Walking beyond parody
As the Times’s Sam Coates suggests, this official Department of Transport video lands right in the middle of The Thick of It territory. Remoding (1:00 in), anyone?
Society
Tuesday
Monday
The Chinese lantern is dimming
Does anyone believe Chinese GDP figures? Officially, the economy is roaring at 9 per cent a year. But thanks to WikiLeaks we know that Chinese Politburo member Li Keqiang thinks that the official GDP data is ‘for reference only’ — and that if you want to know how fast China is growing you should look at electricity consumption, rail cargo volume and bank lending etc. So today’s announcement of China’s electricity consumption figures for April showing a year-on-year growth of 3.7 per cent is quite significant. This is growth beyond George Osborne’s wildest dreams, but by recent Chinese standards is pretty paltry. Last year China’s electricity consumption grew 12 per
The public doesn’t want the government to drop Lords reform or gay marriage
It’s been a fashionable line on the Tory right of late that if the government pushes ahead with Lords reform and same-sex marriage, it will be out-of-step with public opinion. But we have new evidence — courtesy of YouGov — suggesting that isn’t the case. In their latest poll, YouGov asks whether respondents think ‘the government should or should not go ahead with’ a number of contentious policies, including ‘Reforming the House of Lords to make it mostly elected’ and ‘Allowing same-sex couples to get married’. Note that they’re not just asking whether folk support the policies, but whether they think the government should be going ahead with them now.
Just in case you missed them… | 14 May 2012
…here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: James Forsyth asks if Greece is running out of German sympathy and reports Cameron is looking to his early leadership days for inspiration. Peter Hoskin examines Philip Hammond’s attempt to speak out. Sebastian Payne wonders if the Tories will ever find friends in the North and thinks Eric Pickles struggled for an answer on growth. Jerry Hayes looks at the book no newspaper editor wants you to read. And Rod Liddle asks if TOWE is turning British girls into an army of feckless, drunken, sluts.
Another voice: How ministers are gaming the net migration target
International students are currently the largest single category of immigrants who count in the net migration figures, which cover all those intending to stay more than a year. In the most recent figures (the year to June 2011) there were 242,000 such students — making up 40 per cent of so-called ‘long term’ immigration. However, as a new report by IPPR sets out, international students are not really ‘long term’ immigrants at all. They are far more likely to return home after a few years than the other main immigration categories of work and family: the evidence suggests only around 15 per cent stay permanently. Clearly, it would be wrong
Sunday
A guide for girls?
Is the reality television programme The Only Way Is Essex turning British girls into an army of feckless, drunken, sluts who are perpetually up the duff and care about nothing more than alcohol, drugs and money? Or were they of that disposition anyway? The Girl Guides blame the repulsive TOWIE, having commissioned a survey that showed young girls were more admiring of the lifestyle of the venal air-headed bints on the show than they were of more improving pursuits. I’m not so sure. It is a nice thought that, without TOWIE, our young females would all be beavering away trying to get a job as head of the Human Rights
Cameron looks to his early leadership period for inspiration
David Cameron’s big parenting push this week is a reminder of what the Prime Minister would have liked to have been before the economic crisis intervened. Cameron believes that encouraging stable, loving families is the best way to prevent social failure. Doing that reduces the demand for government and, so the logic goes, shrinking the state then becomes a lot easier. How the government can try and help people be better parents without falling into the nanny state is undoubtedly tricky. But Cameron’s emphasis so far has, rightly, been on simply giving people more information to help them make their own decisions. Part of this approach is a series
Saturday
Malapropisms
A London gallery had a spot of trouble with the police when someone complained about a picture of Leda and the swan. ‘As the exhibition was already over,’ said a report in the Daily Telegraph, ‘they took down the artwork, which shows the animal ravaging the naked woman.’ Ravaging? ‘Thou still unravaged bride of quietness,’ as John Keats might have written, on his own Grecian theme. Perhaps the Vikings first suggested the confusion. J.R. Green in his Short History of the English People wrote of the Danes ‘ravaging along Loire as they ravaged along Thames’. But even if rape went with pillage, they were distinguished even then. We all use
Dear Mary | 12 May 2012
Q. My wife was a recovering alcoholic. Now she is a lapsed recovering alcoholic. After three years of sobriety she has taken up the bottle again. I feel that if only she could hear the foul-mouthed and irrational tirades she delivers when under the influence, she might go back onto the wagon. I have recorded several of the hideous conversations she and I have had late at night with the idea of playing them back to her in the morning. Do you think I should try it, Mary? — Name and address withheld A. Definitely not. Recording her in this way is a violation of the trust between you. Much
Status Anxiety: Must there be a Roxy Mark III?
Hamster-gate continues. Last Saturday, Caroline and I went out to dinner, leaving the children playing with Roxy in the company of a babysitter. I told them to put her back in her cage before they went to bed, making sure that all doors, etc. were securely fastened. In order to make sure they complied, I stressed that the consequence of her escaping would be certain death — just as I had before we lost Roxy Mark I. When we came home at midnight, I checked the cage just to make sure the children had followed my instructions and, to my horror, discovered that the lid to Roxy’s sleeping compartment hadn’t
Twelve for the Flat | 12 May 2012
The fittest horse wins the Guineas, the luckiest horse wins the Derby and the best horse wins the St Leger, goes the old saying. But not since Nijinsky in 1970 has any horse won all three. Many of those best qualified, like Mill Reef, have not attempted the feat. Since Nijinsky failed to win the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe after running in the St Leger many top horses have swerved Britain’s least glamorous Classic for fear of prejudicing their chances in Paris. But the owners of Camelot, impressive winner of last weekend’s 2,000 Guineas for Aidan O’Brien and now favourite for the Derby, are thinking of bidding for the
Real life | 12 May 2012
We were hoping the new filly might jump, but we were not expecting her to get started straight away. Ideally, we would have preferred her not to tackle the five foot post and rail fence of her paddock. It had all been going so smoothly. Famous last words with horses. We brought the foal home and settled her into a stable next to the boyfriend’s huge grey thoroughbred. The two of them greeted each other over the wall, big old Longman reaching over with ease to offer her a paternal snuffle and Darcy straining upwards on tiptoe to touch noses. The next day we put Darcy in the outdoor school
Low life | 12 May 2012
The day after her 96th birthday, and three days before she died, my next-door neighbour told me she wanted Jimmy killed and put in her coffin with her. She knew then she hadn’t long to go. The only thing I could do for her, she said, was put fresh milk in Jimmy’s saucer, making sure that the milk was fresh. She was very anxious about this. She’d hate Jimmy to be offered milk that had gone off. I was jubilant. Her wanting Jimmy put down was the best news I’d heard for ages. I’d have offered to do it myself with my bare hands if there was even half a
High life | 12 May 2012
New York So, Sarko and Bruni are out, Hollande is in and I’m off to the Actor’s Studio to brush up on my acting lessons. (Stanley Kowalski is reborn. Stella!) I wonder whether DSK is thinking: ‘There but for an African maid go I.’ My friend Edward Jay Epstein has written a quickie book about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s little problem of last year here in the Bagel, one in which Epstein reiterates the disgraced ex-IMF chief’s suspicions that he was set up by his political enemies. Epstein does not agree, he simply states Dominique’s case. Personally, I was delighted when the frog was busted, and it wasn’t simple schadenfreude either. (I
Letters | 12 May 2012
Pollygarchy Sir: It was with a rising sense of disbelief that I read Polly Toynbee’s review of Ferdinand Mount’s The New Few (Books, 5 May). There’s an oligarchy in this country all right, but what Ms Toynbee fails to realise is that she is a member. For every overpaid plutocrat, there are any number of privileged people like herself who find lucrative employment ‘representing the disadvantaged’. They remind me of nothing so much as the old squirearchy, who used to visit their cottagers to do good works. I would not like to suggest that it is actually in the interest of the socialist elite to keep the masses in their
Ancient and modern: Aesop on Alex Salmond
In Aesop’s fable, mother frog threatened to explode by puffing herself up to a size big enough to take on the ox that had accidentally trodden on one of her young. It’s all so Alec Salmond, puffing himself up to save tiny but heroic Scotland (5 million) and its plucky welfare dependents from being crushed by its tyrannical neighbour (52 million). In a Politeia pamphlet, Lord Fraser has proposed that it would be better for Scotland to become something like a Roman ‘client kingdom’. Such kingdoms were monarchies or their equivalent, on the edge of the Roman Empire, serving mutual interests. Rome would protect the monarch’s position against local rivals, and
Diary – 12 May 2012
Bidden to the Barbican for the Bauhaus exhibition, I trekked from the eponymous underground station. I noted that there are many steps from the platform to the street, perhaps a little steeper than the norm, for I kept catching my crutches on them. Across the road, the narrow steps into the Barbican — a mean afterthought by a rotten architect — I know to be very steep even for a man fully fit in wind and limb. Beyond the serried tower blocks there are more steps, more generous to the lame in every dimension, and down — though they will be up on the way back and there are a
Portrait of the week | 12 May 2012
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, declared that he would ‘focus on what matters’ after the Conservatives’ poor showing in the local elections brought accusations that pursuit by the coalition of such aims as gay marriage and reform of the House of Lords was alienating voters. On the eve of the Queen’s Speech he appeared at a tractor factory in Essex with Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, who had done disastrously in the local elections. ‘I’m really sad,’ Mr Clegg had said of the results. Labour had gained an extra 823 wards, the Conservatives lost 405 and the Liberal-Democrat party 330, leaving it
Fewer laws, more action
This government has run out of good ideas; that was what the Queen’s speech told us this week. When the coalition was formed, it united behind a genuinely bold agenda: school reform, welfare reform, health reform and deficit elimination. Where has the boldness gone? The coalition’s courage has vanished, as has its sense of purpose and the ability of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to agree on anything sensible. So for the next year, our MPs will be kept busy, not pushing on with important changes, but debating intractable problems like House of Lords reform and long-term care for the elderly. If there’s not much to be said for what
Will Greece run out of German sympathy?
As Greece heads for another election, there’s increasing speculation that the anti-bailout parties will do even better next time. Talking to people in Brussels, there’s an expectation that if this does happen German patience could snap and they might start pushing for Greece’s ejection from the euro. The argument goes that Merkel, who faces her own elections next year, can’t afford to let the Greeks change the terms of their bailout deal. There is, though, one particular reason to be sceptical about whether Berlin would ever actually put Athens in a position where it would have to leave the euro. If Greece did go back to the drachma, the markets
