Overheard in advent was this complaint of a bus driver to a passenger, ‘Don’t call me brother! We’re not of the same mother. And as the 24 passed Trafalgar Square, there by the giant Christmas tree were the police arresting a freak for disturbing the peace. Yards from Westminster Abbey were sleeping bags of the shabby seeking sanctuary in shop doors as pedestrians ignored the sick, the lame, the poor, and stores implored, Spend more!
George Osborne has delivered an autumn statement that, provided it doesn’t unravel in the next few hours, should give him very good headlines. He has abolished the old, unfair system for stamp duty and claims that his new system means 98 per cent of people buying new homes will pay less stamp duty as a result. The changes will come into effect at midnight tonight and those who have exchanged contracts but not completed will be able to take advantage of the reforms if they want. This is the measure that MPs will vote on in the mystery three-line whip division tomorrow, giving Labour 24 hours to decide what it
Here is a preview of the leading article from this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow, on George Osborne’s Autumn Statement: When George Osborne first became Chancellor, he asked to be judged on his ability to reduce the deficit. He does not make that request any more. This year’s deficit is almost three times higher than the £37 billion he originally planned, but he understandably glossed over this point when delivering his Autumn Statement. He has other interests now: pension reform, building motorways, or spending more on GPs. The mission to balance the books has been delayed until the end of the decade — or, perhaps, the start of the next. He
Cardinal George Pell, the Australian prelate charged by Pope Francis with cleaning up the Vatican’s murky finances, has decided to speak bluntly about the appalling corrupt mess he found when he started work this year. Writing in the first issue of the Catholic Herald weekly magazine, out tomorrow, the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy – an entirely new post – says he was recently asked by a member of a British parliamentary delegation: ‘Why did the authorities allow the situation to lurch along, disregarding modern accounting standards, for so many decades?’ His response repays close examination. My emphases in bold. I began by remarking that this question was one of the first
Danny Alexander’s latest plot to make the state a major player in housebuilding is just the latest in a line of useless political schemes to appease all the wrong people and let down all the right ones. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury made no effort today to tell us why the state would be particularly good at building houses any more than it would be good at baking bread or brewing beer. It is not clear whether his plan would even boost housing numbers. Take the government’s first foray into building for a while, which involves 10,000 new homes at Northstowe, a derelict RAF base in Cambridgeshire. What would
If sport is a quest for the epic it is also, at the highest echelons, a tilt at immortality. Phillip Hughes has achieved that in the most unconscionable fashion. He will be remembered for as long as the game is played. He is another member of the What might Have Been club. This, of course, reflects the horrifying manner of his death – felled by an ordinary bouncer that left a freakish mark – but also the fact that despite 26 test match appearances and nearly 10,000 first-class runs we never quite got to see the best of Phillip Joel Hughes. The promise had not been fulfilled. Not quite at
A number of papers seem to have got themselves into a sufficient pickle over whether or not Muhammad is the most popular name in this country that Hacked Off has decided it’s a good opportunity to take a pop at the press. The Muhammad story cropped up this week because of a survey from a fun-sounding website called BabyCentre which claimed the name was top of the league when actually their data only covered 56,000 women who gave birth ‘in 2014’ (even though 2014 isn’t over yet). The Office for National Statistics has Muhammad in at 15th, and so Hacked Off is accusing the papers of ‘churnalism’. But the reality
From The Waste of War, The Spectator, 5 December 1914: The destruction which the Germans have wrought in the towns and villages they have occupied is a net loss to the world. Before the war began these aspects of war had impressed the minds of many writers even more than now appears to be justifiable. We had, for example, the famous book of the Russian writer M. Jean Bloch, who, at the end of the nineteenth century, demonstrated to his own satisfaction that a European war would not take place, because it would involve such wholesale destruction and such a universal increase of prices that normal human life would become
Good news for the Tories: a new ComRes poll confirms that David Cameron and George Osborne are the most trusted pair to ‘see the country through the current economic situation’. As the chart above shows, Labour’s two Eds are lagging significantly behind the present Tory leadership in the trust stakes, even coming in below Ukip’s Nigel Farage. These numbers reinforce the Conservatives’ strategy of talking up the economy (instead of say immigration) as the key to winning the next election. As Rachel Sylvester said in her Times column (£), the favourite phrase of Tory strategist Jim Messina is to say that ‘every day spent talking about Ukip issues such as Europe and immigration is
How much of a role should the government have in building homes? The vogue these days is for talking about localist solutions and helping the private sector to grow, but today Danny Alexander signalled a significant shift in the other direction. As he launched the 2014 National Infrastructure Plan, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury said he was examining how the state could commission and pay for new developments itself. The government is already building 10,000 homes at former RAF base Northstowe in Cambridgeshire, which is the first instance of the government working as a developer. Alexander said: ‘An idea I’ve been promoting is direct government commissioning of housing. The
From NEWS OF THE WEEK, The Spectator, 5 December 1914: THE King has been at the front during the past week, and as we write is still there. Indeed, it was stated in Friday’s newspapers that the visit, which has proved eminently satisfactory from every point of view, is likely to be further prolonged. We sincerely hope that this may be found possible. That the King is exceedingly glad to be at the front no one will of course doubt for a moment. It is equally certain that it is a great pleasure and source of satisfaction to the Generals, officers, and rank-and-file of the Army to see His Majesty
After the Bristol Heart Scandal in the 1990’s, the speciality of cardiac surgery rose to the occasion, leading the way in publishing individual surgeon’s mortality figures and self-audit, which made it perhaps the most transparent speciality in the UK, and thus consolidating its long-held position as a world leader in the training of surgeons and patient safety. Professor Bruce Keogh, head of NHS England, recently announced that NHS surgeons will now be asked to submit their mortality data online to public scrutiny, and failure to do so will result in medical purgatory. The cardiac surgery experience suggests that ‘league tables’ will improve outcomes; I disagree. The public deserves competence from
We might not have much of a coherent energy policy, but we do at least have the honour of breaking the record for the most expensive object ever built. According to Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital, speaking at the Spectator Energy Forum, the cost of Hinkley C nuclear power station, Britain’s first nuclear power plant in 30 years, to be built in Somerset by French power giant EDF, is now up to £24 billion. ‘I’ve looked online to see if there was a more expensive object ever built but I couldn’t find one’ says Atherton. ‘The most expensive bridge was something like £6 billion and the most expensive building something
There is an app you can load onto your smartphone, called UK Energy, which can tell you how much electricity is currently being generated in Britain and what percentage is coming from different sources. This afternoon the contribution from wind increased sharply from 1.3 per cent to 2.8 per cent as the wind picked up in the west. On some of the coldest winter days, when an anticyclone is sitting over Britain wind will contribute next to nothing, and once the sun goes down solar panels will generate nothing, either. It is a mark of our unjoined-up energy policy that vast subsidies have been thrown at wind turbines and solar
The city of Denton, Texas, doesn’t often make the news, but last month it did: it became the first city in the US – by a margin of 59 per cent to 41 per cent – to vote to ban fracking. Is the US love affair with shale ending? The industry has not been its own best friend, James Ball, special advisor to Tachebois Ltd, told the Spectator Energy Forum this morning. He asked the audience – made up of a large number of professionals from the oil and gas industry – how many had watched Gasland, the US documentary by Josh Fox which helped to form negative public view
Who would buy a number plate for £400,000? The answer is John Collins, a former photographer for Scottish newspapers (and a bit of a journalistic legend in his time) who is now Britain’s pre-eminent Ferrari dealer. He snapped up a ‘250’ number plate for half a million quid, after VAT. I interviewed him for my Ch4 documentary, How The Rich Get Richer (which you can still watch online for a few days, before it disappears forever). The funny thing about this recovery is that average worker is paid (significantly) less than at the time of the crash and the 1pc are not really any better-off. The ones who have done the best are
It was ‘In Praise of Cocoa — Cupid’s Nightcap’ by that legend of the comping world Stanley J. Sharpless that gave me the idea for the most recent challenge, to write a poem about an unlikely aphrodisiac. How confessional your entries were, who can say, but I liked Adrienne Parker’s account of an erotic encounter with a washing machine. Others who caught my attention include C.J. Gleed (Lucozade!) and Ralph Rochester (‘When I am limber, limp or slack/ I turn my mind to Lady Thatcher/ Waltzing along a forest track/ And no one there but me to catch her.’) The winners take £25 each. The bonus fiver belongs to John
From The Spectator, 28 November 1914: Professional football is something worse than an excuse for young men who refuse to do their duty. It is actually an incentive to them to continue their lives in the ignoble ordinary way, because the very continuance of the games suggests that everything is going on as usual. In the midst of the clamour of a popular match, when nothing seems more important than that Jones should have dashed his way through the opposing backs, or that Smith should have “saved” by a miraculous feat of agility, or that one rich and powerful club should be whispered to be intriguing to buy that wonderful
Two headlines on successive days speak volumes about the scaremongering which is endemic in the way in which learned bodies disseminate information on climate science. Yesterday, the Royal Society published a report, Resilience to Extreme Weather, predicting that by 2090 four billion people around the world each year will be subjected to heatwave events, with dire consequences for the health of older people. This morning, the Office of National Statistics published its latest figures on ‘excess winter deaths’. They show that last winter there were 18,200 more deaths between December and February than would be expected during the three summer months. Dramatic though this sounds, it is the lowest recorded in
The Shadow Education Secretary is suggesting that private schools provide qualified teachers to help deliver specialist subject knowledge to state schools. It’s depressing that they don’t all already have in-house specialists. Not surprising though, according to Terence Kealey, who argued in 1991 that the state should never have got involved in education in the first place: Ever since St Augustine had founded King’s School, Canterbury in AD 597, charitable church schools had flourished. They were rarely short of sponsors. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, for example, was raising no less than £10,000 p.a in London alone in 1719. New societies continued to be formed… But the Commons did not