Society

Should people who comment under YouTube videos be deciding the fate of our country? That’s the frightening scenario proposed by Ed Miliband, who wants to give 16-year-olds the vote because, as he put it, it will make them ‘part of our democracy’. Or, in other words, the electorate’s opinion is no more important than a child’s. There is nothing progressive about allowing children to vote, any more than it is progressive to allow kids to sit on juries or take out mortgages. These things all involve the ability to make judgments, which is not sufficiently developed in adolescence. Voting isn’t just a right that makes you feel ‘part of democracy’;

First politicians banned cheap energy. They are creating an affordability crisis by insisting on the rapid deployment of expensive technologies like offshore wind and by imposing endless green taxes. It is simply illegal to generate electricity at an affordable price with a modern, efficient coal and gas power plant, without bearing all of those other costs. Ed Miliband was one of the people who imposed those high costs on consumers, as the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the last government. Now his plan is to fix the situation by banning expensive energy too. The Government already decides which technologies are good – wind, solar, carbon capture

Labour is the only party for women; that was the message of its conference launch last weekend. Every step towards equality had been made by the red team, it was claimed. Of course there was no mention of Maggie, the first (and only) female PM. Indeed, the party had to overlook the fact that it has never even elected a female leader. Harriet Harman and Margaret Beckett have both been leader by default, before being replaced by the newly elected male leader. Speaking of which, Ed Miliband recently had Messrs Rawnsley and Helm of the Observer round to his house in Dartmouth Park for a natter. Katherine Rose, a freelance photographer (pictured, above), was with

Congratulations to Jon Cruddas, Labour’s policy review chief, for managing to produce a front page headline. Cruddas is famed for holding lengthy fringe events and interviews where he manages either to say nothing of interest or else says something that needs translating several times before it makes sense – one special adviser recently told me that he’d found, on the sixth time of reading, that a speech by this guru on ‘statecraft’ actually contained some very good ideas – and so the Times front page story that he wants parents to lose their child benefit if they refuse to give their child the MMR vaccine is unusual. Monday’s Times front

Was it sexual in reference or wasn’t it? According to the BBC radio news, after Godfrey Bloom, elected as a Ukip MEP, had said that all we women who didn’t clean behind the fridge were ‘sluts’, he justified himself by saying he had used the word in the ‘old-fashioned’ sense. I’m not sure history is on his side. The first use of slut in the sense of a ‘woman of a low or loose character’, as the Oxford English Dictionary quaintly puts it, comes from the middle of the 15th century. That is exactly the same period in which the fridge-dusting sense originates, even though fridges hadn’t yet been invented for

In association with Gatwick Airport Does Britain really need a new airport, or simply more competition between existing ones? In this special View from 22 podcast, the Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson discusses whether the current and future patterns of air travel mean Britain needs a new airport at all, the pros and cons of various expansion options, which option would see the best deal for passengers and the importance of air travel to economic growth. Joining the panel are Stewart Wingate, CEO of Gatwick Airport, Margot James, the Conservative MP for Stourbridge and member of the No.10 policy unit, and Eamonn Butler, director and co-founder of the Adam Smith Institute. You