Society

It won’t actually come as a surprise to anyone living in London that the census results from the Office of National Statistics this week showed that ‘white British’ are down to 45 per cent in the capital. There are bits of the capital whose look and feel suggests that the percentage is much higher – well, the figures are from people who filled in the census forms, which isn’t quite the same thing as the actual population. Remember that cover story in The Spectator a couple of months back, based on the premise that London was practically a city-state, radically different from most other parts of the UK? Well, this

Isabel makes an excellent point about Ed Miliband’s One Nation spiel. It soothes political minds to talk about society rather than economics, people rather than the state, the common good rather individual utility. Voters like it, too, because globalisation and technology make many of us feel lost and alone. But it is, as Isabel says, an easy language of opposition, even a facile one. In office, reality tends to preclude such grand posturing, particularly in an economic crisis. As it happens, last night I went to an interesting Centre for Social Justice lecture by Jon Cruddas, Labour’s policy review chief, on the role of the state in the Good Society.

Have you noticed, recently, that the Coalition has changed the way it behaves in public? Two years ago, had Nick Clegg dropped his support for major Home Office legislation, spoken out about his own opinion on drugs policy and taken such a different position on a proposed dramatic change to the way newspapers are regulated within the space of a month, journalists would have gone into meltdown. Remember that in the early days of the Coalition, Simon Hughes saying he wasn’t sure about something the Prime Minister had announced was enough to hold the front page. Now we’re seeing differentiation on policies every day. Today Nick Clegg said he wasn’t convinced that