Society

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Laws, laws everywhere and not a drop of common sense

It might sound like an Ealing comedy. But it is not funny. It illustrates the fact that law-making in Britain has lost all contact with common sense. The town of Deal in Kent has a heraldic crest. Some local vigilante has pointed out that since the grant of arms was made, the local government boundaries have altered, so it is no longer technically legal for the town to use its current arms. But a replacement would cost the ratepayers tens of thousands of pounds. Deal football club would also be stuck with a five-figure bill. From the outset, this government has preached two sermons. First, that as the country is

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Forget Eastleigh, Tatchell vs. Hughes was a real by-election

I got a text message the other day, inviting me to a party. This is a nice thing to happen, and not an everyday event. I have become used to all modern forms of communication bringing nothing but trouble; the more modern they are, the more unpleasant will be the message. If it arrives via Twitter, it will usually be a condensed ball of noisome vomit, perhaps containing within it the vestige of a threat. In a sense, we are all Mary Beard these days. The nastiness rains down upon all of our heads, the nastiness from other people. Never mind. But this was different; not merely an invitation to

J. Meirion

Free riding foreigners: the next NHS scandal

A fundamental and enduring principle of the NHS is that it is ‘free at the point of use’. All major political parties subscribe to this mantra and none dare challenge it. Herein lies the problem. The consequence of such altruism — all at the UK taxpayer’s expense — is health tourism and abuse of the NHS by ineligible patients. The general public seem unaware of this deception despite being rightly exercised about other examples of similar abuse, such as benefit fraud. How is this any different? The rules and regulations laid down by the Department of Health governing eligibility for free NHS care are so porous, ineffective and difficult to

Lucy Vickery

Love rules

In Competition No. 2785 you were invited to submit poetic advice on how to woo a member of either sex. What better instructor can there be than Ovid, whose Ars amatoria gives guidance on the art of romantic conquest that knocks modern seduction manuals such as The Rules into a cocked hat. Two sections are addressed to men on how to get your girl and how to keep her, and one to women on how to hook your man. There are tips on personal hygiene (Don’t let those long hairs sprout/ In your nostrils. . .’) as well as on the bestowal of compliments and much else. You didn’t quite

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Privatisation is the only solution for Royal Mail

We have had a very high failure rate in deliveries of the catalogues for Emily Patrick’s exhibition,’ says an email from the painter’s husband. ‘Over 50 per cent have been lost in the post or inexplicably delayed.’ Come to think of it, my own most recent Amazon order, allegedly dispatched a fortnight ago, hasn’t reached Yorkshire yet — and neither has last week’s Spectator, although a large envelope posted to me from Old Queen Street on Wednesday did arrive on Thursday, but without its contents. Have aliens seized the sorting offices, or have Royal Mail managers been distracted by a ‘secret 62 per cent increase’ in their bonuses, revealed this

Ian Cowie

Investment: Will bonds crash as shares rise?

Tim Price: In a normal market, maybe. But not in this one UK base rate squats at 0.5 per cent, its lowest level in history — or since the formation of the Bank of England in 1694, which is much the same thing. With sporadic signs of inflation and patchy evidence of recovery, plus a new broom at the Bank of England who is expected to be boldly interventionist, the financial chatterati are transfixed by the prospect of the ‘Great Rotation’. This much-anticipated shift out of UK government gilts, and bonds more generally, back into equities reflects expectations that bond prices are due for a fall because interest rates must inevitably

Tessa Codrington

Travel: Notes from a boom town

Why hasn’t Morocco had an Arab Spring? On the one hand, history; on the other, the vision of the present king, Mohammed VI. Throughout the colonial era, when France and Spain each had a slice of the country, Morocco retained its identity, its cities, its culture and its monarchy — which stretches back for centuries, unlike the artificial monarchies created in the Middle East by the Europeans. It was never officially a colony of either France or Spain, but a protectorate. France did exile Mohammed V, the present king’s grandfather; but in 1956 the people successfully demanded his restoration, and full independence followed in 1957. So Morocco is the only

Victoria Lane

‘Morocco is a diabetic’s nightmare’

Fleeing streets of slush, we touch down in a north African spring, where we are driven through the desert scrub outside Marrakech, passing dusty ochre expanses filled with old plastic containers and half-built hotels and the odd donkey before turning down a track which runs alongside a walled garden. Tantalising green fronds poke above the wall. The gates open (someone is posted to look through a gap in the wall to time it right) and reveal a lush complex of grass, palms, roses, figs and orange trees around a T-shaped pool. This hotel is one of a handful to have popped up a short way away from the clamour of

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Vicky Pryce jury discharged, retrial starts Monday

The jury in the trial of Vicky Pryce has been discharged having failed to reach a verdict. The decision comes after the jury informed the judge that they were highly unlikely to come to even a majority verdict. The retrial is scheduled to start on Monday. There are, obviously, limits to what can be said for legal reasons. We can, though, report that the jury asked the judge ten specific questions during their deliberations. It would be a surprise if the court decided to sentence Chris Huhne before a verdict had been reached in this case. This means that it is unlikely that Huhne will be sentenced before the Eastleigh

Jonathan Jones

Good news on employment, but don’t expect it to keep coming

Today’s jobs figures are pretty unambiguously good news. The number of people in work rose by 154,000 in the last three months of 2012 to a new record high of 29.73 million — surpassing pre-recession peak by 158,000. And unlike other recent rounds of employment growth, this wasn’t driven by a rise in part-time workers (their number actually fell by 43,000). But there are still a couple of reasons cause to greet this good news with caution. Rising employment at a time of economic stagnation has come at the expense of earnings. Adjusted for CPI inflation, average weekly earnings have fallen by 7 per cent in the last five years,

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

A model of diversity

There’s nothing quite like diversity. Take Manchester. It has a large Muslim population and a lot of gays. What could possibly go wrong? Last week Manchester University’s Student Union played host to the ‘Global Aspirations of Women Society’. This appears to be a front group of the extremists of Hizb ut-Tahrir and therefore by no means does what it says on the tin. Anyhow – as the university’s student newspaper puts it: ‘A speaker at a Students’ Union affiliated society workshop said that homosexuals would be executed in an ideal Islamic state, describing the practice of two men kissing as an “atrocity.” 1st year Middle Eastern studies student Colin Cortbus

Steerpike Steerpike

No, Prime Minister | 19 February 2013

Twice Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel was trying to give the media a warning about their treatment of the Duchess of Cambridge, yet her blunt choice of ‘machine made’ and ‘plastic’ has upset the easily upset this morning. She has also revealed an insight into the tastes and mindset of our dear leader. Mantel’s words, in context, appeared in the London Review of Books, but the distorted version was splashed across the front-page of middle-England’s favourite news source. Weighing into the issue from India, the PM decried the ‘hurtful’ comments he had clearly only seen in the Daily Mail. In a further sign of dumbing down, he even referred to

Andrew Montford

Nursing prejudice: how climate change activists are prisoners of their own politics

Sir Paul Nurse, the Nobel laureate and President of the Royal Society, has been hitting out at global warming sceptics. In a speech to the University of Melbourne recently, he attacked dissenters from the climate change orthodoxy, declaring that their objections were in reality political rather than scientific: ‘A feature of [the global warming] controversy is that those that deny there is a problem often seem to have political or ideological views that lead them to be unhappy with the actions that would be necessary should global warming be due to human activity. I think that’s a crucial point. Because these actions that are likely to include measures which include

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Myth of the Immigrant Benefit-Moocher, Part Two

I am afraid, dear reader, that I have misled you. Yesterday’s post on immigrants and benefit-claimants contained an inaccuracy. I repeated a claim I’d seen in the Telegraph that there are almost 14,000 Polish-born people claiming unemployment benefit in Britain. This is not the case. The true picture of Polish benefit-dependency is very different. There are, in fact, fewer than 7,000 Poles claiming the Job Seekers’ Allowance. Indeed, there are fewer than 13,000 JSA claimants from the “Accession Eight” countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Slovenia). Whatever else these eastern europeans have been doing in Britain, they’ve not been mooching off the benefits system. And it

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

On tax policy, to govern is to maintain the status quo

To govern is to choose, wise people like to say when talking about policies which annoy voters but which might make good sense. Today we have another example of what happens when governments don’t choose. The Public Accounts Committee has published another one of its fierce reports on tax, arguing that tax avoidance companies ‘run rings around HMRC’. There’s plenty of criticism in it for HMRC, with the committee finding that HMRC doesn’t know how much it spends tackling tax avoidance, or whether the work that it does do is effective. But the tax system itself, unsurprisingly, doesn’t get a good review either. The report says that Tax Trade Advisers,

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Lessons from Ronnie and Maggie

Ramesh Ponnuru has written a splendid op-ed for today’s New York Times. Splendid, not because it is new or especially original, but because, alas, it’s central message needs repeating until, eventually, even the more dunderheaded class of Republican Congressman hears the message. And it is a simple message. Namely, that asking ‘What would Ronald Reagan do?’ is almost about as useful as mining Martin van Buren, George II or Charlemagne for policy advice that will help solve today’s problems. I exaggerate of course, but only for effect. We are not now as we were then. Or, as Mr Ponnuru puts it: Republicans are very good at tending the fire of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Myth of the Immigrant Benefit-Scrounger

The Sunday Express is at it again. It is outraged that Britain’s prisons contain some inmates who were not born in this country. Of course, everyone is hopping aboard the immigrant-bashing bandwagon these days. Immigration, it sometimes seems, is something to be feared, not valued. I understand the political calculation behind all this. The restrictionists have carried the day and there are few votes in seeming “soft” on immigration these days. Which is a shame. But there you have it. Nevertheless, the immigration brouhaha increasingly bears more than a passing resemblance to a moral panic. As tends to be the case, such fears are not utterly groundless but they are

Douglas Murray

The BBC’s great public service: Cancelling the Today programme

Is it true that the Today programme did not go out this morning?  If so the strikers have done a great public service. Giving the country a day off the Today programme is one of the kindest things anybody could do, in any economic climate.  I hope the generosity continues. I stopped listening years ago after I acknowledged that the programme only succeeded in getting every day off to the worst possible start.  Since I stopped listening my life has improved immeasurably It is not just the inevitable left-wing bias of the programme or the left establishment view of what is or is not news.  It is the fact that

Matthew Sinclair

Why no conservative should support a mansion tax

The Government is expected to raise around £550 billion in tax revenue this financial year. The Centre for Policy Studies estimates that a mansion tax (of £20,000 on properties of £2 million), would raise at most £1 billion, less than 0.2 per cent of revenue. The tax is, however, likely to weaken the market and reduce prices – reducing receipts from other taxes; so even the CPS’s static analysis is probably optimistic. This proposed tax would be a huge burden on those forced to pay. The rate is not 1 per cent of the property’s value. The standard lifetime of a lease on a new build is 125 years, over

Sunday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Horsemeat scandal: four key questions

The ongoing horsemeat scandal has opened up a hugely complicated web stretching across the EU, highlighting the difficulty of tracing the origins of the meat on sale in this country. Even now, almost a month after it was announced that horse could be in beef products, no one is entirely sure of how the horses entered the food chain. There are other big questions, too: here are four that need answers: •       The matter of dodgy horse passports – which I wrote about last month – is something that still hasn’t been fully investigated. It has now emerged that up to 7,000 unauthorised passports have been in circulation in the UK