Society

While our economy was contracting by 0.7 per cent, America’s was growing by 0.4 per cent, according to the first estimate just released by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. But, as the graph below shows, those 2012 Q2 figures just represent a continuation of the divergent economic paths the two countries have been on since 2010. In America: steady if unspectacular growth. In the UK: stagnation followed by a second recession. P.S. The Americans report GDP figures as ‘annualised growth rates’ — that is, the percentage GDP would grow by if it grew for a whole year at the same rate as it did in the quarter — which

The pace of reform in education has been stepped up again today. The model funding agreement for all new academies has now been changed by the Department for Education to remove the requirement for all teachers to have Qualified Teacher Status. Any existing academy will also be able to change its funding agreement to include this new freedom. This change might sound technical but its importance is that it means that academies will now be able to employ people who have not gone through a year of teacher training. Previously, an academy couldn’t have employed, say, James Dyson to teach design without him having done a year in a teacher

As with all bureaucracies of its size and aloof detachment, the International Olympic Committee is blithely indifferent to the very principles it claims to uphold. Its charter proclaims that ‘any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement’. It was precisely that discrimination – of country, race, religion, and politics – that inspired the worst atrocity the Olympic Games has ever seen. During the 1972 games in Munich, the Black September terrorist group took eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage and killed them. Over the last few months

News reaches No. 22 that rising star of the right Milo Yiannopoulos, of Catholic Herald and tech-world fame, is to be nominated for Stonewall’s ‘Homophobe of the Year’. The news has come as a surprise to the flamboyant Yiannopoulos, who, despite arguing forcefully against gay marriage on Channel 4’s risible 10 O’Clock Live, has never made a secret of his own sexuality. Then again, headlines such as ‘The lingering stench of gay marriage’, published after an appearance on Newsnight earlier in the year, may have contributed to the nomination. But the waspish columnist, recently dubbed the ‘pit bull of tech media’ by the Observer, need not worry about winning: Mr

A few years ago, comedian Marcus Brigstocke beautifully summed up the national response to the news that we’d be hosting the Olympic Games: ‘“Would you like the oldest, most historically significant athletic competition the world has ever known, attracting athletes from every known nation on the face of the planet to come here and perform at the peak of their abilities in the very country where you live?” Most British people go “Where will we park?”’ Mitt Romney made a similar observation last night, albeit without the humour. When asked by NBC’s Brian Williams whether London’s ready for the Games, he said: ‘You know, it’s hard to know just how

I’m fresh back from the Port Eliot festival in Cornwall where I spent a day prescribing poetry prescriptions to those in need. It was a revelatory experience. Having spent twenty years or so promoting poetic excellence through the Forward Prizes for Poetry and broader access to the art-form through National Poetry Day, I’ve been battling with the challenge of making poetry appear more relevant to people in their everyday lives. Battling because there is no doubt that most people find poetry intimidating. It’s a fusty, dusty, back of a bookshop, elite, slim-volumed thing that’s not really for them. The occasional line of a poem will be lodged in their mind

Yesterday Nick Clegg published an ‘implementation framework’ for the government’s  mental health strategy. This follows his announcement in February 2011 of a ‘No Health without Mental Health’ policy, which has not been delivered and is now fragmenting under the changes being implemented to the commissioning structure of the health service. I have a special interest in this subject. About four years ago the failure of both the NHS and the private sector to deliver moderately competent mental health treatment (to me) nearly killed me; I was very ill with complex PTSD. The cost to the state of my death (in the absence of other resources and leaving behind a family

‘Osborne’s austerity is killing the recovery.’ It’s a familiar refrain, one that we hear every time there’s bad economic news. And, sure enough, today’s terrible GDP stats have sparked yet another rendition. Take this, for example, from the TUC’s Brendan Barber: ‘The government’s austerity strategy is failing so spectacularly that is has wiped out the recovery completely.’ But very rarely is that austerity quantified. Just how big are these cuts that have supposedly crippled the British economy? Well, according to the latest ONS figures, total managed expenditure stayed roughly flat in the coalition’s first year, before being cut by just 1.8 per cent in real terms (£12.6 billion) in 2011-12. But this

Today’s GDP figures are far worse than expected. They mean that the economy has now shrunk for three consecutive quarters. The figures have destroyed the optimism created by the fact that employment and tax revenues are rising. Politically, these figures are undoubtedly a blow to the coalition. Labour is out trying to pin the blame for the continuing recession on the government’s economic policy. The Treasury is countering that the figures confirm that ‘the country has deep rooted economic problems’. In a sign, though, of how serious the GDP fall is, the government is conspicuously avoiding suggesting any external reasons for it — such as the Eurozone crisis, the weather

MPs have been amusing themselves with a rather grim game in which they guess what event will lead to Parliament being recalled in August. Over the last few days, the Euro crisis has become the definite favourite. The yield on Spanish bonds is now over 7.55 per cent – a rate that is unaffordable in anything other than the shortest of terms – the IMF is indicating it will cut off future aid to Greece, and Italy’s regional debts are about to pull back into the eye of the storm. Now, this crisis has so far being marked by a willingness by the Eurozone to do just enough to stave off the trouble for

With the South Africans slaughtering England at the Oval this weekend, Mr Steerpike was more intrigued by the goings-on off the pitch. Catching up with a super-skinny and immaculately preened Shane Warne, it would seem that the former Aussie spin-king is still very paranoid about being photographed smoking in public. Every time a small child came up demanding a photo, Warne risked setting fire to his tight Armani number by hiding his cigarette behind his back. Still, it’s an improvement on the ‘altercation’ he had in 2000 with some Kiwi lads who snapped him smoking whilst being sponsored by a nicotine patch company. No smashed cameras this time. Ed Miliband

Will we soon see Harriet Harman shopping in Iceland while wearing a shell-suit and sporting, just above the cleft of her buttocks, the tattoo of a leaping dolphin? The fragrant one has been assuring journalists of her bona fide blue collar credentials. Well, actually, in fairness, that’s not quite what she said. She merely insisted that she was ‘not as posh as Samantha Cameron’ and not ‘landed gentry’. Harriet was very expensively educated and is the niece of the 7th Earl of Longford — so gentry, then, if not quite landed. But I suppose from Harriet’s vantage point this makes her sort of normal, even if from the vantage point