Society

Saturday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: Double crossed

There is no shortage of competitors for the strangest site on the internet. ‘The Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics’, for instance. Or gooseduds.com — an essential website (essential, that is, if you have ornamental garden geese and feel the urge to dress them in seasonal clothes). Or hatsofmeat.com, a website that shows exactly what its name suggests. But, after 18 years of surfing the web, last week I stumbled on a page more ridiculous than any of these. I live in Kent. Getting to Heathrow is a nuisance. The south-western stretch of the M25 is often congested, and the journey is made slower by Surrey’s habit of imposing random

Bruce Anderson

Drink: Flowers of Scotland

Back in the Sixties, there was a more than usually sanguinary murder in Glasgow. While the killer was awaiting trial, the Scottish Daily Express decided to buy up his family. This must have been after the days when such a case would end with a good hanging; Alan Cochrane insists that he is not that old. But the newspaper thought that the low-lifers’ tales of the dark and bloody alleyways of the Gorbals would titillate its readers. Alan, then a young reporter, was told to hide the family from rival bidders until judgment day, in some discreet hotel up on Lomond-side. That did not sound a hard posting, until he

William Waldegrave

Man with a trade mission

About the second part of the title of Nigel Cliff’s excellent book there can be no argument. Vasco da Gama’s voyages do indeed remind one of those of Odysseus and Aeneas — in the range of adventures, mostly disastrous, which befell the tiny ships, and also in the iron will of their leader. His ruthless pursuit of his goal left a trail of destruction behind him, both for his own companions and for those whom they encountered along the way. It is the first part of the title, which claims that Portugese policy was the last fling of medieval crusading, about which there may be more doubt.   The Christian

Friday

The Spectator

From the archives: The loss of the Titanic

On Sunday, it’ll be 100 years to the day since RMS Titanic sank during its maiden voyage. To mark the occasion, here is a piece about the disaster that appeared in The Spectator at the time: The loss of the ‘Titanic’, 20 April 1912 The appalling loss of life in the ‘Titanic’ and the story of what is in some ways the most terrible wreck in the history of shipping have not only compelled the emotion of the whole world, but have turned both Great Britain and the United States to wide and solemn searchings of heart. The destruction of the largest ship afloat on her maiden voyage, of a

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How Mitt Romney inspired the British charity tax debacle

How is Mitt Romney linked to the charity tax debacle? I thought I’d pass on to CoffeeHousers an explanation which passed on to me about the origins of this latest mess. It dates back to the point in the Budget negotiations where Nick Clegg had finally persuaded Osborne to introduce a Mansion Tax. A major coup for his party — but Cameron vetoed, thinking it’d hurt Boris in London. Clegg is annoyed, tells Osborne he can’t have his 40p tax, but he still has a problem. A Lib Dem spring conference is coming up — so what will he announce? He hunts for a new idea. The Thursday before the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Another case of Big Government trumping the Big Society

Exactly two years ago today, David Cameron launched the Conservative Manifesto — one of those rare moments in the Tory campaign where it all seemed to make sense. Cameron begged for a hearing: he was serious, he said, about changing government. It was about realizing that ‘Big Government isn’t the answer to the problems’ and that people outside government — like charities — were. This is why the charities debacle today is not just another Budget blunder. As I say in my Telegraph column, if Cameron tolerates the taxman’s proposed assault on philanthropy, he’ll be admitting defeat on what he described that day as his ‘fundamental tenet’. The best-paid 1

Thursday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Want to know what tax transparency looks like? Look at Norway

If you take George Osborne’s plan for tax transparency to its natural conclusion, where do you end up? The answer is Norway, where details of every taxpayer’s annual income, wealth and annual tax return are publicly available — and it’s not a new thing. Norwegian tax returns have been publicly available since the 1800s, the idea being that financial transparency is seen a vital part of social democracy. Figures were traditionally released every October in a Yellow Pages-style book, available for anyone to read at the local town hall or tax office. As the internet evolved, they decided to take things online. The government initially came up with the idea

Jonathan Jones

Hints of a U-turn on the ‘charity tax’

The pressure is ramping up on the government to reverse its decision to cap tax reliefs on charitable donations. The Times is against it — their leader this morning calls the move a ‘blunder’. And the Telegraph doesn’t like it either, saying that ‘Even from a distance of 8,000 miles, it must be apparent to David Cameron that the Government made a mistake in the Budget by capping tax relief on charitable giving’. Even Tory MPs are speaking out against the measure, including Mark Pritchard, Conor Burns and, in a piece on ConservativeHome, Chris White. And Number 10 does seem to be preparing the ground for a U-turn — or

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

A welcome attempt to fix the broken energy market

Back in October, Ofgem produced a report exposing the failure of the UK’s energy market. It showed that the supplier’s profit margin on the average fuel bill had shot up from £15 to £125 in just four months. As I said at the time, ‘This wouldn’t be possible in a market that was working correctly. If customers were shopping around for the best deal, suppliers would have to undercut each other – and there’s plenty of room for them to reduce prices while still turning a profit (£125 of room, in fact). But Ofgem’s figures show this isn’t happening.’ And why isn’t it happening? Because, in Ofgem’s words, ‘Many consumers

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Shapps has ‘deep reservations’ about the ‘conservatory tax’

There is deep unease among Tory ministers about the proposals for a so-called ‘conservatory tax’. The idea, which was pushed hard by Chris Huhne when he was Energy Secretary, is that when anyone does substantial home improvement work they would be made to make other changes to make their house more energy efficient. It is estimated that this would add about 10 percent to the cost of adding a conservatory or an extension to your house. The government is currently consulting on the policy. But I understand that Grant Shapps, the housing minister, has ‘deep reservations’ about it. He fears that the proposals are anti-aspiration and could risk bolstering the

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

What today’s Abu Hamza ruling means

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five terror suspects, including notorious Islamist cleric Abu Hamza, can be deported to the United States — a decision welcomed by both David Cameron and Theresa May. Last year, Hamza and three of the other men appealed to the ECtHR against extradition to the US on a whole host of grounds — including that they might face the death penalty and that their trials would be prejudiced. The Court found almost of all their grounds inadmissible, but allowed the appeal to proceed on two grounds: that they would be held in the ADX Florence ‘super-max’ prison and would face extremely long

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The liberal mob’s latest victim

I see that the rightish writer John Derbyshire has been sacked by the US conservative magazine for which he wrote, National Review. This is because of a piece he wrote for a different conduit, Taki’s Mag — an online publication run by The Spectator’s own Taki Theodoracopulos. Mr Derbyshire’s article was a response to ‘The Talk’ which, apparently, is something black parents give to their children to help them cope with growing up in a bitterly racist country — such as be humble and polite to police officers or you might get shot, that sorta thing. Mr Derbyshire wrote ‘The Talk: Nonblack Version’, which he said was a distillation of

Jonathan Jones

Osborne’s tax avoidance clampdown

So, George Osborne has taken a look at the tax arrangements of some of the UK’s wealthiest people. And his reaction? ‘Shocked’, apparently — or so he’s told the Telegraph: ‘I was shocked to see that some of the very wealthiest people in the country have organised their tax affairs, and to be fair it’s within the tax laws, so that they were regularly paying virtually no income tax. And I don’t think that’s right. I’m talking about people right at the top. I’m talking about people with incomes of many millions of pounds a year. The general principle is that people should pay income tax and that includes people

Monday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Gunter Grass: the tin drum and the tin ear

This morning’s editorial in Israel’s left-wing Haaretz newspaper noted a double standard that was also a bad joke. Israel’s Interior Minister’s had declared, ‘If Gunter Grass wants to continue to distribute his false and distorted works, I suggest he do so from Iran, where he’ll find an appreciative audience.’ The minister could not detect the irony in his words, the paper said. It is precisely his decision not to let Grass enter Israel because of a poem he wrote that ‘is characteristic of dark regimes like those in Iran or North Korea’. You can read Grass’s poem here. I find it a false and vainglorious work because of its strong

Matthew Sinclair

We need a crack down on tax avoidance

After the Budget there was a lot of anger over the pasty tax and the granny tax. Another big rise — in tobacco taxes — didn’t make as many headlines, because it wasn’t much of a surprise. But for someone smoking a pack a day it almost wiped out the entire value of the rise in the Personal Allowance. Given that most smokers earn relatively low incomes, it was probably the most regressive measure in the Budget. The idea is that smokers are supposed to be grateful for this impetus to give up. Many will keep smoking though, and this will just be yet another strain on their household budgets.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sadly, the 47p tax rate is here to stay

Nothing is more permanent than a ‘temporary’ government tax, as George Osborne is reminding us. When Alistair Darling proposed a 45p rate in 2008, even the Institute of Fiscal Studies said it would lose money – but Darling said it would be ‘temporary’. Brown upped it to 50p, Osborne took it back down to 45p but the ‘temporary’ status has been revoked. The Sunday Times has today splashed on Osborne’s interview with Robert Winnett of The Daily Telegraph, where the Chancellor said ‘I’m very happy with the 45p rate of tax. We’ve got it to a good place where it’s competitive.’ Britain had the highest top rate of tax in the

The Spectator

The decline of the spirit

In celebration of the feast of Easter, we’ve dug out this profound leader from March 1975, which looks at the ever-evolving relationship of church and state.  The Church, the State and the decline of the spirit, The Spectator, 29 March 1975 Spring is a time of rebirth; yet it is also the time of the death of Christ. It is the time when “Jesus knew that his hour would come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end” (John 13.i). In the Spring and Easter of 1975 there is much evidence of

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Supper

Francis Maude was judged to have let the side down by uttering the words ‘kitchen supper’. It was almost as bad, apparently, as having said ‘nursery tea’ — not the language of the people. Yet people do eat supper, and may eat it in the kitchen, not always on their laps in front of the television. If Mr Maude had a proper dinner, it was supposed, he’d have it in the dining-room. In any case, names of meals are notorious social identifiers. Originally, supper was the last of the day’s meals: breakfast, dinner and supper. Hence the Last Supper, not the Last Dinner. Mr Maude would hardly call the meal

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Food: Flesh and blood

Poor Hawksmoor. So obviously the genius of English Baroque, and yet he always comes last in the histories, behind flashy Vanbrugh (duh) and dull Wren (meh). It was probably a class thing — what isn’t? — because Hawksmoor was from Nottingham, and a clerk. So it feels good to walk into a chophouse bearing his name. It isn’t much, but it’s something. Hawksmoor Guildhall is the third of three restaurants from Will Beckett and Huw Gott. The first is in the shadow of the Christ Church, Spitalfields, and the second is in Seven Dials, Covent Garden. Perhaps a chain beckons — Beefeater, but more joyful, with fewer hostages, I mean

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 7 April 2012

Q. A friend had a glamorous book launch to which I was not invited but which was all over the papers. Since I regularly review books, this exclusion seems pointed. The implication is that I am no longer considered glamorous myself and she would not wish to be conflated with me in any review. What should I say when I next run into her? — Name withheld, London NW1 A. Don’t assume the exclusion was deliberate. These days most publishers have unpaid interns, to whom such chores as guest lists are often deputed with predictable results. Your dignified response is to assume that being left off the list was a