Society

Thursday

Matt Cavanagh

Net migration starts to fall – but the real questions remain unanswered

The latest immigration figures published by the ONS today, for the calendar year 2011, show net migration falling for the first time under the coalition – but nowhere near fast enough to give ministers confidence that they will hit their target by 2015. The ONS estimates that immigration last year fell by 25,000, and emigration rose by 11,000, resulting in a drop in net migration of 36,000 – from 252,000 to 216,000. This is in line with my earlier prediction, though the ONS warn that the fall is not statistically significant, and the target of 100,000 still looks a long way away. It is worth noting that despite ministers’ rhetoric,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Olympic effect won’t be so golden for politicians

The Olympics and Paralympics have been a superb spectacle this summer, but will they help the economy? No one in the Treasury thinks so – if anything, they fear the games will hurt the figures and pretty soon we’ll be hearing about the ‘Olympic Effect’ damaging Q3 growth figures. George Osborne is already being mocked for his habit of blaming downturns on snow, holidays etc so I suspect the Chancellor will not mention it. But when first class returns from London to New York were half the price they normally are, you have the feeling not much business is being done. Today, the first economic indicator has come suggesting an Olympic

Wednesday

David Blackburn

The quiet cult of Andrew Strauss

‘I’m fascinated by politics. But I’m not that enthralled by any of the parties.’ Those are the words of Andrew Strauss, who resigned the England cricket captaincy earlier today, in an interview with the Spectator last year. The interview was conducted by the former England cricketer Ed Smith, who remarked that ‘Strauss is not talked about with hushed awe’. Where the great Mike Brearley has entered mythology, Smith noted, Strauss has been merely marked ‘effective’. Now we must talk of Strauss the cricketer in the past tense; and Smith’s judgment merits revisiting. True, Strauss did not inspire awe. He was not a tactician, either in the modern or traditional mould. He was not a macho

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Drop in workless households suggests welfare reform could be starting to work

Could we be starting to see the first fruits of the coalition’s welfare reforms? The Office for National Statistics reported today that the number of workless households has fallen for the second year running. It found that just under 18 per cent of households have no adults in work, a fall of 0.8 percentage points from last year. Between April and June 2012 there were 3.7 million households in the UK where no-one was working, down 153,000. Garyling and his colleague in the Work and Pensions department Iain Duncan Smith will also be buoyed by the news that the number of households where no adult has ever worked also fell by 26,000

Ryan Bourne

Would a wealth tax work?

Roll up, roll up! The biannual Lib Dem half-baked tax policy circus is in town! Last time, the so-called ‘mansion tax’ show never lived up to its billing, as ringleader Clegg tried juggling too many ideas. We had the mansion tax, tycoon tax, new stamp duty bands and the more noble income tax threshold rise to watch. Now, it seems, the spectacle is back – with the big beasts of the Liberal Democrats prowling the airwaves to push for a new wealth tax to ensure the rich ‘pay their fair share’. Unlike the mansion tax, this policy suggestion would not, we are told, be a permanent feature – but rather

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Giles Coren’s Twitter Eulogy

The saying goes that the only silver lining at the end of a political career is the chance to read your own obituary without actually dying. For Giles Coren, the speculation that he had ‘quit Twitter’ was the twenty first century equivalent. It was not all good news though. After a characteristically bad tempered exchange with a rival critic, Coren’s account promptly disappeared for twenty-four hours. The obvious speculation that he had stormed off in one of his signature rages quickly brewed. His last words seemed to be: ‘F**k off Marina. It’s hurtful and bitchy and pompous. When I want career advice from you I’ll f**king ask for it.’ Not bad

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Chris Grayling’s new unpaid work experience scheme

Buoyed by his department’s recent success in squashing allegations of ‘slave labour’, Chris Grayling launched a new back-to-work scheme for unemployed young people in London today. The joint pilot with the Mayor of London will put 6,000 18-24 year-olds with little or no work experience into placements with charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises in the community which last three months. If they refuse to take part, then they will not receive their benefits. Grayling is well aware that this sort of scheme will be controversial, because it could mean young people lose their benefits if they refuse to comply. In an article in the Evening Standard, the employment minister

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rape is rape and abortion is abortion. Except when they’re not. – Spectator Blogs

Way back in my debating days at Trinity College, Dublin we knew you could guarantee large crowds and impressively  – that is, pleasingly – bad-tempered debates twice a year. These were the annual debates on Northern Ireland and abortion. And they really were annual fixtures during which, for years on end, the same arguments were deployed with the same passion and no-one’s views were ever changed by anything they heard. In those days it was usually pretty clear who the bad guys were too. In the case of abortion it was anyone speaking as a representative of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child or, more generally, anyone

Saturday

The Spectator

The worst result

This week, the GCSE results envelope landed on doormats across the country. The results ought, on any rational basis, to shame the nation. Never mind how well or badly pupils may have done individually, taken as a whole the results point to a chillingly predictable trend for anyone in a comprehensive school. A pupil can look at their postcode, and see where it ranks in the government’s Index of Multiple Deprivation. If they live in a relatively prosperous area, they can be expected to have done fairly well. If they live on a sink estate, the odds are that they will have done badly. Parents have long known about this

Christopher Booker

Diary – 25 August 2012

When in 2009 I published a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster it provoked contrasting responses from two members of the royal family. Prince Charles, protesting that he was ‘bemused’ by my views on climate change, struck me off his Christmas card list, where I had been for 25 years since we became environmental allies back in the 1980s. I was, however, startled and delighted to have a long, thoughtful and sympathetic letter about the book from Prince Philip, whom I had met only once, and which, inter alia, led me to be far from surprised when he last year made headlines for having dismissed wind turbines as ‘absolutely

Taki

High life | 25 August 2012

With the exception of the French Academy immortals Michel Déon and Jean d’Ormesson, two wonderful writers and both the epitome of charm and graciousness, the French can be a pretty silly lot. They weren’t always. They got that way sometime between the two great wars, and turned even sillier during the German occupation and following their liberation by Eisenhower and co. Humiliated by Prussia in 1871, saved by America in 1917, done in for good by Germany in 1940, there were two more débâcles in store, Indochina and Algeria, but I’m jumping ahead. I’ve just finished two books on Paris during the occupation and the liberation, one by Alan Riding

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 25 August 2012

Then she rented us a luxury apartment at Penzance in Cornwall for a week. Sightseeing was not high on our agenda. Bring cable ties, she’d said. I’ve been a naughty girl. She went down by train; I drove. I drove due west for three hours through a rainstorm of tropical intensity. My new phone’s blue light winked text messages from her all the way down. One said: ‘Lost my musth. It’s completely gone. Menopause?’ The apartment was called Stanhope Forbes, in homage to the leading light of the Victorian era Newlyn artists’ colony. Stanhope Forbes’s paintings of bustling late-Victorian fish quay scenes, with lovely girls in virginal pinafores, decorated the

Toby Young Toby Young

Oh for the Prince Maurice

Around the middle of last year, I was approached by the writer Tim Lott to see if I’d like to be a judge in the annual literary competition he organises. On the face of it, the prospect wasn’t very appealing. It’s a romantic fiction prize and who wants to read dozens of chick lit novels, particularly as there’s no fee? But Le Prince Maurice Prize does have one thing going for it. The prizegiving takes place at the Prince Maurice Hotel in Mauritius and the judges get to spend a week there — all expenses paid. ‘Can I bring my wife and four children?’ I asked. ‘Er, no. ’Fraid not,’

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 25 August 2012

Q. My wife is known to run a very well-organised house. As a consequence, weekend guests often arrive without the right kit, assuming they can go and raid our boot room and borrow something belonging to one of our (seven) children rather than weighing themselves down with heavy boots and coats et cetera for their journey. My wife does not mind them doing this, but I do — it is the presumption that I mind. What do you suggest, Mary? — Name and address withheld A. Retrain the miscreants by mislaying the key to the boot room and instead offering them ‘pop-up’ raincoats fashioned from heavy duty garden refuse sacks

Melissa Kite

Real life | 25 August 2012

Being the girlfriend of the world’s most devastatingly handsome gay celebrity nutritionist has its disadvantages. I know, how could that statement possibly be true? What could be more divine for a girl than lounging by a Spanish poolside with an eye-wateringly handsome, gallant, kind, generous, caring, courteous, accomplished, witty and charming forty-something gay man and his similarly attributed friends? For the first few days it was very heaven. He and his first handsome, gallant, kind, caring male gay house guest treated me like a princess. I didn’t lift a finger. They laid a fresh, immaculately laundered beige Ralph Lauren towel on my sun lounger every morning and then lay down

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 25 August 2012

Home After being granted asylum by Ecuador, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, addressed a crowd of supporters from a balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy, to which he had fled in June to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces questioning over allegations of sexual assault. The Foreign Office had annoyed Ecuador by drawing attention to the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987, which might allow police to enter the embassy to arrest Mr Assange. George Galloway, the Respect party MP, said that what Mr Assange was accused of ‘might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape’. Asil Nadir was found

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Cooking witches

The Witchery is almost a themed restaurant; it is a weeping medieval tenement, just below Edinburgh Castle, which looks like a blackened tooth. Inside, it has wood panelling, wall paintings, red velvet table clothes and an enormous silvery head of Dionysus, which the waiter says is made of polystyrene. Upstairs are the sort of suites you can imagine Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel bouncing up and down in, dressed as Robespierre and Voltaire, but because it is August and the Fringe is in town, they are all booked up with writhing comedy agents plotting things. It is all very The Ninth Gate. (The Ninth Gate, should you be ignorant of

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 25 August 2012

What has happened to Italy, a country that not even Mussolini could discipline? It used to be cheerfully anarchic and self-indulgent: cars parked haphazardly all over pavements, long lunches and long siestas, fat tummies full of pasta. Officialdom, though bloated and intrusive, could also be flexible. I first fell in love with Italy more than 50 years ago when I skidded on an icy road into a tram stop in Milan, knocking over a bollard and banging my head (no seat belts then) on the windscreen, and a man in uniform poked his head through the window offering to help me move the car because the bollard was the property

Peter Jones

Vitruvius on rail franchising

Ever since nationalisation was invented in the 19th century, private franchising (e.g. the West Coast Main Line) has raised the question: why should private business profit from a public service which the state ‘should’ run for all? Ancients, obviously, never gave it a second thought. When Romans needed roads and aqueducts built, armies serviced, mines worked etc., they contracted the work out, as they did too with collecting provincial taxes. This always meant trouble. Whatever system was used — from private consortia (publicani) buying the right to collect taxes or local bigwigs collecting them under the eye of the Roman financial officer — there were always complaints about unfairness and extortion. There were the usual

The Spectator

Letters | 25 August 2012

A place for sport Sir: Many of us in the education world are baffled by the political furore over school sports fields. Harris Federation runs 13 academies, largely in tight urban spaces. All manage to deliver outstanding sports lessons. Why? Because of the skill of our sports teachers and the vision of our sponsor, Lord Harris of Peckham, who once dreamt of becoming a professional footballer. Harris Boys’ Academy East Dulwich has sport as a subject specialism but almost no outside space of its own. Bizarrely, in 2008 Southwark Council would only provide planning permission to build the school on condition that we would not use the park opposite for