Society

Wednesday

The Spectator

Glad tidings

The below is from The Spectator, the best-written and most entertaining magazine in the English language. To read the whole magazine on iPad/iPhone, click here for a free trial. Or click here for a Kindle free trial. To listen to politicians is to be given the  impression of a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and getting worse. This, in a way, is the politicians’ job: to highlight problems and to try their best to offer solutions. But the great advances of mankind come about not from statesmen, but from ordinary people. Governments across the world appear stuck in what Michael Lind, on page 30, describes as an era

Pippa Middleton

Diary – 12 December 2012

I have been much teased for my book, Celebrate: A Year Of British Festivities For Families And Friends. Lots of journalists are saying that my advice is glaringly obvious. A spoof twitter account called @pippatips offers such pearls as: ‘Enjoy a glass of water by getting a clean glass and pouring in water from a tap or bottle.’ It’s all good fun, I know, and I realise that authors ought to take criticism on the chin. But in my defence, let me say this: Celebrate is meant to be a guide to party planning and, as such, it has to cover the basics. If I were to write a cookery

The Spectator

Portrait of the year | 12 December 2012

January Britain’s public debt rose above £1,000 billion for the first time. Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, was stripped of his knighthood. The High Speed 2 rail link between London and Birmingham was given the go-ahead. Police removed protestors’ tents in Parliament Square under a new act. Abu Qatada won an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights against deportation to Jordan. In Syria protestors continued to be killed. In Saudi Arabia 28,000 women applied for jobs in lingerie shops, in which only men could previously serve. February The High Court ruled that prayers said at meetings of Bideford council were unlawful.

Dumpynose

Xmas Spectator

2A, 118, 1 and 19 (three of five words and one of three, ignore two apostrophes) are of a kind. The first word of a further example sounds like what is defined by both 53 and 8/92; 39, 72 and 110 may each precede its second word; its third is associated with 75, 95/54D and 97; 37, 52A, 4, 43, 47D, 68, 74 and 107 are its fourth; its fifth is part of 57, 77 and 99; ‘34/62/35’ defines an anagram of its sixth; and its seventh capitalised is an abbreviation of the 6/91D. Its sixth word will appear diagonally in the grid and must be shaded.   Across 15

Dumpynose

2090: Precipitate | 12 December 2012

HAL DAVID (15) and ANDY WILLIAMS (12/19) died on the 1st and 25th September 2012. The former produced the LYRICS (29) of the OSCAR (4)-winning song ‘RAINDROPS KEEP FALLIN’ ON MY HEAD’ (1A/18/39), while the latter made a successful ALBUM (33) of the same name. First prize Christopher Bull, Fleet, Hampshire Runners-up Jason James, Cambridge; Kevin Ward, Quorn, Leicestershire

Oliver Duggan

Top civil service appointments in desperate need of reform, says former Environment Secretary

Civil Service Commission chief Sir David Normington this week rejected plans to allow ministers to pick their own permanent secretaries. It will be a great disappointment to Francis Maude, who argued involving ministers in the appointment process would increase the accountability of the most senior civil servants in a department. I’ve had a chat with one former Secretary of State who agrees with Maude that the selection process is in desperate need of an overhaul: Caroline Spelman. The former Environment Secretary has kept her head down since she lost her job in September’s reshuffle, but she’s emerged to speak to Coffee House on this key issue of civil service reform.

Jonathan Jones

Private sector growth pushes employment to new record high

The number of people in work in the UK hit 29.6 million in August-October – the most ever — according to today’s figures from the Office for National Statistics. So despite GDP still languishing 3 per cent below pre-recession levels, employment has fully recovered, with half a million jobs created in the last year: The rise in employment has been thanks to the private sector more than making up for the job cuts in the public sector. The numbers don’t quite back up David Cameron’s claim that there are 1 million more private sector jobs than when he took office — to get that he must either be using January-March

Steerpike Steerpike

St Andrew’s students beat ‘milking’ with ‘champagning’

The Daily Mail got very excited last month over ‘a new student craze’ called milking, where students post videos of themselves ‘pouring milk over their heads in public places’: The four-pint fad began in Newcastle and soon spread to Edinburgh, Oxford and other universities. Not to be outdone, the fine gentlemen of St Andrews University have given their own twist on the craze: ‘Champagning’: Robed up, their video speaks for itself. It certainly gives a new meaning to ‘Champagne for the brain’, but a damned waste of fine Pol if you ask me.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Michael Gove tells heads to dock the pay of ‘militant’ staff

Michael Gove has written to schools across the country telling them that they can deduct a day’s pay from staff who try to disrupt school time by carrying out ‘work to rule’ industrial action. This form of action involves teachers fulfilling their job description to the very letter, with the NUT and NASUWT issuing list of activities their members should refuse to undertake. These include refusing to submit lesson plans, refusing to agree to timetable changes, refusing to undertake clerical tasks or covering for colleagues’ absences. Gove’s letter, seen by Coffee House, says: ‘I respect the right of teachers to take industrial action, but this action short of a strike

Steerpike Steerpike

Pippa’s exclusive office Christmas party tips

Bestselling author Pippa Middleton has written this week’s Spectator diary*, in which she takes on her critics directly: ‘I have been much teased for my book, Celebrate. Lots of journalists are saying that my advice is glaringly obvious… It’s all good fun, I know, and I realise that authors ought to take criticism on the chin. But in my defence, let me say this: Celebrate is meant to be a guide to party planning and, as such, it has to cover the basics. If I were to write a cookery book, for instance, I would be compelled to say that, to make an omelette, you have to break at least

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Lord Justice Leveson and the baby killers

I have worried about Hugh Grant’s understanding of power ever since he started bringing up baby. I first saw him reach for the innocent child at one of the party conferences, where he was on stage arguing for statutory control of the press. He had his stock reply ready when someone asked whether he wasn’t being naïve about the likelihood of politicians or politicised bureaucrats seizing the opportunity to censor. ‘The phrase that is always used is ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bath water’. I have always said I don’t think it is that difficult to tell what is bath water and what is a baby. To most

Giles Coren

Fifty shades of Santa

During a frantic online rummage for last-minute Christmas presents (I am too old to risk actually purchasing anything on the internet this close to the 25th, but I thought I might find some inspiration for presents I could then go out and buy in the shops and drag home in a bag on a stinking bus full of fat tourists through solid traffic), I came upon something very disturbing indeed: novelty baby clothes inspired by… Fifty Shades of Grey. You thought the sexualisation of children had gone only as far as six-year-old girls dressed up as Lady Gaga. But it has gone much, much further. Such as, for example, tiny

Liam Fox

Egypt on the brink

It is strange now to recall the jubilation with which the ‘Arab Spring’ was welcomed. Amid all the excitement of dictators toppling, many people here in the West, as well as some over there on the ground, forgot that the test of a revolution is not the overthrow of a tyrant, but what comes next. Though they will never admit it, the Arab revolutions surprised western governments as much as the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. History is always producing the unexpected, which is why some of us never took it for granted that all this would have a happy ending. Now, almost two years after the Tahrir Square uprising,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The net is closing in on Father Christmas, the old perv

Does Santa Claus really exist? I have to say I have become very sceptical in recent years. There is something about this character which simply does not ring true, not to mention his rather sinister retinue of airborne reindeer. I am not saying that he definitely does not exist, simply that we should not be too credulous, too ready to believe what the authorities tell us. A junior school teacher in Dorset is in trouble for having allowed into the minds of his eight- and nine-year-old charges a similar element of doubt. According to news reports, when asked by some children if Santa really existed, the educator reportedly ‘raised his

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The unlikely revolutionary

Behind Michael Gove’s desk stands an imposing McCarthy-era poster which says: ‘Sure I want to fight Communism — but how?’ In their less charitable moments, Tories may argue that his Department of Education is as good a place as any to start. The strength of its grip over state schools has long been the subject of political laments and Yes, Minister sketches. Confronting the educational establishment was too much for the Blair reformers and even the Thatcher government. But Gove, the least likely of political warriors, finally appears to be making progress. ‘Some things I never imagined we’d be able to accomplish alone, let alone in a coalition government, so

Dennis Sewell

Assault on the ivory tower

Look down the list of the masters, wardens and principals of Oxford colleges and you’ll soon see that The Spectator’s contributing editor Peter Oborne was on to something with his theory of the inexorable rise of the media and political classes. At high tables across the university, former journalists, broadcasting executives and quangocrats are increasingly occupying places of honour once reserved for scholars of great renown. Ensconced in the master’s chair at St Peter’s College is the former controller of BBC Radio 4, Mark Damazer. The principal of St Anne’s is former Newsnight editor and Channel 4 executive Tim Gardam. Ex-Guardian and Economist writer Frances Cairncross is the rector of

Joan Collins

American Notebook | 12 December 2012

I bumped into Steve Martin dining with Eric Idle at a Beverly Hills boîte, as one does. ‘I really enjoy your Spectator diaries,’ said Steve. ‘And I,’ said Mr Idle. ‘And you and the roller-skating nuns were the best thing in the Olympic finale,’ I chirped back. Hollywood folk love to give each other compliments. I buttered up George Clooney at the Carousel Ball, where he was being honoured for his charitable work in Haiti and the Sudan, by telling him how much I adored Argo, which he co-produced, and that same night I told Shirley MacLaine how much I liked her in Downton, even though I’d gladly have maimed

Michael Lind

The age of turboparalysis

More than half a decade has passed since the recession that triggered the financial panic and the Great Recession, but the condition of the world continues to be summed up by what I’ve called ‘turboparalysis’ — a prolonged condition of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine roars and the wheels spin but the vehicle refuses to move. The greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression might have been expected to produce revolutions in politics and the world of ideas alike. Outside of the Arab world, however, revolutions are hard to find. Mass unemployment and austerity policies have caused riots in Greece and