Society

Danny Finkelstein writes  in his column for The Times today that just because we are unsure about what the outcome and effect of any intervention in Syria may be, that is not reason enough to do nothing. Further to support his case for military intervention he suggested that those that argue against military intervention fail to grasp that the consequences of that approach are impossible to anticipate as well. In other words, quite possibly damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Well I certainly agree with the latter point. I fully accept that I am no expert on the Syrian crisis, and the complexities of the region. I

Jamie Oliver, eh, what a card? Why can’t Britain’s revolting poor eat better food? If they can afford televisions they can afford mussels and rocket too, don’t ya know? Something like that anyway. But instead they loaf in front of the goggle-box stuffing their fat faces with lardy ready-meals and fast food. What is to be done with them? And why can’t they be more like the Spanish or the Italians? Never mind that Italian children are more likely to be obese than British children. Never mind, too, that kids in impoverished southern Italy are more likely to be overweight than children in the wealthier north. Instead just fantasise about a

In the Spectator last week, I described how Richard Dawkins had become a space-filler for empty-headed pundits with no idea what else to write about in these slow summer days. The standard form was to upbraid him for being an Islamophobe because of a series of remarks he had tweeted about Islam in general and the behaviour of Islamist conservatives in particular. Some were crass, others reasonable. A few writers chose to add a variant, which has been chugging along for years now, and asserted that ‘militant atheism’ was as bad as ‘militant religion’. If I had had the space, I would have pointed out that militant atheism has a precise

Universal pensioner benefits like the Winter Fuel Allowance (WFA) cost the Exchequer over £8 billion a year. This is not a massive sum compared to overall government expenditure but it is absurd that every pensioner gets WFA, even cash millionaires. We must face the fact that this is totally wrong. It is morally and economically wrong that lower-paid people are paying for the benefits of millionaires who are more than capable of paying their own fuel bills. In an ideal world we would stop handing out WFA to people who didn’t need it. But that’s not easy or cost-effective. So we need to look carefully at the WFA and other