Society

From ‘Catching the Train’, The Spectator, 17 July 1915: ENGLISHMEN have many exasperating habits, but perhaps the most exasperating of all is that of running a train so fine that they only just catch it. What the normal healthy, unnervous Englishman likes to do is to arrive at the railway station one minute before the train starts, walk up the platform a little agitated inside but outwardly very calm and ostentatiously slow in movement, saying to any one he meets that there is not the slightest need to be in a hurry, as there are still twenty-five seconds before she is due to start. “Besides, all the carriage doors are

Earlier this year Mr S reported how Jeremy Clarkson got on stage at a glitzy charity auction and told the audience that the BBC were ‘f—ing b—–ds’. Happily, during the expletive-filled rant over his Top Gear suspension he also managed to raise £100,000 for the Roundhouse arts charity by offering attendees the chance to join him for his last lap around the Top Gear test track: ‘I’ll drive somebody around in whatever I can get hold of, I’m sacked so it’s probably a Nissan Maestro. But anyway it will be my last ever lap of the Top Gear test drive. There was an 18 year waiting list to be in the audience

My Saturday morning would not be complete without Amanda Platell’s delicious put-downs in the Daily Mail, usually aimed at people who richly deserve them. But today she identifies a target that doesn’t. Her piece, “White Dee, and how the Left lost the war on welfare,” argues that Ch4 made Benefits Street to “provide a powerful argument for the deserving poor” but ended up awakening a nation to the abuses of welfare. She’s wrong: Ch4 knew what it was doing. And only Ch4 would have had the guts to do it. Benefits St was indeed a landmark in the debate; she’s right about that. But wrong to suggest that it somehow backfired on Ch4. Its

In his Budget, the Chancellor claimed that ‘those currently on the minimum wage will see their pay rise by over a third this Parliament, a cash increase for a full time worker of over £5,000.’ But this wasn’t quite the whole story. What he didn’t say is that a full-time worker could see just 7pc of this pay rise in their pockets due to the withdrawal of benefits and tax credits. Osborne’s Treasury will accrue the remaining 93pc in reduced welfare payments and increased tax revenue. The simple truth is that the Living Wage helps government more than it does workers. In Britain, tax credits and other benefits conspire to make