Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer: How many loaves must the PM make before his breadmaker starts saving money?

Does workfare work? George Osborne announced a ‘work for benefits’ scheme. ‘Workfare’ schemes have been attacked by the left. Do they work? Wisconsin Works The introduction of the scheme, which obliges benefits claimants to accept community work placements, was followed by an 80 per cent reduction in welfare caseloads between 1990 and 2000. Washington state’s WorkFirst programme, which obliged claimants to accept unpaid work placements, increased employment among participants by 13%. A similar scheme which offered paid work increased employment by 33%. Ontario Works 56% of participants leaving the scheme found employment, two-thirds of them earning above the threshold which defines the ‘working poor’. Australia’s Work off the Dole scheme

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite — after nearly 40 years of riding, all I know is: horses are horses. They are not people

Natural horsemanship has a lot to answer for. After a cross country event the other day, I rode back to my trailer to find the two women parked next to me doing some very strange things as they loaded their horse. One woman led the pony up the ramp quite efficiently, flicking it with the rope to stop it hesitating and then shut it inside. Whereupon her friend shouted: ‘No! Get him back off, quickly!’ And she lowered the ramp, untied the pony and pushed him back down the ramp. ‘He’s got to choose to load,’ said the woman, who I now noticed was a little hair-brained looking. ‘He’s got

Alexander Chancellor

Good news from Alexander Chancellor’s menagerie

There is at last good news to report on the poultry front. In the past, when I have mentioned my chickens or my ducks, it has usually been after some grisly tragedy — a duck decapitated by a terrier, another disembowelled by a fox. I can no longer remember how many chickens I have lost to foxes, which usually leave only piles of feathers as evidence of their visits (though I once saw a fox brazenly killing a chicken in broad daylight just outside my front door). But since I am determined never to yield to terrorism, I always head off to the poultry centre in Towcester to replace whatever

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 3 October 2013

I defy anyone, even Tolstoy were he still alive and were he to abandon War and Peace for a bridge column, to avoid a shed load of clichés when describing the final of the Venice Cup in Bali, between the magnificent English Ladies and their American counterparts. Let me make do with heart-stopping. With seven boards to go, England led by two IMPs, rendering the previous 89 boards somewhat insignificant! And what sensational boards they were. One small slam, missed by the Americans, produced a big swing for England. America then claimed a game swing back. Two Grand Slams were missed at both tables and the Americans finally took Gold

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I make a surgeon give me my book back?

Q. Towards the end of last year, I began three months of treatment for a knee replacement. During one consultation the surgeon and I chatted about a mutual interest, the pleasure of cigar smoking. In fact I ceased smoking some time ago, but still had a quantity in my humidor and was pleased to make a gift to someone still enjoying a smoke. Among the items were a number of Monte Cristo Habanas, and to avoid any damage I packed them in a leather cigar case: I also handed over an inscribed book on the cigar industry, saying that I would like to have both the book and the case

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The Wild Rabbit’s food may be organic – but nothing else there is

The Wild Rabbit is a pub in the Cotswolds, that small corner of Britain full of evil grinning cottages; if the Cotswolds were a small dog it would always be mounting interior decorators and ripping out their throats. It is owned by Carole, Lady Bamford, the wife of the JCB billionaire Sir Anthony ‘Digger’ Bamford, which of course poses the question — does she have a toy one at home? And when she proved she could look after that one she got a real one? In any case, the Wild Rabbit is a story because Lady Bamford is also the owner of Daylesford Organic, which obviously helps stock the kitchens

Dot Wordsworth

Dot Wordsworth’s week in words: Did William Empson have the first clue what ‘bare ruined choirs’ meant?

I am shocked to find that William Empson, famous for his technique of close reading, was no good at reading at all. A paragraph of his in Seven Types of Ambiguity, concerning one line in Sonnet 73 by Shakespeare, is called a great example of literary criticism. In the London Review of Books, Jonathan Raban wrote recently about how Empson’s book made him ‘learn to read all over again’ in 1961. As for this paragraph, he had been ‘ravished by its intelligence and simplicity’. The line is ‘Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’. ‘Of course!’ the young Raban exclaimed after reading Empson’s remarks. ‘After all, Shakespeare was

Peter Jones

Aristotle on winning the centre ground

Party conferences always provide the most agreeable spectacle of politicians desperately trying to appeal to both the diehards among the party faithful and the soft underbelly of the general public. Aristotle (384-322 bc) lived at a time when democratic and oligarchic groupings within any polis (city-state) were regularly in conflict to impose their system of government, and was all too aware of the problem. In his Politics, Aristotle began by reflecting on the advantages that these two different systems of government offered to citizens within a polis. Democracy, he concluded, appeals to the many poor, because it gives them a say in the assembly, but oligarchy to the rich few,

The Spectator

Letters: David Aaronovitch defends Daniel Finkelstein, Godfrey Bloom defends himself

Oborne’s ideas of ethics Sir: Your edition of 28 September included a 1,500-word demand from the journalist Peter Oborne to the effect that the Times, the newspaper that I work for, should sack its columnist Danny Finkelstein. The reason given by Oborne for this view is that Finkelstein is too parti pris and close to people in power to be a ‘proper’ journalist. He is wrong in his argument and also, I believe, deficient in his journalism. Oborne deploys the veteran cliché about true journalists ‘speaking truth unto power’. Yet the history of British newspapers is full of ‘political’ journalists such as Finkelstein. At the Telegraph there were great figures

Toby Young Toby Young

Miliband’s fight with the Mail is cold political calculation

I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference in Manchester, but it’s Ed Miliband I want to discuss. In particular, his objection to Saturday’s article in the Daily Mail about his father Ralph. I felt a smidgen of sympathy for Ed when I saw the headline (‘The Man Who Hated Britain’) because a similar piece could be written about my father. May be written about him, in fact, if I pursue a career in politics. Like Ralph Miliband, he was a left-wing intellectual and, while he didn’t renounce parliamentary democracy, he was at one point a member of the Communist party. He left in 1936 after the first of Stalin’s

The Spectator

Miliband’s la-la lurch to the left has revived the right

Every opposition leader sometimes needs to act as a saboteur. Ed Miliband showed his wrecking skills this week, picking a fight with the Daily Mail about an article it had published saying that his Marxist father ‘hated Britain’. The row overshadowed the Conservative party conference and sparked a debate which informed those who did not previously know (or care) that Ralph Miliband was an asylum seeker who arrived in Britain as a teenager and repaid his adopted country by fighting Nazis while serving in the Royal Navy. Miliband’s absurd overreaction upstaged what little the Tories had to say that day. Of the four main political parties, Labour had the most

The Spectator

The week: ‘Land of opportunity’; Obama phones Iran; glow-in-the-dark robber

Home Shares in Royal Mail are to be sold by the middle of this month, before postmen can go on strike; the company is valued at between £2.6 billion and £3.3 billion. The Church Commissioners, an investment arm of the Church of England, became part owners of the resurrected Williams and Glyn’s bank which will open branches relinquished by the Royal Bank of Scotland. The minimum wage for those aged 16 or 17 rose by 4p to £3.72 an hour; for those aged 18-20 by 5p to £5.03; and for those older by 12p to £6.31. Poundland, which has 458 shops in the British Isles, said it wanted to open

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Charles Moore’s notes: At last! Reds under the beds again

 Manchester For those of us of a certain age, Ed Miliband’s speech last week was exhilaratingly nostalgic. His promise to freeze energy prices reminded us of happy times when Labour policies were patently, shamelessly idiotic. At last, after a generation of loss, we began to hope to find reds under the bed again. In its understandable excitement, the Daily Mail made the mistake of finding only a dead red — Mr Miliband’s late father, Ralph. It then compounded its error by saying that Miliband senior ‘hated Britain’, on the basis of some angry remarks he made when aged 17. So the Mail managed to offend against taste and decency on

David Hare

David Hare’s diary: Actresses are smarter than journalists

So mysterious, the Conservative party. In every poll, our five most admired institutions are the NHS, the BBC, the Royal Mail, the armed forces and the monarchy. The Conservative party wants to destroy four of them. Conservative? The only traditional aspects of British life to be preserved are private education, executive over-pay, the rights of both the security services and the press to wiretap innocent citizens, and the delegation of foreign policy to Washington. Some Tories even want to send high-speed trains zipping through their own rural constituencies. Ministers muttering into their beards about how everything must be changed and changed utterly more closely resemble the Trotskyites of my youth

Columba

2133: FM

All except four clues contain a superfluous word each. Initial letters of these words spell the titles of four 29D by 39 (two words). The first title defines four unclued lights; the second and third titles are defined by the remaining unclued lights. The fourth title (four words) is a cryptic indication of a sequence of letters formed by two clued lights; these must be highlighted.   Across   11    Branch of medicine perplexed our grey nurse (12) 14    Sailor in hurry risks a skin disease (7) 16    Hard, entering unknown number again (4) 17    Close game missing high tension (5) 18    Revolutionary around outset

Columba

To 2130: Elusive

Extra letters in clues give the assertion by HOUSMAN (31) that ‘I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat’. In the grid, the definition RENEGADE eludes seven unclued terriers.   First prize J.R. Carrington, Denchworth, Oxfordshire Runners-up Sandra Speak, Dursley, Gloucestershire; Andrew James, Winchester, Hampshire

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 podcast: Tory conference review

Peter Oborne thought David Cameron’s speech was well delivered with a new sense maturity, while James Forsyth believes the blandness will reignite the Tories. Isabel Hardman reckons it was less exciting than last year and Iain Martin thinks the Tories are now perplexed by Ed Miliband. Guido Fawkes thought Cameron outshone his rivals and Dan Hodges thinks the Tories have held their nerve On this week’s View from 22 podcast, our panel of commentators review this week’s Tory conference in Manchester, what it means for the party’s standing and debate who ‘won’ the conference season. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer every week, or you can use the

John O'Neill

Will David Cameron be sticking his finger up at Ed Balls after the latest service sector figures?

Yesterday David Cameron told the Tory conference that he had a new gesture for Ed Balls – a finger pointing upwards to indicate a stream of positive figures on the economy. You can almost imagine him doing it today at his desk in Downing Street after reading the latest figures on the service sector. Markit/CIPS’ Purchasing Managers Index of activity recorded a level of 60.3, a slight decrease from August’s seven-year high of 60.5, but enough to give the UK’s best quarter for the services sector since 1997. Any number above 50 indicates growth. The level of growth, according to research from Citi’s Michael Saunders, could be consistent with an

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The Silk Road has been busted – but its legacy to the international drug trade will remain

Since 2011, the Silk Road has infuriated governments the world over by allowing digital pirates to operate above the law. It has been – in effect – an eBay for Afghani heroin, cocaine and all manner of illegal goods. Hosted in the virtual tunnels of the ‘Deep Web’, transactions are made in BitCoin and up until yesterday, it was doing roughly 60,000 a day. But now, it seems, the cops have swooped. Yesterday afternoon Ross William Ulbricht, known by the pseudonym ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ was arrested – on charge of being the owner. Drugs were the site’s bread and butter, making up 70 percent of sales. But you could buy