Society

Yesterday’s reshuffle isn’t the only story in town. Save the Children, a global charity, has today started to fundraise for children in Britain whom it says are affected by the government’s cuts. It is now run by Justin Forsyth, an ex-aide to Gordon Brown, who will have understood the political implications of the research: that coalition policies are making child poverty worse. The problem is that this analysis mistakes the nature of poverty in Britain, and – worst of all – the ways of alleviating that poverty. The root problem is a confusion of low income as a cause of these issues, rather than the symptom of wider social failings

Yet more evidence that the country is going to the dogs. Doubtless this is the ECHR’s fault too. Or, of course, It’s Liverpool, Jake… [Thanks to GM]

For people in the communication business politicians have an uncanny ability to confuse even their better intentions by resorting to clumsy, even stupid, language. Thus David Davis earlier today. When normal people hear the phrase “shock therapy” I’m pretty sure they associate it with pretty awful, even ghastly, measures that, most of the time, don’t even have the saving grace of working. You wouldn’t want any of your relatives to be given shock therapy. It’s A Clockwork Orange or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest stuff. Davis is not alone. Dominic Raab says the “talented and hard-working have nothing to fear” from removing “excessive” employee protections. I suspect many hard-working

The 2013 Matt Ridley Prize is now open. Click here for more details. When Matt Ridley offered £8,500 for the best prize essay for environmental heresy, we at The Spectator expected lots of entries. But what took us by surprise was the quality of the submissions. The winner is Pippa Cuckson, whose piece on hydropower is the cover story of this week’s magazine. The judges had a pretty tough task. There were quite a few brilliant demolitions of environmentalism in general: as Stephen Hawking said at the Paralympic Games opening ceremony, the enemy of knowledge isn’t ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. It could sum up the problem with rational

The Corby by-election campaign is warming up, with the Tories selecting Christine Emmett as their candidate. Emmett is a local woman who lives in neighbouring Rutland. She runs her own management consultancy, and claims ‘extensive experience’ working with the NHS and in other areas of the public sector, notably in the fashionable area of ‘health and wellbeing’. The emphasis that the party is placing on Emmett’s work with public services, particularly the NHS, suggests that its strategy will concentrate on public service reform rather than economic policy. Speaking of which, Nick Clegg, in an interview with the Times (£), has reiterated that the autumn will be dominated by a ‘rat-a-tat

‘If concerns are expressed, we look into them. We’ve done that.’ When Glenys Stacey appeared on Sky News this evening after Ofqual finally published its initial report into the gradings of the GCSE English exams, she had an air of finality about her. What the chief executive of the regulator was trying to suggest, as she discussed the report’s findings with the presenter, was that this was the end of the row. Even though Ofqual’s report said the problem with last week’s GCSE results was not that the papers taken in June had been marked too harshly, but that those sat in January were marked too generously, this is not the