Society Archives

Saturday

7 Jul 2012

The tangled truth

There is a kind of mercantile speculation which ascribes every action to interest and considers interest as only another name for pecuniary advantage. But the boundless variety of human affections is not to be thus easily circumscribed. This is from a sermon by Samuel Johnson. I can’t find the date, but suspect he is having an early pop at Adam Smith, whom he met only once (they didn’t hit it off). Around a hundred years later, here’s Friedrich Hayek, accepting the Nobel prize for economics. It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely

Jrh Mcewen

Joining the conspiracy

You just can’t win with a conspiracy theorist. For him or her, the long-established association of conspiracy theory with paranoia goes to show that there is a secret plot to conceal the truth and discredit truth-tellers. However, as Joseph Heller put it, ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’ And, in any case, perhaps the sanest response to the prevailing conditions is paranoia. Look at the news. There’s the bankers, of course, conniving to rip us off. But even doctors are at it too. GlaxoSmithKline has just been fined $3 billion for convincing them to prescribe inappropriate medicine. Yes, these are indeed high days for conspiracy theories. The

Anthony Horowitz

Kindles for kids

‘How do we get children reading?’ the minister asked me, just a week after Michael Gove had got them reciting poetry, more or less by making it illegal for them not to. This was his number two, Nick Gibb, who had invited me to the Ministry of Education for a 40-minute chat. I’m not sure how impressed he was with my thoughts as I’ve heard nothing since, so it seems fair enough to share them with Spectator readers. Who knows? Maybe Mr Gibb is one of them. Politicians have a way of paying lip service to the subject of illiteracy because it is one of those issues that couldn’t be

Hugo Rifkind

Tom Cruise, Mitt Romney, and a hate that dare not speak its name

How weird are Scientologists? Other than the bright-eyed young men in sharp suits on Tottenham Court Road — who have somehow spotted my glaring personality problems at a distance and are adamant that I ought to step inside and identify them in more detail — I’ve never knowingly met one, so I don’t really know. My hunch, though, would be fairly. It’s not everybody who can go through life believing themselves to be covered in millions of tiny aliens which a tyrant called Xenu once stacked around volcanoes which he then detonated with hydrogen bombs. Mind you, I once went to a decent-sized town in Guatemala where they worship a

John Simpson

Dear boss…

Dear Director General Many congratulations on getting the best job in world broadcasting. Enjoy it as much as you can, while you can; in my 46 years at the Beeb, few directors-general have left as they would have chosen. Several were forced out before their time was up — usually as the result of bad behaviour by governments, Conservative and Labour. Mark Thompson made it through to the end, but I imagine he’s glad to go. His last two years have been overshadowed by a licence-fee agreement which has turned out to be harsher than anything the BBC has ever previously experienced. The shock of it all has become a

Melissa Kite

Wife sentence

As Katie Holmes emerged from her New York apartment in a pair of strappy heels, a contingent of women scattered throughout the world will have punched the air with joy. I searched through the pictures of her first appearance since filing for divorce feverishly on my iPad. ‘Come on, come on, let’s see the feet,’ I muttered, as I scrolled down. I need not have worried. There they were, gloriously arched in a pair of ostentatious, leopard-print stilettos. The battle was joined. The fightback had begun. Let there be no mistake. This Cruise divorce is a battle of ideas in which everyone will take sides. Our very belief systems are

Florence King

Stuck in the middle

Understanding the American class system is elementary. In Ruggles of Red Gap, the striving American wife instructs her new English butler on the duties she expects him to perform for her husband. ‘I want him to look like somebody,’ she explains. ‘Like who, madam?’ asks the perplexed servant. ‘Like somebody,’ she repeats firmly. There you have it. Our upper class are Somebody, our lower class are Nobody, and our middle class are Everybody. Not for us the traditional middle-class composition of doctors, lawyers, judges, business owners and academics. All of these are Somebody to our rank-and-file middle class, who make the cut simply by self-identification. They might be department heads,

Martin Vander Weyer

Farewell to Bob, the mercenary who seized command of the Barclays regiment

‘My dad once said that the only time he’d ever heard me say “never” was when I was asked if I’d had enough,’ Bob Diamond told me in 2009. You might guess, given the nine-digit fortune he scooped from Barclays during a 16-year tenure which ended on Tuesday morning, that what he could never get enough of was cash in his own deposit account. But actually he was talking about the pressure of steering Barclays through market storms in the face of relentless personalised hostility: ‘I love the challenge, Martin, I love the business.’ I believed him and, as I’ve written before, I admired him for it. Diamond was the

James Forsyth

Chancellor on the charge

Walk into George Osborne’s suite of offices in the Treasury and you are struck straightaway by a new excited mood. People who a month ago looked worn down by the burdens of office are now full of life. In no one has the transformation been more dramatic than the Chancellor himself. He strides out of his room, shoulders back, a smile playing across his face, and says, ‘Come on, stop gossiping with the political advisers. Let’s get on with it.’ It is remarkable to think that just a few weeks ago colleagues were discussing whether his enthusiasm had been permanently dented by events. This new enthusiasm is the result of

Friday

6 Jul 2012

Martin Bright

Let’s get to work getting our veterans back to work

The cutting of 17 army units by 2020 was never going to be popular. It is over-dramatic to suggest we now have a self-defence force rather than an army, but the loss of 20,000 regular soldiers will clearly have an effect on the UK’s ability to wage war. And yet the cutting is the easy part. The test for the government (or the next) is how they tackle the consequences. One of these will be large-scale redundancies among ex-soldiers and support staff. Has anyone thought about this? We already know that unemployment and mental health problems are an issue among veterans and that many end up in prison. This is

Alex Massie

The enigma of Mark Ramprakash

A pearl richer than all his tribe who, alas, loved batting not wisely but all too well. If tragedy seems too strong a term for Mark Ramprakash’s career there remains ample room for sadness when one considers the fate of the best batsman England has produced since Gooch and Gower announced themselves more than 30 years ago. The answer to the eternal question ‘What might have been?’ is rarely less than melancholy but never sadder or more frustrating than when pondering Ramprakash’s fate. The outline of his story is familiar to all who’ve followed English cricket these past 20 years: the most gifted batsman of his generation couldn’t find a

Shiraz Maher

Prevent strategy still needs political will

West Midlands Police have just announced seven arrests as part of an investigation into alleged terrorist activity. This follows the detention of six individuals on similar charges across London yesterday. Together, they reveal just how active the Islamist network in the UK remains and the potency of its ongoing threat. One of those arrested in London yesterday, a convert, Richard Dart (also known as Salahuddin al-Britani) first came to prominence last year when his step-brother featured him in a documentary called ‘My brother the Islamist’. It offered a rare observational view on the inability of one family to comprehend the militancy and millenarianism of their son. Dart was radicalised by

Thursday

5 Jul 2012

Richard Marsh

Closing cardiac units might be right, but it won’t be easy

Yesterday, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley reported to MPs on the state of the NHS. The state of the NHS, you’ll be relieved to know, is good, or at least it is in Mr Lansley’s estimation. Budgets are in surplus, waiting lists are down and, unless you are very unlucky, you won’t have to hang around for more than four hours in A&E before they see you. One thing, however, that the Health Secretary didn’t volunteer – curiously, since it was the biggest NHS news of the day – was the reorganisation of heart care for children, and the closure of three specialist surgery centres in England. This is probably just

Douglas Murray

4 years to bury the ghosts of Bloody Sunday?

It has just been announced that the police are going to launch an investigation into the Bloody Sunday deaths. It comes after the Police Service Northern Ireland and the Public Prosecution service reviewed the evidence of the Saville Inquiry. There will be a lot of comment about this in the coming days, but I think a couple of things are worth noting at the outset. Firstly, there can be no doubt that a number of soldiers deliberately shot and killed innocent people that day. Secondly, there can be no doubt that they then lied and misled an exceedingly long and costly public inquiry set up precisely in order to find

Jonathan Jones

QE is no substitute for a growth strategy

So the Bank of England is firing up the presses again, and injecting another £50 billion of Quantitative Easing (on top of the £325 billion we’ve had so far), in a desperate bid to get the economy moving. The Bank’s certainly right that growth’s not forthcoming. GDP in the first quarter of this year was 0.2 per cent below where it was in the first quarter of 2011, and the prospects for Q2 aren’t looking too bright either — especially with the extra Jubilee bank holiday. Some are hoping that the Olympics will help brighten the picture in Q3 — David Cameron says he’s ‘confident that we can derive over

Isabel Hardman

‘Welfare suicides’ are awful, but they’re still a red herring

One of my first jobs as a junior reporter was covering the inquest of a man who had committed suicide at the end of a legal battle against a rise in his rent. His council house had been transferred to a housing association, and the rents were set to rise by £5 a week. Like all inquests, it was a grisly affair. It took evidence from a sobbing young relative, and included the details of how he killed himself. This case was a terribly sad mess, and there doubtless should have been more support at hand for a man frightened about falling into arrears with his rent. But his death

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — chancellor on the charge

Did those around Gordon Brown create the conditions for the Libor fixing scandal? According to George Osborne, the answer is yes. In his cover feature this week, James Forsyth speaks to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who takes aim at his opposite number, stating those in the last government were ‘clearly involved.’ In our latest View from 22 podcast, James discusses how the trail may lead to these key figures from the last government: ‘During the 2008 financial crisis, it seems there was a concerted effort to keep Libor low. This prevented banks from being nationalised. But it also raises the question of whether anyone from the last government was

James Forsyth

Osborne and Balls are playing high stakes on Libor

The exchanges between Balls and Osborne just now are some of the most heated and most personal in parliamentary memory. I suspect that Balls would now not offer to cook Osborne ‘my 14-hour pulled pork South Carolina barbecue. I’d know he, as an American aficionado, would truly appreciate it’. The cause for this row is George Osborne’s interview in the new issue of The Spectator. The following paragraphs have sent Balls into a rage: ‘If exonerating the Bank is his first priority, his second is tying this scandal to the last government. He starts by blaming the regulatory system devised by Brown and Balls for allowing these abuses to happen.

Wednesday

4 Jul 2012

Nick Cohen

Crony Conservatism

The fundamental division in modern politics is between corporatists and believers in free markets. So what, you might say, that has been a fundamental division for quite a while. This time it is different, however. As a general rule, the more right wing a politician or commentator is seen to be, the more likely he or she is to support the propping up of lame ducks and the requisitioning of public money to subsidise grasping workers. Meanwhile those who support breaking up the banks so that they are no longer too big to fail are variously described as lefties, the enemies of wealth creation, banker bashers and the like. The

Isabel Hardman

Bob and Bollinger banking

This is the memo from Bob Diamond, released yesterday, on which many of this afternoon’s questions at the Treasury Select Committee will hinge. It records a conversation with Bank of England Deputy Governor Paul Tucker, and is worth reproducing in full here: Further to our last call, Mr Tucker reiterated that he had received calls from a number of senior figures within Whitehall to question why Barclays was always towards the top end of the Libor pricing. His response was ‘you have to pay what you pay’. I asked if he could relay the reality, that not all banks were providing quotes at the levels that represented real transactions, his