Society

Friday

Jonathan Jones

Is Newt’s chance slipping away?

Thanks to his spectacular surge last week, culminating in a big win in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, Newt Gingrich looked like he was back in contention for the Republican presidential nomination. Immediately, he took a commanding lead in Florida – which will host the next primary on Tuesday. And though Mitt Romney remained the clear favourite to go up against Barack Obama in November, Gingrich was still in the hunt. But this week – just when he was looking strong – it’s all gone a bit wrong for Gingrich. $13 million worth of ads from the pro-Romney Super PAC ‘Restore Our Future’ have dwarfed the $3 million spent

Daniel Korski

‘Let everyone live happily…’

Created to remember one of the darkest chapters in mankind’s history, Holocaust Day is for many people an occasion for unadulterated discomfort. Most of my family perished in the Holocaust and those who survived either hid in occupied Poland, pretending to be Catholics, fled to Uzbekistan in the then-USSR or, like Marcel Rayman, fought the Nazis. Today I re-read a letter Marcel sent to his family the night before he was executed by the Nazis for trying to kill the German commander of Paris: Little mother, When you read this letter, I’m sure it will cause you extreme pain, but I will have been dead for a while, and you’ll

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Osborne needs to come up with radical growth policies, and soon

When it comes to defending the free market, and making the case for fiscal sanity, there’s scarcely anyone better than David Cameron. He was on superb form in Davos yesterday, giving much-needed blunt advice to the continentals. ‘Eurozone countries must do everything possible to get to grips with their own debts,’ he said. And he’s right. The snag, as I say in my Daily Telegraph column today, is that Cameron’s definition of getting to grips with debt involves increasing it more than Labour planned to, more than France, Germany, Italy or Portugal. On the first sign of trouble, his government gave up on its deficit reduction timetable – it will now

Jonathan Jones

A matter of honour

Condemnation’s coming from all sides for the £963,000 bonus awarded to RBS’s Stephen Hester, on top of his £1.2 million salary. The most prominent denunciation came from Lib Dem Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne on last night’s Question Time: ‘I think there’s a sort of question of honour. Even if there is a contractual opportunity for him to have a bonus, it doesn’t mean he has to accept it. He’s already being paid more than £1 million a year. His total package now, means he gets paid in about three days what a soldier risking his life in Afghanistan gets paid in a whole year. And I think he should

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Breakfast/coffee/apples update!

Just seen this in the latest copy of Private Eye, from its Pseuds Corner column: ‘I woke up with my wife and baby of six months on the small island of Burano in Venice where we have a lighthouse. We took our breakfast on the terrace of one of the best restaurants in the world, Da Romano. I had one organic apple and fresh pomegranate juice, and a cookie made by the bakery next door. Then I started designing a new, affordable moped.’ – Philippe Starck.  

Peter Hoskin

Transparency marches on

It has been quite a few days for transparency in Westminster. First, Ben Gummer’s ten minute rule bill for tax transparency — which would see every taxpayer in the country receive a statement detailing what they owe and what the money’s being spent on — earned itself a second reading in the House. And now, today, the Department for Education releases its new ‘performance tables’ for secondary schools. You can sift through them here, and I’d recommend you spend at least a couple of minutes doing just that. They reveal finer detail about schools and results than has been made public before, such as about how ‘disadvantaged children’ (those on free school meals

Daniel Korski

Let’s talk about Qatar

The rise of Qatar has been one of the most remarkable developments in the recent history of the Middle East. How this small, oil-rich Gulf state built Al Jazeera and parleyed the TV station’s influence into a diplomatic role across the region is an insufficiently explored issue. The list of the monarchy’s achievements is impressive, even putting aside how they secured the football World Cup for 2022. Qatari diplomats have mediated in Lebanon, helped rejuvenate the Arab League, led condemnation of Bashir al-Assad and joined the fight against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. In a way, Qatar has become one of the region’s lynchpins, second only to Saudi Arabia as the West’s

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

More scumbags? Or more scumbags getting caught?

Has Britain become a nation of immoral, lying, cheating, scumbags as the increasingly pious Peter Oborne seems to suggest in his latest article? Peter, who writes for such unblemished upholders of truth and decency as The Daily Mail, suggests that these days, if people found money lying about in the street, they wouldn’t hand it in. Whereas before they would. As in: ‘Gaw, I fahnd a tenner dah the Ol’ Kent Road, officer – make sure it gets back to its rightful owner, me old china, and if not then bung it to a charity for the kiddies. Blow me dahn, though, Jerry did a thorough job last night and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Abbott quits abortion talks, but will her contributions be missed?

Diane Abbott has, the BBC reports, walked away from the all-party talks on abortion because of the government’s proposals on counselling services. But others involved in the talks claim that Labour’s public health spokeswoman was not a particularly active participant. Abbott, who is not always the easiest of people to work with, had already irritated some of those involved in these talks. In the first meeting she, allegedly, took the opportunity to rest her eyes. She then apparently turned up half an hour late for the second meeting before missing the third one completely. When I put these claims to Abbott’s office, they said that they doubted they were true but

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Academies work, now let them expand

ARK Schools, one of the leading City Academy providers, has just released another amazing set of results with GCSE passes 11 percentage points higher last year than were achieved in 2010. This is staggering progress, given that these schools are serving the same neighbourhoods with the same demographics as the council-run schools which they replaced. It is also a reminder that the City Academy programme, started by Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis and expanded by Michael Gove, can claim to be the most rapidly-vindicated social experiments in recent history. The results of ARK’s schools speak best for themselves: ARK’s formula clearly works, and I’d like to see it applied to many more

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Alex Salmond’s Inevitability Strategy

Apparently it is all but compulsory for London-based observers to note that Alex Salmond is “wily”. Those possessing an Anglo-Scots dictionary may add that he’s “sleekit”. By this they really mean he’s not a numpty and this, given the pressures of the times and all of that, is as much of a compliment as any minister can hope to receive. Alex Salmond is an intelligent politician who is often on manoevres. Shockerooni! Be that as it may, it is evident that the First Minister appreciates the importance of image-projection and, accordingly, is doing his utmost to present Scottish independence as a destination that’s as logical as it is inevitable. It

Peter Hoskin

Obama delivers his pitch for a second term

A Romney-seeking missile. That was what much of Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address amounted to last night. He didn’t mention the Republican presidential challenger by name, of course. That would have been too obvious. But he did dwell on those sorts of issues around taxation and jobs — including his ‘Buffett Rule’, by which, we learn, millionaires should pay at least a 30 per cent tax rate — that have been causing Romney trouble. To underline the point that ‘a billionaire [should] pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes’, Warren Buffett’s secretary was even among the Obamas’ guests for the evening. Obama’s ploy, when presenting

Tuesday

Oliver Lewis

In defence of the Welfare Bill

The government’s welfare reforms seem to be staggering on, despite the concern from the Lords that they’ll harm those who need help most: children and the disabled. But before the Bill goes back to the Commons, and everyone becomes more agitated, let me put the case for the Bill from the perspective of someone it might affect.  I have a vested interest in the impending changes to disability benefits, because both my brothers are autistic – one severely so. My family depends on the Disability Living Allowance; caring for my brothers is a full time occupation for both my parents, and without support they simply wouldn’t be able to cope.

Jonathan Jones

Romney’s tax returns provide ammo for his opponents

Finally, grudgingly, Mitt Romney has released his tax returns for the last two years. After much um-ing and ah-ing — and a lot of prodding from Democrats, Newt Gingrich and the media – he has disclosed that he paid $3 million in tax on his 2010 income of $21.7 million, and $3.2 million on the $20.9 million he made in 2011. Romney hoped that releasing this information would allow him to move past the focus on his financial affairs, but his rivals – both inside and outside his own party — don’t seem prepared to let that happen. The Democrats are naturally keen to emphasise both Romney’s large investment profits

Jonathan Jones

UK government debt hits £1 trillion

New figures out today show the UK’s public sector net debt at just over £1 trillion for the first time ever. In the first 19 months since it took over, the coalition added £225 billion to the £779 billion debt it inherited. And it’s projected to rack up another £390 billion by the next election.

Monday

Jonathan Jones

Bringing the squeeze into focus

The ‘word of the year’ for 2011 is already featuring prominently in 2012. Yep, the ‘squeezed middle’ is the focus of the Resolution Foundation’s latest report, which they launched in central London earlier today. It’s a fascinating and nicely presented study, and I’d recommend you read it in full: this think tank really is very good at choosing the most revealing metrics to bring some clarity to an often vague debate. But, in the meantime, here are some of the things that stood out to me from today’s event:   1. The squeeze started long before the recession. Talk of the ‘squeezed middle’ often focuses on the impact of the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Leave the Isle of Grain alone

It is a fairly horrible thing to find oneself on the same side of the fence as that gabbling imbecilic hag, Janet Street-Porter. The sort of occurrence which makes you question your entire belief system. But her article today about the ludicrous plan to build a vast airport on the Isle of Grain is absolutely correct, in pretty much every respect. I don’t quite see why the entire south-east of England should be tarmaced over and used as a sort of giant public convenience for London. The Isle of Grain is one of the few areas south of the Wash which is of genuine environmental importance (rather than being one

Sunday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My favourite nighttime diversion

Late at night, when my wife is safely tucked up in bed, I sneak into my office and turn on the computer. I spend ages in front of the screen, mesmerised, panting with exertion. To my wife’s disgust — when she checks my browser history — I am almost always sporcling. ‘I married someone who wastes his life away doing THAT,’  she says with utter contempt. ‘I think I would rather it’s porn.’   It’s not porn. I’ve never really been porn-inclined, not even when I was 15 and magazines like Hustler were doing the rounds. Instead, I get my kicks out of nerdish geography quizzes on the US website,