Society

Friday

Jonathan Jones

Borrowing figures are good and bad news for the government

Today’s public finance statistics are another case of good news/bad news for the government. First, the good news: the ONS revised down its estimate for government borrowing in the last fiscal year (2011/12) from £125 billion to £119.3 billion. That’s £6.7 billion below the OBR’s estimate in March this year, and means that the coalition succeeded in cutting the deficit by 25 per cent in its first two years (29 per cent in real terms). But the bad news comes when you look at the current fiscal year. The ONS estimates government borrowing for August at £14.41 billion — roughly the same as August 2011 (£14.37 billion). These estimates do

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Burstow goes rogue to attack Treasury

Hell hath no fury like a government minister sacked (as proven by our anonymous ‘Dumped by Dave’ piece this week). Another former minister, Paul Burstow, lost his job because Nick Clegg was miffed at the way the Lib Dem had failed to flag up the dangers in the Health and Social Care Bill. He’d already formed a habit of briefing against his own department when he was in office, so it’s no great shock that Burstow has decided to dish the dirt on the Treasury in the Telegraph today, claiming it is responsible for blocking reform of the social care system. He writes: ‘Of course, if fixing this was easy

Alex Massie Alex Massie

John Swinney misses a trick – Spectator Blogs

There are days when Scottish independence seems a more than decent idea. Budget day at Holyrood is always one of them. I say budget day but it’s really faux-budget day because, at least until now, it’s always been only half a budget. A parliament that may spend but cannot tax is only half a parliament. So, if not independence then proper fiscal autonomy at least. That would make Holyrood a better, bigger, more responsible place. It might also provide incentives for better public policy. Might being the operative word, obviously. Nevertheless the reaction to the so-called budget John Swinney delivered yesterday has been encouraging. That is, the public sector unions

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A blast of common sense on social media censorship

Munira Mirza, Boris Johnson’s deputy mayor for education and culture, provides a much needed blast of common sense in today’s Evening Standard. She says that the police, and society, need to calm down about people making idiotic and offensive comments on Twitter and other social media sites. As she points out, ‘Do the police have nothing better to do than patrol Twitter, hunting out people who send tasteless tweets?’ But there’s another reason to worry about this policing beyond the fact that it is a waste of resources: the more we race around arresting people for saying stupid things or things that go against the current orthodoxy, the less free

Wednesday

Andrew Marr

Diary – 19 September 2012

I’m just back from Chicago, Washington and New York where I’ve been making a film on Obama’s four years, and still shaking off the jetlag. It’s been a hot early autumn there, after a scorching summer; but nobody on the campaign trail seems to be talking about climate change. Or indeed about anything except the economy. Nor do many people seem to be listening. There’s an eerie absence of electioneering bumper-stickers, posters or even much coverage on the TV breakfast shows. You get tiny flashes of political coverage between the weather and traffic. This is a fight taking place in upmarket nooks and angry crannies — certain websites, op-ed pages

The Spectator

Letters | 19 September 2012

Criminals on the net Sir: Nick Cohen (‘Nowhere to hide’, 15 September) raises interesting points about the double-edged nature of the internet. The web has brought us massive communications benefits. However it also affords criminals the same. It is this that concerns me, rather than Mr Cohen’s claim that it will allow, through our Communications Data Bill, the government to monitor people’s every move. This is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Bill. Its purpose is to update powers law enforcement bodies already have, making them relevant to the 21st century. It cannot make sense to enable police to investigate crimes conducted using a mobile phone but not give

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 September 2012

Home The government gave a commercial company, Capita, a contract to find and remove more than 150,000 migrants who have overstayed their visas. A French court prohibited a magazine from republishing pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge topless, or distributing them. After appearing in the French magazine, the pictures had been printed in the Irish Daily Star. The Duke and Duchess continued their Jubilee year tour, taking in the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. In a freedom of information case brought by a Guardian journalist, an appeal court ruled that correspondence between Prince Charles and the government should be made public. Derek Jameson, a former editor of the Daily Star, died,

Taki

High life | 19 September 2012

Nueva York The dateline is in Spanish because I have yet to hear any English spoken here in the Bagel, and I landed in some style more than 24 hours ago. Never mind. Flying at 47,000 feet at close to 500 knots per hour on a G550 is as close as it gets to perfection in travelling. The G550 is the Mozart-Beethoven-Schubert-Schumann-Edward Hopper-Degas-William Holden-Burt Lancaster-John Wayne-Papa Hemingway-F. Scott Fitzgerald-Lew Hoad-Roy Emerson-Robert E. Lee-Hasso von Manteuffel of airplanes. There, you get my point, dontcha? Way up there, close to the angels, there ain’t no turbulence. The plane glides like a giant bird, and silently to boot. And it still has tricks

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 19 September 2012

Last weekend we stayed in a cottage at Madron, an ancient granite village in west Cornwall. A church has stood at Madron since 500 AD and there is a holy well nearby. More recently Madron and the surrounding landscape was commemorated in the poems of W.S. Graham (1918–86), who spent the latter half of his life there. By an odd coincidence I’d brought with me a poetry anthology, snatched in haste at random from a shelf, called 100 Poems by 100 Poets, edited by Harold Pinter and others, and we were surprised to find one of Graham’s poems, ‘I leave this at your ear’, included. And then we were even

Melissa Kite

Real life | 19 September 2012

Friends with children all seem to agree that there is a general rule on numbers: if you’ve got one child, you may as well have two. But you must never, ever be tempted to think that if you’ve got two children you may as well have three. Apparently, the apophthegm breaks down at that point. Three children pushes you over the edge. It is no longer manageable using the techniques or financing you have previously been employing. It will turn your entire life upside down, drain you of all available resources, fiscal, mental and emotional. I can now confirm that the same thing goes for horses. (It may not be

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 19 September 2012

Who wants to be a millionaire? The answer is practically everybody. Who wouldn’t want a life of financial ease in which every need was affordable? But since the vast majority of us will never achieve this blessed state, we try to persuade ourselves that it is not such a happy one. When people believed in God, they could take comfort in the prospect of a happy afterlife. But now they must convince themselves that here on this earth they are no less content than the very rich. Unfortunately, this is not easy. We know that great wealth doesn’t necessarily bring contentment — the tragic case of Eva Rausing is a

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 19 September 2012

You’ve won a national championship by the narrowest of margins. You’re too elated to sleep: you’re going over the hands in your head, when suddenly — argh! — you realise you scored one board incorrectly. If you come clean, your score will drop. What do you do? This is exactly what happened to the American player Debbie Freeman, winner of the Mixed Teams in the recent North American Bridge Championships. What did Debbie do? She informed the tournament director the next day, dropping her team out of first place and into second. This sort of good sportsmanship is not unusual at the top level in bridge. Zia Mahmood and Michael

Raymond Keene

Phoenix arise

Every year I give many so-called simultaneous displays, usually for charity, where I take on 20 opponents at one and the same time. The only game I have lost this year in such events was a complicated battle during the Phoenix Legacy weekend in Dorset, organised by Rosie Barfoot, to raise awareness of the need for mental activity as one ages. Apart from the lecturers, Tony Buzan of Mind Mapping fame and Dominic O’Brien, the eight-times world memory champion, there was also an address by Leontxo Garcia of Spain’s leading newspaper El Pais, Madrid, who is an expert on the role of chess in combating Alzheimer’s. Notes based on the

Raymond Keene

No. 236

White to play. This is from Alekhine-Feldt, Odessa 1916. Some great masters have taken on numerous opponents simultaneously without sight of the board. Here is a blindfold finish by Alexander Alekhine. Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 25 September  or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I shall be offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Rd4 Last week’s winner William Anderson, Old Knebworth, Herts

Toby Young Toby Young

Why would anyone want to keep GCSEs?

On the principle that you should know your enemy, I’ve spent the last few days trying to work out where the critics of Michael Gove’s GCSE reforms are coming from. Why does anyone object to introducing more rigour into the classroom? Just to be clear, the last government presided over a period of relentless dumbing down. As GCSE results continually improved, England plummeted in the OECD’s international league tables. In 2000, our 15-year-olds were eighth in the world for maths. By 2009, they’d fallen to 27th. So there’s no question something needs to be done and, on the face of it, Gove’s reforms are just the ticket: insisting on just

Dot Wordsworth

Dear Mary | 19 September 2012

Q. I understand that the man who organised the Debs’ List is no longer with us, so I wonder if you can advise me how I could round up some of the right sort of young for a drinks party? My niece, who has been at school in Los Angeles, is about to fly into London to stay with me here for a gap year but very few of my friends have male offspring of the appropriate age, namely 18-25. Money is no object, and neither is pride. Just tell me: how does one find them these days? — Name withheld, London SW3 A. In the absence of Tatler’s social

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Lord Sugar’s castle

Alan Sugar’s Turkish restaurant, Sheesh, is in Chigwell, a land of soft lawns, hard money and fairies who count it. They come out when footballers beep their horns, so to speak. If it sounds disgusting, it isn’t really — Essex is simply Surrey with a makeover and thinner legs. Sheesh is a huge, white, half–timbered Tudor ex-pub, sitting, or rather screaming, in a photogenic lane begging for folk tales starring shouty TV lords. It is one of the most beautiful restaurants I have ever seen, because I have no taste. It is fantastically fake, Camelot crashing into Monaco; I suddenly imagine Sugar on a horse jousting with a broken Amstrad

Dot Wordsworth

Predistribution

I feel flattered to think that Ed Miliband was inspired by my column of 31 March to invent a word for his speech at the Stock Exchange earlier this month. I had written, after Theresa May denounced preloading, that it was ‘easy to tack pre- on to words’. I forgot to advise that some meaning should be predetermined for the word. But to use a word that no one knows the meaning of is quite in the spirit of the radical 17th century. Owen Felltham (1602-68), for example, a man who kept on writing the same book, which he called Resolves, invented, for the edition of 1628, the word disdeify,

Dumpynose

2081: Four of each | 19 September 2012

Each of five unclued lights (one hyphened) must be 28 in a 2 way. Across 1    Naked German cuts elbow (5) 9    Fresh treatment of sick darling hen (10) 11    Chap twisted limb batting (5) 12    City in ravine colonel captured (7) 14    Dance with athletic Zulu round Lithuania (5) 15    Coed developed constant signal device (5) 16    English soul crossing river makes brilliant discovery (6) 22    Computer programs? Pit-sawyer’s lost without IT (7) 24    Knight shunned more agreeable piper perhaps (4) 25    Unit of volunteers Officer Commanding leads (4) 27    Man-eater (no maiden) dressed as necessary (7, three words) 33    Maybe Arbuckle was excited about 27th element (6) 34