Society

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

The censorship Olympics

The Olympics may just 16 days away but will the spectators be able to find chips? The shocking picture above shows the real effect of the Censorship Olympics. Thanks to a lucrative sponsorship deal with McDonalds, all other catering teams are forbidden from serving chips anywhere within the area of London categorized as Olympic Park — unless they come with fish.   The Soviet-style roadlanes are bad enough, but the right to sell a bag of chips to anyone who wants one is fairly fundamental in Britain — and Nick Cohen writes the cover story tomorrow on how many other fundamental rights have been flogged to the IoC and their sponsors.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The free-school ‘scandal’ ignores parents and pupils

The Guardian has published a piece on school reform which perfectly expresses the attitude which has condemned children of lower-income parents to dismal education for years. The introduction of the story goes as follows:   There are around 10,600 empty school places in Suffolk. Or, to put it another way, if 10 average-sized secondary schools were closed down, there would still be a place for every child living in the county who needs one. Which made it somewhat surprising, therefore, when the Department for Education approved four free schools in the county, with a further two in the offing. ‘The Suffolk free school scandal’, as local campaigners are calling it…

Andrew Neil

Blair’s deal with Murdoch

The below is an extract from Andrew Neil’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, published today. You can read the whole document here. ‘How we treat Rupert Murdoch’s media interests when in power,’ Mr Blair told me in 1996, a year before he became Prime Minister ‘will depend on how his newspapers treat the Labour party in the run up to the election.’ That is exactly how it panned out.  The Sun and the News of the World fell in line behind New Labour in the run up to the 1997 election, The Times stayed broadly neutral and the Sunday Times unenthusiastically Tory. After the election, The Times quickly fell in

Tuesday

Gordon Hector

Making work pay

‘Making work pay’ – it’s the phrase du jour of welfare reform. It’s not always clear, though, how it is actually achieved. One part of the equation is looking at how earnings, taxes and benefits interact at the lower end of the income scale. As people earn more, they’re entitled to fewer benefits, and have to start paying higher taxes. This creates what’s known as a ‘withdrawal rate’ – the percentage of any extra income lost to this combination. When people talk about the ‘poverty trap’ or work not paying, this is often what they’re referring to: because if people don’t get to keep much of the money, their incentive

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Diamond’s ‘complete lack of candour’

Bob Diamond could be rather too busy in the next few weeks to enjoy the £2 million salary and pension entitlement that he will still collect from Barclays despite waiving £20 million in bonuses. The Treasury Select Committee may well recall the former Barclays chief executive to explain what chair Andrew Tyrie called a ‘complete lack of candour to Parliament’. The bank’s chair Marcus Agius revealed to the committee this morning that the fatal blow to Diamond’s career was dealt by Sir Mervyn King, who told the Barclays board that Diamond no longer commanded the confidence of the regulators. But there remain questions about the veracity of some of Diamond’s

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

GOD draws near to Bank of England job

Paul Tucker rather drove a steamroller over his hopes to be the next Bank of England Governor during his testimony to the Treasury Select Committee yesterday. We said on Coffee House last night that the suggestion that Tucker and co discussed a possible manipulation of Libor as far back as 2007 had seriously wounded his bid – although Tucker argued that he ‘thought it was a malfunctioning market, not a dishonest one’. Paddy Power agreed that Tucker was in trouble – and has duly lengthened the odds against Tucker getting the job. Before his appearance, he was 6/4, but those odds are now 5/2.  The new favourite for the job, according

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The truth about Jesus of Nazareth

I’ve just received email notification of a debate I sadly missed at the East London Mosque entitled ‘Was Jesus a Muslim Prophet or a Christian God?’ The email came from a thoughtful chap called Abdullah Al Andalusi who informs me that the speakers tended towards the former, rather than latter proposition. Indeed, there was a ‘powerful refutation’ of Christian dogma on the subject. I am genuinely saddened to have missed this debate, as it’s the sort of thing which is always fun to chew over. As a consequence I have it in mind to arrange a similar sort of intellectual pow-wow — a debate which asks the question: ‘Was Mohammed

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Is the Work Programme working?

School and welfare reform are the signature missions of David Cameron’s government – but is welfare going wrong? Labour is crowing that today’s figures from the Work and Pensions department on welfare-to-work show it’s a failure. I’ve just come back from a DWP briefing with Chris Grayling, the minister responsible, and thought Coffee Housers would be interested in his take. It was Labour who first involved private companies into welfare-to-work, and the coalition has continued it – but pressed the reset button. Their scheme is called the Work Programme, the largest welfare-to-work programme on the planet with 750,000 clients. It means the government pays a £4,000 fee to a company

Martin Bright

Tennis and the rise of the ‘mediocracy’

The discussion of Britain’s latest tennis nearly man has turned inevitably to the culture of a sport which, in this country at least, remains laughably exclusive. Asked on the Today programme why we fail to produce consistent numbers of good tennis players the tennis evangelist and comedian Tony Hawks (who knows a thing or two about what is laughable) made a good suggestion about opening up our ridiculously expensive (and often empty) courts to the public. But the debate about tennis reveals a deeper malaise. In this country we are prepared to accept mediocrity because the last thing we would dare tamper with is the class system. There is a

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Shots in the arm for the economy

There’s an interesting paper out from a number of members of the Conservative Free Enterprise Group this morning. The report, called Policy Bites: Seven Shots in the Arm of Britain, makes these seven recommendations for reforming the economy: 1. Over 65s still in work should continue to pay National Insurance contributions on their earned income to fund NIC holidays for young low-paid workers. 2. Exempt businesses with up to three employees and less than £75,000 annual turnover from employment regulation. 3. Reform the Treasury to place greater emphasis on supply-side reform. 4. Give planning permission for a third and fourth runway at Heathrow. 5. Create a new Ministry of Infrastructure

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tucker’s down on his luck

‘This doesn’t look good, Mr Tucker.’ Andrew Tyrie made this observation towards the end of his Treasury Select Committee’s evidence session with Bank of England Deputy Governor Paul Tucker. He was talking about the minutes of a meeting in 2007 which suggested Tucker was aware of the lowballing of Libor, but he might as well have been summing up the witness’s hopes of taking the reins as the Bank’s next Governor. Tucker insisted he was not aware that lowballing was taking place, but the minutes themselves said: ‘Several group members thought that Libor fixings had been lower than actual traded interbank rates through the period of stress.’ John Mann leapt

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A self-regarding attack on free speech

Imbecilic leftie authoritarians are whining again about being called nasty names by people with less power than them. Exhibit A is the fabulously stupid Islamist Mehdi Hasan, once of the New Statesman and now of the Huffington PostUK, whatever that is. Here’s the emetic opening sentence of his article in today’s Guardian (under the headline ‘We Mustn’t Allow Muslims In Public Life To Be Silenced.’ Yes, he means himself): ‘Have you ever been called an Islamist? How about a jihadist or a terrorist?? Extremist maybe? Welcome to my world.’ The abuse he gets, he whines, is ‘as relentless as it is vicious’. He complains about being called a dangerous Muslim

Sunday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Proud and partying

A rather wonderful spat in the always mysterious and interesting democratic republic of homosexuals. On one side, the excellent lesbian writer Julie Bindel, on the other side, St Peter Tatchell. The point at dispute is London’s Gay Pride March: Peter likes it a lot and was there this year as usual. Julie thinks it’s become absolutely ghastly: just a huge party for men to secure sexual access to as many other men as they possibly can. It’s been taken over, she says – sounding for all the world like a retired army major living in Burford, –  by ‘rollerskating nuns and men with their backsides hanging out.’ She also takes

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Libor: the truth is out there

Is parliament good for anything? This is, in effect, the question behind the coming Libor investigation. Ed Miliband’s assumption that to get any questions answered you need a judge-led inquiry fits a trend, and one that Rod Liddle examines in this week’s magazine. For my part, I’m uneasy about the deification of the judiciary and quite liked Rod’s idea of having an inquiry into the judges, led by a butcher. If parliament doesn’t work, I think the answer is to fix it rather than give up on it. So a lot is now resting on Andrew Tyrie, who is about to chair the parliamentary investigation into Libor, who must next

Saturday

The Spectator

Omniscandal

It is easy to understand Bob Diamond’s miscalculation. In the great pantheon of banking scandals, it was unlikely, he thought, that Libor interest-rate rigging would rank very high. Libor is the average interest rate at which banks lend to each other — or, rather, the rate at which they admit to lending to each other. Any metric that depends on bankers’ honesty is, obviously, wide open to manipulation, so when the Financial Services Authority decided to tighten the rules, with an investigation six months ago, the natural response was a yawn. Barclays had been bending the rules, but so had everyone else, and Barclays was so co-operative that the FSA

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: Plato on Bob Diamond

Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays, has resigned because of Libor rate-fixing among his traders in 2005–9. He once defined the ‘culture’ of a successful bank as ‘how people behave when you think no one is watching’. Plato knew all about that, as the story of Gyges’ ring in his dialogue Republic (c. 370 bc) explains.  Glaucon, challenging Socrates to demonstrate that behaving morally is intrinsically good (whatever the consequences), tells how a Lydian shepherd Gyges found a ring which rendered him invisible when he turned it to one position on his finger, and visible again when he turned it back. As a result, he seduced the king’s wife, with

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 7 July 2012

In her profile photo she was curtseying prettily in a floral dress. In her written profile she described herself as a ‘nice lady, with a nice and open soul, and with common sense’. Not what I was looking for at all, but she lived quite near, and, with petrol the price it is, I was willing to overlook things. I also admired her advice to any chaps contemplating sending her a message. Our profiles should not tell her that we like good food ‘as if you are living to eat’. Nor should we say that we liked to laugh, because ‘everybody does this’. Finally, we shouldn’t claim to be happy,

Taki

High life | 7 July 2012

The Spectator lost one of its most loyal readers when Alistair Londonderry, Marquess of, died recently of that most dreaded pancreatic cancer, the very same that had killed his brother-in-law Jimmy Goldsmith 15 years before. Alistair would have been 75 in September, an age that Jimmy never even got close to. Sir James once told me that Alistair had the best brain of anyone he knew, with almost encyclopedic knowledge of politics and music. Jimmy would ring him and casually ask in those pre-Google times who the vice-president of, say, Upper Volta, was. Back would come an unpronounceable name. Goldsmith would have his secretary check it and, presto, Alistair would

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Another pet bites the dust

Roxy Mark II is dead. I hoped I’d never have to write those words, but there’s no doubt about the matter. I don’t mean our replacement hamster has escaped like the first one (current whereabouts unknown). I mean she’s expired. She’s not resting. She’s passed on. She is no more. She has gone to meet her maker. I first learnt the news when I was travelling in East Africa a couple of weeks ago. Caroline called in a state of panic to say she ‘thought’ Roxy was dead.  ‘She’s not moving,’ she said. ‘I forgot to feed her. D’you think she’s died of starvation?’ ‘Oh Jesus,’ I replied. ‘Not another

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Spectator’s Notes

The Governor of the Bank of England raised his legendary eyebrow and Barclays tried to singe it. If there was any doubt about the badness of Barclays’ behaviour in the Libor-rigging scandal, it is surely removed by the way Barclays has dealt with its denouement. Bob Diamond and co claimed they had no part in rigging, and yet they released the October 2008 letter written by Mr Diamond purporting to show that Paul Tucker, the deputy governor of the Bank, was giving them permission to rig. If it does show that, they are liars. If it does not — as three official investigations have already concluded — then they are