Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 16 January 2014

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that English local authorities would be allowed to receive all the business rates collected from shale gas schemes, not just the 50 per cent they’d expect. Total, a French company, said it would invest about £30 million in drilling two exploratory wells in Lincolnshire. To head off higher borrowing rates, the government announced that ‘in the event of Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, the continuing UK government would in all circumstances honour the contractual terms of the debt issued by the UK government’. The annual rate of inflation, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, met the target set by the government for

The Spectator

A successful obesity campaign? Fat chance

Fat chances The National Obesity Forum said that Britain is reaching a ‘doomsday scenario’ where half the population is obese. What happened to previous government campaigns to tackle obesity? — Between 1997 and 2008 the percentage of men getting the government’s recommended level of physical exercise grew from 32 per cent to 39 per cent, and women from 21 per cent to 29 per cent. And yet over the same period the proportion of men who are overweight or obese grew from 62.2 per cent to 65.9 per cent and women from 52.5 per cent to 56.9 per cent. — In 2006 28 per cent of men and 32 per cent

Dot Wordsworth

Where did ‘No justice, no peace’ come from?

The chant No justice, no peace by supporters of Mark Duggan, the drug gangster shot dead by police in 2011, sounded more like a threat than a prediction. No one knows the originator of the slogan, but that is not surprising. It is a commonplace of the struggle. In 2011, for example, a pair of artists called Mikkel Floher and Rasmus Nielsen put on an exhibition called No Justice No Peace at a gallery in Frederiksberg, Denmark. The artists are ‘united by a common sense of injustice and indignation’. They should meet my husband. No justice, no peace has been around since the 1970s among the chanting classes. Some contributors

Dumpynose

2145: Two in a row

Unclued lights form four thematic pairs, one of which combines to form a single word.   Across   1    Working prophets allege they carry cables (14, two words) 10    Reptile in summer (5) 11    Jacket of lass in Alaska (6) 12    Problem in thatching started again (7) 16    Bones to bury beside ray-flowers (10) 20    Libertine close to fun river port (5) 21    Cross objector making wine … (7) 22    … measures pigeons losing height (5) 31    Although no longer tiddly sow enters house (5) 33    Perhaps cold Dumpynose will spit (7) 34    Copper is following about bad Ozzie (5) 35    Saints holding the Queen is right to expose blasphemers

Dumpynose

Christmas crossword: The winners

Christmas carols, and their anagrammed ‘new titles’:   O COME ALL YE FAITHFUL IT CAME UPON THE MIDNIGHT CLEAR ONCE IN ROYAL DAVID’S CITY GOOD KING WENCESLAS I SAW THREE SHIPS IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER   ALLELUIA OF THE COMFY ADMIT UMPTEENTH ANGELIC CHOIR COSY, DAINTY, DIVINE CAROL LEGS GO CAKED IN SNOW SPIES THEIR WASH MIRED IN WHITE BLANKET   The first prize of £100, three prizes of £25 and six further prizes of the new Chambers Crossword Completer go to the following. The first four winners will also receive a bottle of champagne.   First prize Mr J. Frankland, Milnthorpe, Cumbria   Runners-up Martin Dey, Hoylandswaine, S. Yorks; Roger

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The Tories’ hunger games

Last night I went to hear Chris Mould of the Trussell Trust speak at my local church. The scene appeared to confirm every myth Tories tell about themselves. Though it does not make a great noise about it, the Trust represents the Anglican conscience at its active best. On their own, without state support or any of those nanny bureaucracies the right so deplores, the churches have organised more than 400 distribution centres to provide emergency food aid to desperate people. The men and women, who check that clients are truly in need, and hand out food, nappies and sanitary towels, are volunteers, motivated by a concern for others rather

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour’s minimum wage attack flops

Labour’s minimum wage debate in the Commons last night was designed mainly to humiliate the Conservatives about their past opposition to it and to remind voters that only the Labour party cares about those on low wages. But it failed on two counts. The first was that Rachel Reeves fell into the easy trap of accusing someone of missing a vote without double-checking whether this had been for a good reason (all the more surprising given the party’s recent rage over a Sun article describing Lucy Powell as ‘lazy’ when she had in fact been away on maternity leave). She laid into Vince Cable for failing to vote on Labour’s

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

January Wine Club – Tanners

I’m honoured — and nervous — to be following in Simon Hoggart’s colossal footsteps in these pages. Simon, God rest his soul, was not just one of our greatest political journalists; he was one of our best wine writers and his Life’s Too Short to Drink Bad Wine is a classic. I know that this column, which he made his own, is something of an institution for its readers. If I can bring a smidgeon of Simon’s wit and perspicacity to the Spectator’s wine club, I will be doing very well. Happily, our old friends Tanners of Shrewsbury have come up with a mighty tasty selection with which to start off

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The fight for compassionate Conservatism

‘Has the Secretary of State, like me, managed to watch programmes such as Benefits Street and On Benefits & Proud? If so, has he, like me, been struck by the number who complain about welfare reform while able to afford copious amounts of cigarettes, have lots of tattoos, and watch Sky TV on the obligatory widescreen television?’ This question, from the Tory backbencher Philip Davies in Parliament this week, was not one Iain Duncan Smith would have welcomed. The Work and Pensions Secretary is desperate to avoid any language that casts the poor as the indolent authors of their own misfortune. But as he knows, not all of his Tory

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Benefits Street exposes Britain’s dirty secret – how welfare imprisons the poor

[audioplayer src=’http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_January_2014_v4.mp3′ title=’Fraser Nelson and Frank Field MP discuss Benefits Street’] Listen [/audioplayer]No scandal has been more successfully covered up than the appalling truth about what happens to Britain’s poorest people. We have, as a country, grown used to pretending they don’t exist; we shovel them off to edge-of-town housing estates and pay them to stay there in economic exile. We give them welfare for the foreseeable future, and wish them luck in their drug-addled welfare ghettos. This is our country’s dirty little secret, which has just been exposed by a devastating Channel 4 documentary. And the left are furious. The outrage over Benefits Street has been quite extraordinary, comparable only

Alan Rusbridger

Ten reasons why conservatives should take Edward Snowden seriously

Towards the end of last year Tom Stoppard gave a rather brilliant PEN/Pinter lecture on freedom of expression which was, in part, a kind of love letter to the place which has been his home since 1946: ‘There is no country in the world I would rather be living in, no country where I would feel safer.’ Later in the same lecture he listed his own ‘obsequies over the England we have mislaid’. The list began: ‘Surveillance, mis-selling pensions and insurance. Phone hacking. Celebrity culture. Premiership football. Dodgy dossier. Health and Safety. MPs’ expenses…’ And so on, before underlining his own personal mantra on human rights: ‘A free press makes

Lucy Vickery

Talking shop

In Competition 2830 you were invited to choose, from different authors, two characters who have the same job or position and give an excerpt of not more than 150 words from their conversation on meeting. The assignment 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. Honourable mentions to Frank McDonald, Brian Murdoch, D.A. Prince and Sylvia Fairley. The bonus fiver is Chris O’Carroll’s and the rest take £30 each. ‘Welcome, Silver. Allow me to offer you a glass of wine.’ ‘Swab the deck with your

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Gendercide, abortion and hypocrisy of the pro-choicers

There was a lovely little ultrasound picture of a foetus to illustrate the Independent’s splash today about the incidence of sex-selective abortions in Britain. According to the paper’s analysis of ONS statistics, the incidence of second daughters among immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh and possibly those from other countries such as India isn’t quite the same as in the population at large. Either immigrants from these groups are, more than the rest of us, having child after child until they have a boy or they are simply aborting second pregnancies where the foetus is a girl in order to ensure their next child is a boy: most probably, according to

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Emotional Case for the Union

For a long time now, the case for the United Kingdom has been made in a tiresomely negative sense. That is, Unionists have spent more time pointing out the practical and procedural difficulties that are an unavoidable consequence of Scottish independence. This is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that, however justified these concerns may be, it does not go very far. After all, practical difficulties are the things politicians are elected to solve. Or at least ameliorate. The case for the Union needs to be about something bigger and better than that. Unionists don’t simply need a plan, they need a story. So it was braw

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Video: Mad Moose, the racehorse who wouldn’t run

Once upon a time there was a horse whose job was to run as fast as he could. There was just one problem. Mad Moose didn’t always fancy running. It wasn’t a matter of ability – it’s just that most of the time, he didn’t really feel like it. When he was on form, he could do fantastically well; he won at Cheltenham in 2012 after being 40 lengths behind at one point, but after that win he seemed to have had enough of it all. At his next Cheltenham appearance he refused to race, which he did again at York in May this year: In December at Sandown Park, he

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron: We are still a green government

One of the most intriguing things about last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions was David Cameron’s decision to say he suspected the recent severe weather in the United Kingdom was linked to climate change. It seemed to be an interesting restatement of where the Prime Minister personally stands on green issues – a position that his own Environment Secretary Owen Paterson refused to back the very next day. So today when David Cameron appeared before the Liaison Committee to talk about, among other things, green issues, its members were understandably keen to probe him on whether, after the Green Crap Removals Team had rolled up their sleeves and got to work

Douglas Carswell

A credit boom before each bust

Here is a graph that shows the four economic downturns Britain has been through (red lines) over the past forty years. What I find strking is that each downturn was preceded by the same thing: a surge in the growth of money (blue line). In other words, the bust followed an unsustainable credit-induced boom. The motives and justification behind monetary policy leading up to each boom/bust might have been different. In the early 1970s, monetary policy was shaped by Competition and Credit Control (CCC) reforms. In the late 1980s, those who decided monetary policy wanted to shadow the Deutschemark, then join the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). After that unhappy experience, monetary

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Winter Olympics should never have been awarded to Vladimir Putin’s Russia

Last month’s terrorist attacks in Volgograd were doubtless an attempt to warn foreigners off the Winter Olympics in Sochi next month. An attempt, too, to remind Vladimir Putin that his problems in the Caucasus – many of them at least partially made in Moscow – haven’t gone away. For understandable reasons the bombs have caused plenty of folk to wonder about the security of athletes and visitors in Sochi. Those concerns are, plainly, real even if we may also, I think, expect the Russian state to erect several rings of steel around the Black Sea resort. The real concern, frankly, is that Russia was awarded the games in the first

Monday

Tom Huxley

Demonising? Episode 2 of ‘Benefits Street’ flatters a very ugly picture

The Synthetic Outrage Squad has been out in force over Channel 4’s Benefits Street, dubbing the series ‘poverty porn’ that ‘demonises’ a vulnerable group of people. In fact, as someone who’s lived in the city depicted on the programme for most of my life, what I saw not only rings true but also paints a rather flattering picture of life at the bottom in Birmingham. The reality can be much worse. Those who watched the second episode looking for ‘poverty porn’ would have wondered what all the fuss is about. It did not ‘demonise’ the poor; what we saw was a mother trying her hardest to give her children a