Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Get-out clause

In the same week that Sun journalists were subjected to dawn raids at home, the British justice system released one of the leading ideologues of al-Qa’eda to walk the streets. The fact that Abu Qatada should never have been here in the first place, having arrived in 1993 on a forged passport, is not a minor point. He has cost this country much in expense and security. He is said to be connected to terrorist jihadist groups in the UK, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia, Iraq, Indonesia, Italy, Belgium, Morocco, Libya, France, Afghanistan and Sweden — in 2007, the Special Immigration and Appeals Commission described his influence as ‘formidable, even incalculable.’

Martin Bright

The Coalition must not create the modern workhouse

I have warned on this blog before that the reforms of the welfare-to-work system risk embedding unpaid labour into the benefits system. This week’s story about Tesco advertising for night shift workers to be paid Job Seeker’s Allowance plus expenses has rightly caused outrage now it seems that large retailers and charities are pulling out of the work experience element of the Work Programme. As the Independent reports today, Matalan has suspended its involvement in the scheme and Waterstones, Sainsbury’s and TK Maxx have expressed their opposition. Employers are now said to be concerned that job seekers will lose their benefits if they drop out of placements. Shiv Malik of

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Attack of the Militant Secularists

If you want to hear a BBC discussion going hopelessly wrong, listen to the ‘debate’ between the Bishop of Lichfield, Jonathan Gledhill and Alan Beith on the Today programme this morning. Radio 4 meant it to be about the established church, and set the Anglican bishop against the Methodist Beith. But a freemasonry of the faithful took over, and ‘balance’ went out of the window. Conformist and non-conformist united against their common enemy, ‘militant secularism’. Not just Anglicans and Methodists, Beith assured us, but Sikhs, Jews, Muslims and Hindus were at one in their fear of the secularist menace. ‘It is bad enough having to put up with the platitudinous

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A poem for the Met

Metropolitan police officers have been asked to write a poem celebrating the wonderful diversity of our capital. The winning entrant will get to have ‘elevenses’ with the Met’s Head of Diversity, a nice lady called Denise Milani. This is too entrancing a prospect to pass up. So, given that the poem will come from a policeman’s view, here’s my entry: Albanian gangsters with rice flails and Uzis, Ukrainian pimps with high-cheekboned floozies, Jamaicans with handguns, Somalis with knives — just some of the people enriching our lives. Jew-hating Imams from Rabat and Homs, Stockpiling their basements with ricin and bombs, Rich Saudi princes with cowering slaves, Slovakian hooligans, Romanian knaves, A

Paul Mason

Greek Notebook

At Athens airport, the digital noticeboard reads like the script of an agitprop play. ‘Strike, strike, strike, strike, strike,’ it announces, next to the destinations. ‘Due to the turmoil,’ says the PR person we’re talking to, ‘all the politicians you’ve flown in to interview have pulled out.’ My cameraman, driving the Audi, seems determined to break the world land-speed record between Athens and Patras, but is thwarted by the fact that the 21st-century motorway is blocked by a mudslide. This means travelling on the 20th-century road, which is really a 3rd-century bc road lined with concrete and graffiti. At Derveni, a strip of crumbling concrete villas, we find the one restaurant

Ian Birrell

Big charity

The aid business has grown fat. It’s time there was proper scrutiny Such a simple question: should Oxfam spend a couple of hundred pounds a month opening up the swimming pool at its guesthouse in one of the nicer parts of Nairobi? It was posed by Duncan Green, the group’s head of research, on his blog, and provoked a revealing bout of navel-gazing in the aid industry. The pool was shut, Mr Green disclosed, on the orders of the charity’s head office, which feared a scandal after an advert for a pool attendant appeared on its website. The post went viral, sparking a far bigger response than Mr Green’s usual

Melissa Kite

Kiss off

Do you xxxx? Sorry to be impertinent. Perhaps you simply xx or x? I’m not a natural x’er, but it’s hard to resist when everyone else is x’ing all over the place. Besides, if someone x’s you, it would be rude not to x back, right? Truly, in this age of emotional incontinence, the etiquette of text and email signoffs is becoming a minefield. In the ever-intensifying arms race to display more and more emotion, even if it is entirely bogus, we are sending little figurative snogs to perfect strangers. We are ending the most businesslike emails with a valedictory expression of love and longing when a ‘Kind regards’ would

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Are we all becoming better informed – or is it just me?

The difference between the debt and the deficit, I quite often find myself telling people, is like the difference between your overdraft and the gulf between what you earn and what you need. Even if you could reset the former to zero, somehow, the latter still be there, forever dragging you down. ‘But aren’t you the guy who writes a whimsical made-up diary in which you pretend to be Cheryl Cole, or tell sex jokes about Silvio Berlusconi?’ they’ll frequently reply. And they’re right, because that’s exactly who I am. But I’m bloody clever, too. I know loads of stuff. Lots of us do. More, I increasingly think, and more.

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Mixing it

In Competition No. 2734 you were invited to provide anagrams of lines from Shakespearean sonnets. These assignments are not the most popular but every so often the urge to send you to anagram hell gets the better of me. ‘I found this competition exasperatingly difficult,’ wrote Josephine Boyle. Equally exasperated, it seems, was Basil Ransome-Davies, whose email subject line read: ‘Everlasting fire for this one’. Shirley Curran expressed her frustration anagrammatically: It is rather gawky to reinvent bards! (It is the star to every wand’ring bark). While W.J. Webster injected a refreshing note of cheeriness: ‘Lovely competition! Two Scrabble sets and a laptray — the insomniac’s dream!’ But I am

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: In with the old

I have noticed Britons in France or Italy cringe with embarrassment, and mutter apologies to waiters when ordering a cappuccino after dinner — or at any time after noon. ‘Look, you needn’t apologise,’ I say. ‘The reason foreigners drink their coffee black isn’t because they’re sophisticated: it’s because their milk tastes like crap.’ It has always surprised me that two countries which take great pride in food can produce such dismal milk. One theory is that many Mediterranean people have not evolved the ability to digest milk after childhood. So Brits should not feel ashamed at any lack of savoir-faire; if anything, our hosts should feel uncomfortable about their failure

Bruce Anderson

Drink: Mature consideration

It started with a ’99 Margaux, which commanded general agreement from the Brits around the table. Nose, length, balance, harmony: all delectable. It was a velvety, feminine wine, full of promise. Even so, the home team concluded, it was not really ready. The Frenchman in our company could not have disagreed more. ‘You English — you are a nation of necrophiliacs. This wine is excellent; how could you say that it isn’t ready?’ I gave battle. As the fruit and the tannins had not fully come together, we were only drinking 70 per cent of the wine. Give it another three or five years, and they would make love in

Friday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Lord Carey warns British Christians not to get carried away

The British need to talk about religion. The trouble is, every time God rears His head in the public square — as we have seen this week with the row about prayers at council meetings and Baroness Warsi’s speech on ‘militant secularism’ — everybody starts speaking in platitudes. The debate follows a familiar pattern: an anti-religion spokesman, probably a man from the National Secular Society, says something about Britain not being a ‘theocracy’. He then might mention America as an example of the theocratic menace, happily ignoring that the USA is, definitively, a secular country. In reply, somebody religious, probably Lord Carey of Clifton, says that ‘religious freedom’ is under threat. And finally, somebody who

The Spectator

From the archives: Why England and France will never be best friends

To mark David Cameron’s get-together with Nicolas Sarkozy today, we’ve dug up this essay from the Spectator archives by Lord Powell. As foreign policy advisor to Lady Thatcher and Sir John Major, Powell provides a first-hand insight into the incompatibilities that separate our two nations. A fundamental incompatibility?, Charles Powell, The Spectator, 3 September 1994 A few summers ago, I accompanied Margaret Thatcher to a meeting with President Mitterrand in Paris. The weather was sunny and the mood equally so. The agenda was rapidly disposed of and the President proposed that we adjourn to the Elysée garden. Once there, he took Mrs Thatcher — as she then was — off

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator

The Spectator’s figures are out today, and I’m delighted to say that they show sales growing at their fastest rate in ten years — driven by our new digital formats. The above chart shows how things are moving. I thought CoffeeHousers might like to know a bit more about how we in 22 Old Queen St see it all. The magazine industry, like the rest of print, is going through something of a revolution. Readers are migrating to digital alternatives like Kindle, as there is no waiting for delivery. Kindle addicts like having their magazines and newspapers waiting for them in their pocket, available to read any time. As our readers changed, so has

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Alex Salmond, Supply-Sider?

Today’s Chat With Dave is all very well and good but Alex Salmond’s speech to the LSE last night was just as significant. Much of the wrangling about Scottish independence has, for respectable reasons, concentrated on matters of process leaving the substance of what an independent Scotland might actually be like for another day. This too is reasonable since so much is speculative at this stage and, in any case, one should not necessarily presume that the SNP would dominate post-independence politics. Nevertheless, it is useful to have an idea of what Alex Salmond considers important. What he emphasises now is the best available guide to what might be emphasised

Faisal Islam

Bailout country | 16 February 2012

With the political wrangling over another Greek bailout continuing today, we thought CoffeeHousers might care to read (or re-read) Faisal Islam’s cover piece for The Spectator from four months ago: In a theatre in central Athens, over a thousand tax inspectors have gathered to shout crossly about the latest cuts to their pay and pensions. Eventually the argument, between the government-affiliated union leader and his members, spills out on to the street. The rank-and-file feel betrayed: they were persuaded to accept the first wave of pay cuts earlier this year, and now they are being asked to take even more. This does not feel to them as if they’re being

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

British jobs for foreign workers

The free movement of labour and capital — don’t you just love it? Our unemployment rate is now 8.4 per cent, the worst in sixteen years. But, paradoxically, there isn’t an enormous problem with unemployment — or at least there shouldn’t be. Take the following two figures and you’ll see why: Last year’s total of British born workers in paid employment: down by 208,000. Last year’s total of foreign born workers in paid employment: up by 212,000. That’s fairly straightforward, isn’t it? Ok, it may not be quite as straightforward as it looks. But there is a certain agreeable symmetry to those figures, no? The Conservatives like foreign labour because

Wednesday

Matt Cavanagh

How to implement a minimum price for alcohol

Pete posted earlier on the Prime Minister’s latest intervention on the issue of problem drinking. The new proposals — like a greater police presence in A&Es, and ‘drunk tanks’, special units where drunks are taken to sober up — are sensible enough, but seem small relative to the scale of the supposed problem, and focus on peripheral (though important) side-effects, rather than the core of the issue. The ‘big idea’ seems to be missing, even though the Conservatives have been flirting with it for some years, is a minimum unit price (MUP) for alcohol: far more controversial, but potentially far more effective. The last Labour government, in which I was an adviser, looked at this

Jonathan Jones

How can employment and unemployment go up at the same time?

The employment level has risen since the election, according to today’s figures — albeit only slightly, from 29.0m to 29.1m. But unemployment’s up too: from 2.46m to 2.67m. So how come we’ve seen both more jobs and lengthening dole queues? Well, that’s because the ‘economically active’ population (people who are in work or ‘have been actively seeking work and are available to start work if a job is offered’) has grown faster than employment has. There are now 31.8m people in the UK who fit that description, an increase of 320,000 since the coalition came to power. But with only a 110,000 rise in employment, that means the number of

Peter Hoskin

Minimum pricing, maximum controversy

Just because there’s no PMQs today, it doesn’t mean you won’t hear from David Cameron. The Prime Minister is readying his anti-booze cruise once again, and taking it on tour to a hospital in the North East. Once there, he will rail against ‘alcohol abuse’ and its consequences, which include, he will say, a £2.7 billion a year bill for the NHS. And he will preview some of the solutions that may make it into the government’s ‘alcohol strategy’ next month: ‘drunk tank’ cells where binge drinkers can be dumped overnight; ‘booze buses’ to deliver people to these cells; police heavies in A&E wards; and, possibly, minimum pricing for alcohol.