Society

One of the big measures in today’s Budget was the Help to Buy scheme. It answers two demands: the first for the Tories to continue to support home ownership as what George Osborne called ‘the most human of aspirations’, and the second for the government to do everything it can to get construction moving again. But there’s an interesting political point here. In the summer, George Osborne frightened the living daylights out of Eric Pickles and his team at the Communities and Local Government department by putting it about that he wanted further relaxations on planning regulations to encourage economic growth through construction. Pickles & Co fought back pretty hard,

David Cameron is coming under fresh pressure to force out NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson this afternoon. The health boss has had to apologise to the Public Accounts Committee, after his evidence yesterday was directly contradicted by whistleblower Gary Walker’s testimony to the Health Select Committee today. Nicholson told the PAC that Walker ‘didn’t identify himself as a whistleblower at that moment in time, nor did he raise with me any issues of patient safety’. But today Walker produced a letter which said ‘I assume the Department of Health has a policy on whistleblowing and would therefore like this letter to be considered in that context’. Nicholson’s letter of

The Ivy may be known for its famous clientèle and terrible food, but are they taking this celebrity thing a bit too far? The club has invited Mark Pinchin, Public Affairs Director of the Church of Scientology, to speak at the end of the month. Scientology boasts more celebrity supporters than Hacked Off, and are always on the look out for new members. Stars and groupies, you have been warned.

The Adam Afriyie leadership speculation has now got to the point where he’s been interviewed by Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics. His first big broadcast interview as a potential leadership candidate was always going to be a big test for Afriyie and he failed to impress today. Afriyie, who looked like he’d been heavily coached for the encounter, failed to properly answer the questions put to him or to make a case for any alternative vision. He was even unprepared to say whether or not he supported means-testing pensioner benefits. On the whole question of his own ambitions, Afriyie was hugely unconvincing. Moments after declaring ‘I have no ambition

Jeremy Hunt used his address to the Conservative Spring Forum this afternoon as the next step in his quest to make the Conservatives the party of the NHS, not Labour. His speech was in some ways quite formulaic: it started with good news about health care in this country, then praise for the ‘extraordinary’ staff working in the NHS. But then it moved on to his duty ‘to be honest about the failures’ of the health service too. He said: ‘If you care about something you don’t try to sweep problems under the carpet – you expose them, sort them out and make things better. And by criticising us when

The ‘clash of generations’, depicted above by Anton Emdin, was the bestselling issue of The Spectator last year. It’s a new and potent force in British politics: the idea that the young will end up having to foot the NHS and care bills for the old: the working-age will have to support the pension-age as they sit in their hugely valuable houses and run up NHS bills. There is talk about ‘intergenerational fairness’, one of the more sinister ideas to emerge of late, and one worth rebutting. I look at this in my Daily Telegraph column today, which has drawn a response from the author of that cover story, The