europe is getting fatter. His teeth are rotting from the sugar in his coke and chocolates. He feeds his children bread and pasta instead of quinoa and couscous. It is time to tax the fat man – he must learn to stop eating sugar. And today, George Osborne has acted. In his Budget, he noted with disgust that some boys eat their own body weight in sugar. He has introduced a tax on sugary drinks – to the applause of the Labour Party, Liberal Democrats and (doubtless) Jamie Oliver who pioneered this snobbish idea in his restaurants. This can be expected to be the first of many. The path

Isabel Hardman

What to expect from today’s Budget

The art of delivering a good Budget – in a political sense at least – is to give everyone the impression that while you’ve had to do some really difficult things, you’ve miraculously managed to find some nice things to do too that will distract people for at least one round of newspaper front pages. George Osborne did manage that for his summer Budget after the election – only for the row about cuts to tax credits to blow up later. So we might expect a range of measures that generally make for good headlines, such as: Raising the threshold for higher-rate tax payers to help the 1.6 million people

Ed West

High-rise housing is hellish. It’s time to bring back terraces

On the radio this morning the subject of high-rise housing was being discussed, the hook being the new film adaptation of JG Ballard’s High-Rise. Tower blocks are widely considered to be a disaster today; they took largely working-class populations out of often sub-standard (but potentially very nice) terraced houses into technically better housing that was in reality often isolated and unsafe. Yet, despite this hindsight, I feel we’re making something of the same mistake again, with the current rush for skyscrapers across the city – with some 435 high-rise buildings now approved. Some of those being proposed and planned, such as the Paddington Pole and the new tower in Notting Hill