Society

The good thing about economic forecasting is that it’s only right when it’s good news for your party. Today the IMF has upgraded its growth forecast for the UK in 2014 from 1.9% to 2.4%, which means that from a Coalition perspective the organisation – having had a rather rocky relationship with the Treasury over the past year or so – is entirely right and filled with jolly good fellows. This is the biggest upgrade for any developed nation. The IMF also said that growth in 2015 will be 2.2%. George Osborne calculated when he delivered last year’s Budget that he just needed to buy some time until the summer,

A change is in the air across Britain. A new divide is opening up: not between the rich and the poor, nor indeed the poor against the poor; but instead between those on both ends of the political spectrum who remain outraged at the depiction of the impoverished on ‘Benefits Street’, and the increasing millions that are glued to their screens actually watching it. The economically inactive are, as irony would have it, proving an extraordinary success for Channel 4.  It shouldn’t be surprising – it was after a noisy week of petitions, protests, and pugnacious press pieces that the viewing figures rose from an already impressive 4.1 million to

Spectator literary competition No. 2833 This week’s task is a fashionably confessional one. We live in an age of emotional incontinence, where spilling the beans to as many people as possible seems to be all the rage, so let’s have an extract from the teenage diary of a well-known public figure, living or dead. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 29 January. The most recent competition brought forth an entertaining cast of literary pairings, with gentlemen’s gentlemen, sleuths, teachers and doctors featuring most strongly, but not forgetting, too, a sprinkling of sailors, spies, nannies and ladies of the night. The standard was high,

Roy Greenslade has set the hare running with his claim that Alexander Lebedev and his mini-mogul son Evgeny are looking to offload the Independent titles. The ‘viewspaper’ is understood to be haemorrhaging cash. ‘This is not new news,’ one insider tells me; although, as Greenslade reports, ‘the official line’ is that Independent Print (which makes the Indy, the Sindy and the i)  ‘is merely seeking new investors.’ But even that won’t be easy: newsstand sales of the Indy are down to 43,224  (which in part reflects the success of the ‘i’) and any investor/bidder will have to consider the Indy’s integration with the (profitable) Evening Standard, which is so extensive that