Society

Monday

Steve Davies

Cracking down on payday lenders will hurt the poor

Payday loans and pawnbrokers are a common feature of the nation’s high streets today, as they have been for centuries.  Recently however they have experienced something of a boom. Now they are also going online and increasingly advertising their products on TV. One company in particular – Wonga – has become something of a household name.  All of this has provoked calls for the sector to be regulated or even outlawed. Now we have a summit and a lot of public statements from politicians to the effect that the activities of payday loan companies are uncompetitive and against the public interest. This kind of policy agenda is wrong on a

Alex Brummer

What can we expect from Mark Carney?

What the Mark Carney era may offer is a little bit more predictability on monetary policy. Under Mervyn King the main guidance came from the Bank’s quarterly Inflation Report press conferences, MPC minutes, and speeches by committee members. Under the Bank’s new remit, set by the Chancellor in the March budget, it’s likely that Carney, like Bernanke, will seek to link interest rates and monetary policy directly to growth and jobs targets There will be subtle changes but no one, as economists at HSBC have noted, is expecting ‘shock and awe’. The big question for Carney is which indicators to use as targets. The runners are unemployment (as in the US), real

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Liam Byrne lets IDS aim for his weak spot on welfare

Liam Byrne chose an interesting line of attack at a very testy Work and Pensions Questions today. The whole session had been rather like a mounting pile of passive aggressive notes on a fridge, with ministers rising to answer questions by saying ‘I’m glad the honourable member has asked me about such and such a policy because it gives me the opportunity to cite new figures showing we’re doing very well and that the last Labour government made a terrible mess of everything’. Byrne decided to raise the underoccupancy cut/’bedroom tax’/’spare room subsidy’ as his topical question. Here is the exchange: Liam Byrne: I wonder if the Secretary of State

John Penrose

To stop bloated utility bills we need to be able to shop around

Hardly a day goes by without some sort of complaint against utility companies being aired in the press. Everyone agrees that the problem is endemic; too many people feel ripped off when their energy or water bills arrive, and people who are happy with their bank are rarer than snow in summer. The worst thing perhaps is that there’s a sense of inevitability about it. People know they’re being taken for a ride but they feel they can’t do anything about it. If we’re not happy with our local supermarket we can switch to a different chain, but if it’s a water firm we can’t. And even where it’s possible

Sunday

Molly Guinness

Christopher Hitchens and The Spectator: writing full of curiosity, indignation and analytical rigour

After Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011, Douglas Murray wrote in the Spectator that he’d had ‘a talent for making us, his readers, want to be better people. He used his abilities not to close down questions and ideas, but to open them up. In the process he made you, the reader, aware that you needed to do more, engage more, think more and know more. Writers often feel a need to impress their readers. Christopher made his readers want to impress the writer.’ To nearly everything he wrote, Hitchens brought curiosity, indignation and analytical rigour and a vast frame of reference. It’s been a great pleasure looking through the

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why do we assume that ‘whistleblowers’ like Edward Snowden are always in the right?

Although virtually everyone, including me, is against the dreadful people who ran the Care Quality Commission, I do notice that something ridiculous has crept into all reporting of such rows. This is the unquestioned assumption that the ‘whistleblower’ is in the right. Other recent examples include the mysterious anti-CIA and anti-GCHQ man, Edward Snowden, the police who appear to have invented what Andrew Mitchell told them at the Downing Street gates, and anyone who ever accuses anyone in any position of authority of having performed acts of paedophilia. We know that many people in big organisations have base motives for covering things up, and we excoriate them for doing so.

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The greatest scandal in Britain is the failure to give poor children a proper education.

Earlier this week, I was part of a panel on Newsnight Scotland discussing the latest – some would say, belated – efforts designed to improve Glasgow’s dismally underachieving state schools. That they need improvement is beyond doubt. In Scotland’s largest city, only 7% of state-educated pupils leave school with five good Higher passes. In Scotland as a whole a mere 220 children from the poorest 20% of neighbourhoods achieved three As at Higher (the minimum grades required for admission to leading universities such as St Andrews). As I said on the programme, this should be considered a national scandal. More than that, a disgrace. (Like Fraser, I wish more people

Philippa Tuckman

Soldiers’ right to protection remains, and so it should

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling in the Snatch Land Rover / Challenger II cases, which allowed the families of four soldiers who lost their lives while serving in Iraq to sue for damages, has provoked some strong opinions. Some say that the MoD is in all ways different from other employers and that it should not therefore be held accountable in the courts. Of course soldiering is not ‘just another job’, but surely it does not follow that we should tolerate the deaths of young British citizens if those deaths are caused by the Government’s failure to provide adequate training or equipment. Soldiers should be no less entitled than the

Ed West Ed West

Cant phrase of the moment: community cohesion

Ever since the Woolwich murder I’ve noticed an upsurge in the use of what is now my least favourite cant phrase – ‘community cohesion’. Political cant proliferates when theory fails to match reality, and today we have a diverse and vibrant array of words and phrases that mean two contradictory things at once, and also nothing. It’s important to talk about community cohesion because diversity is our strength, and also our weakness, and should be celebrated, and policed. Community cohesion also has a darker Singaporean edge. In Singapore, the world’s first truly multicultural modern state, speeches and broadcasts can be arbitrarily shut down if community leaders believe them to be

Steerpike Steerpike

Alec Baldwin Vs the Media: Round 57

Not for the first time, grumpy actor and Obama fan-boy Alec Baldwin has lashed out at the press and left Twitter in a huff. Baldwin has let rip at the ‘toxic’ showbiz coverage of the Daily Mail, after they accused his pregnant wife, Hilaria, of tweeting during James Gandolfini’s funeral. Baldwin likes to have a go. In a recent edition of Spectator Life, he even called for a Leveson-style inquiry in the US: ‘There is no market that is bigger for media outlets in terms of the tabloids and generating trash than the US.’ Strong stuff. But no doubt he will be back once he’s calmed down. He usually does.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Another Horror Story from Zombie Ireland

Here’s a snapshot of life in 21st century Ireland: Vincent Campbell sold a house and 4.75 acres of land outside Limerick City for a nifty three million euros in 2005. He’s just bought the same property back for 215,000 euros. Meanwhile, the Irish Independent has been having a good week. The paper has revealed how Anglo Irish Bank*, amidst stiff competition perhaps the worst bank in europe, knowingly stiffed the Irish taxpayer for billions by playing the Irish Central Bank like a salmon. As the Indo reported, taped conversations between senior Anglo executives reveal a fresh part of the true story behind the collapse of a bank that went a long way

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Forget about ‘rewilding’: we should be focusing on the species that we do still have

The buzzword of the moment seems to be ‘rewilding’. George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and environmentalist has a new vision for the countryside, which he wrote about in the magazine two weeks ago. Instead of covering our green and pleasant land with sheep, what we ought to be doing, he argues, is re-introducing all of the species which we humans killed off hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. The process, which he describes as ‘a mass restoration of ecosystems’, would involve repopulating Britain with the elephants, lynx and bison. ‘We live in a shadow land’, he argues in the ‘animated guide’ to rewilding. But instead of thinking about reintroducing

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

In defence of Silvio Berlusconi

Ah Italia! Such a great place to get your head round great art and great women but what a crappy little country. How else can you describe a place that condemns a 76-year-old man to seven years in jail and bans him for life from public office for a crime that both he and his victim deny — a crime to which there were no witnesses and for which there is no evidence? That is what has just happened in Milan in the infamous Bunga Bunga trial at which three women judges (and no jury) found the media tycoon and three times prime minister guilty on Monday of ‘prostituzione minorile’

The Spectator

Letters: My cuts are real, says Francis Maude

We’ve only just begun Sir: In Ross Clark’s article ‘Cuts, what cuts?’ (22 June), he suggested that I was boasting about saving the taxpayer £5.5 billion. It’s true: I’m proud of my department’s Efficiency and Reform Group and the work of civil servants across Whitehall who have sliced out wasteful spending. But the figures he used were 12 months out of date. Last year we saved the public purse £10 billion — 80 per cent up on the figure he quoted. That increase — which doesn’t include the savings from tackling fraud, error and uncollected debt — rather put pay to the Audit Office’s concern that our earlier savings might not have been

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: Cicero on tax havens

David Cameron wants the international community to do something about big business avoiding paying tax. If only it were as simple as that. Ancient philosophers, beginning with Aristotle (4th C BC), made a distinction between man-made law, which was peculiar to a state that made it and derived its validity simply from its adoption by that state, and natural law, which was universally valid. One could say that the former was right because it was law, the latter was law because it was right. Cicero (1st C BC) called this universal ‘world’ law ius naturale, identified it with divine reason and associated it with another concept, that of the ‘law of nations’, ius

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 27 June 2013

Jane Austen is a ‘contingency character’, we have just learnt. In his last appearance as Governor of the Bank of England before the Treasury Select Committee of the House of Commons, Sir Mervyn King explained that the great novelist rather slightingly so described stands in reserve to feature on any of our bank notes if too many people succeed in counterfeiting the current occupants. She is also in the running for the ten-pound note when Charles Darwin relinquishes it. This is a hot issue, because the notes do not feature enough women, we are told — despite the fact that since 1952, 100 per cent of them have featured a

Taki

Taki: Robin Birley’s lifesaving nightclub

What was that about London and being tired of life? Or that flickering ecstasy of a long ago memory of being drunk at dawn and watching people going to work? Surely not at my age and in the year 2013, but there you have it. You can go home again, Thomas Wolfe had it all wrong. I felt at home all last week, at Loulou’s, on Gerald Road, and in deep Oxfordshire. Let’s start with Gerald Road, where the Bismarcks gave a Pugs dinner to celebrate Bob Miller’s 80th birthday, Bob being the Duty Free billionaire who — surprise, surprise — is as nice, down-to-earth and sporty a man as

Jeremy Clarke

Low life: Brief encounter aboard the Mombasa to Nairobi ‘Lunatic Express’

Many years ago I met a woman in a train on the Mombasa to Nairobi ‘Lunatic Express’ line. She was seated opposite me in the compartment, next to her husband. The three of us had the compartment to ourselves. It was early in the morning. I’ve forgotten what the sleeping arrangements had been the night before. I think perhaps the husband and I had bedded down together and she’d rejoined him in the morning. Her husband had then left the compartment to go to the lavatory or dining car, and she and I had begun to talk. She’d met and married the husband after a whirlwind romance a year before,

Melissa Kite

“Welcome to BT. If you are calling about sending a monkey to the moon, please press 1…”

Once upon a time, it was perfectly possible to ask British Telecom to do something in return for money. You would ring an 0800 number and someone in India would politely accept the premise that if you paid them, say, £70, they would send an engineer to your home to carry out repairs. This used to be true of Sky TV as well, before they decided that there was virtually nothing about their £50 a month service they would fix other than by giving you instructions down the phone to make you fix it yourself. ‘But the box has blown up into a million pieces!’ ‘Yes, madam, and we are

Alexander Chancellor

Long life: Watching the opera Peter Grimes on the beach was cold and uncomfortable — just as it should be

The Martello Towers — that chain of 103 little fortresses built in the early 1800s along the south and east costs of England to repel a feared Napoleonic invasion — were condemned by William Cobbett at the time as a huge waste of public money; and so they turned out to be, for the British victories at Trafalgar and Waterloo ensured that Napoleon would never invade. And in fact, during the 200 years of their existence, no gun has ever been fired from any of them, with the one exception of the Martello Tower at Aldeburgh in Suffolk, the northernmost of them all, which was used by anti-aircraft gunners during