Society

Yesterday, George Osborne dedicated himself the mission of ‘full employment’. Today, Michael Gove has given a speech declaring that the Conservatives are the ‘party of social justice’. This is not positioning – it’s simply stating the obvious. Thanks to Gove, the best hope a council estate kid has of dodging the local sink school is for a new school to open nearby. The Gove reforms don’t help the rich – the education system works fine for them. The best state schools are filled with the state pupils from the richest backgrounds. Ed Balls was sent private, as his dad (who used to teach at Eton) had wisely saved money and

Index on Censorship, once home to the most important defenders of free speech in Britain, is falling apart. Seventeen full-time staff members in place when Kirsty Hughes, a former European Commission bureaucrat, took over as chief executive in 2012 have been fired or resigned. Among the recipients of redundancy notices are Padraig Reidy who was Index’s public face and its most thoughtful writer, and Michael Harris, who organised the lobbying to reform England’s repressive libel laws, the most successful free speech campaign since the fight to overturn the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the 1960s.  The board, headed by David Aaronovitch of the Times and filled with Matthew Parris

UK insurers have been under fire since George Osborne’s Budget, and many must be reeling from the shock of it all.  Suddenly the landscape seems to have changed.  No longer will people be forced to buy annuities, and suddenly people have a lot more options. As an observer who has for so long campaigned on behalf of customers, it has been heartening to witness such regulatory action at long last, yet nevertheless astonishing to see how long it has taken for meaningful intervention from the Regulator on behalf of customers.  The time for change has arrived. Here are ten things that have gone wrong in the UK insurance sector. 1.

The Budget contained eye-catching measures to stimulate business investment, which has been lagging badly behind the current recovery, and to encourage exporters, whose performance has trailed off after a promising mid-recession uptick when the pound weakened. But there was little to address the scandalous unfairness of business rates about which I regularly hold forth. These punitive charges — ‘£26 billion for George Osborne that… he might otherwise have to take direct from you and me,’ I wrote last year — on which businesses have no vote and for which they get so few services in return, are still based on pre-recessionary 2008 valuations of commercial property. The next revaluation has

Can we protect children from the darker aspects of the internet? That was the question put to the panel last night, when the Spectator hosted a feisty discussion about the effects of technology on childhood. Child abuse, pornography and online dating were discussed, as was the idea that children have become self-centered and socially inept. Andrew Neil chaired the event, and was joined by culture minister Ed Vaizey, psychologist Oliver James, The Spectator’s Rory Sutherland and Microsoft’s Jacqueline Beauchere. Each panelist presented a different angle on the subject of The ‘Always On’ Generation, but all agreed that technology had created new opportunities and challenges. Ed Vaizey took the stage first,