Society

For almost a decade now, what social conservatives say and the evidence in front of our eyes has been diverging with remarkable speed. According to the received wisdom, the permissive revolution of the 1960s led to family breakdown, which in turn led to today’s terrifying crime rates. The small snag with the argument is that crime rates are not terrifying. The decline in marriage and rise in divorce notwithstanding, crime rates have collapsed. Social conservatives can take some comfort from the fact that the fall coincides with the increase in the prison population since 1990. But a rise of about 30,000 in the number behind bars is small beer when

We’re approaching that point in the government’s life cycle when ministers begin to worry about whether they’ll be able to get things done before the next election. One Tory was complaining to me yesterday that the civil service will simply be able to run down the clock with any new ministers after the next reshuffle. This nervousness about their ability to get things done is reflected in the fact that, and don’t laugh, the government is holding a consultation on whether its consultations need to go on so long. Eric Pickles has long been pushing for this, arguing that the 12 week consultations were excessively cumbersome. They certainly mitigate against any rapid

Listening to Mervyn King and his Bank of England deputy Paul Tucker over the past few days, you’d have thought they only found out about Libor manipulation with the rest of us, three weeks ago. Appearing before the Treasury Select Committee this morning, King stated that ‘the first I knew of any alleged wrongdoing was when the report came out two weeks ago’. But documents from the New York Federal Reserve, made public as part of the US Congress’s investigation, suggest that US authorities did know, and tried to warn the Bank of England that manipulation was going on. First, the transcript of a phone call on 11 April 2008 between a Barclays

I have just started a new column, Bright on Politics, for the Jewish Chronicle. My first piece last week discussed Ed Balls and Israel. And this week I discussed why politicians turn to judges when they have lost their moral compass. Here’s the piece. I’m sure you’ll let me know what you think. Blind faith of Brothers and others in law When the political class loses faith in its ability to make moral judgments, what does it do? It calls in the lawyers. The present fashion for judge-led inquiries in the UK has given us the Leveson inquiry into the ethics of the press, and may yet lead to a

It’s easy to be complacent about human rights. We commend ourselves for passing laws that are designed to ensure that, for example, gay people are not discriminated against, or subject to abuse and derision as a consequence of their sexual orientation. We pat ourselves on the back, cheered by our own civility. And yet is it not likely that gay people are still discriminated against, and abused? So, we must forever guard against complacency, against hidden or covert or subconscious homophobia. Because it is all to easy to match ourselves against the sort of behaviour that persists in less developed countries, and feel good about ourselves as a consequence, to