Society

Monday

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 21-27 November 2011

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which — providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency — you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’, which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write — so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game, from political stories in your local paper, to

James Plunkett

Are we facing an American nightmare?

With the Chancellor’s autumn statement due next Tuesday, we’re all talking about growth. The ECB and Bank of England now say the UK economy is set to grow at less than half the rate the OBR forecast back in March. That makes it all but certain that George Osborne will announce dramatic downward revisions to UK forecasts when he stands up in parliament next week. But before all the fighting about Plan As and Bs reaches fever pitch, it’s worth asking what the next decade looked like under the previous, more optimistic growth projections. The answer isn’t pretty and it helps highlight one major question that’s rarely asked in our

Sunday

Johnnie Kerr

Heath on Heath

‘I don’t know why I became a cartoonist,’ says Michael Heath. ‘I had no education during the war, so when I was twelve and war ended, I couldn’t read or write like children now. I suppose I sort of expressed myself by drawing.’ He is sitting in the conference room at The Spectator, surrounded by shelves of leather bound back volumes, almost sixty years worth of which are filled with his drawings. I’m shocked to learn he was born in 1935 — he doesn’t look anywhere near a man in his seventies. He still treks miles to work every day on foot.  Cartoons today, he tells me, aren’t at all

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

English English

Some man in the Daily Telegraph was going on about English not being only for the English. Dr Mario Saraceni, the man in question, an academic at the University of Portsmouth, goes further. He says: ‘It’s important the psychological umbilical cord linking English to its arbitrary centre in England is cut.’ But why should it be? The next thing he says sounds truly deranged: ‘The origins of English are not to be found in the idea of it spreading from the centre to the periphery, but in multiple, simultaneous origins.’ Does he believe that in the fifth century some Jutes set sail from Schleswig-Holstein in clinker-built boats for Malaysia and

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: your problems solved | 19 November 2011

Q. I believe there is a recent trend among very well-brought-up people to attempt to alleviate the impression of elitism that their impeccable manners may provoke by putting their feet in places where they should not be. When I was in London just before the election, I noticed a picture of Mr Cameron sitting in a window, with one Nike-clad foot pulled up next to him on the windowsill. I believe this was deliberate, in order to reassure prospective voters that he was not a stuffy old fogey, but hip and with-it. Now, at my mud hotel in Mali, I have told the staff that feet are not allowed on

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 19 November 2011

The fact that the request came in late on a Thursday afternoon should have aroused my suspicions. ‘Are you available?’ she asked. This was a BBC producer asking me if I was free to appear on Any Questions the following day. I quickly ran through my commitments: pick up Caroline’s dry-cleaning, fix the lavatory seat in the upstairs loo, take Ludo to the doctor. ‘Of course I’m available,’ I said. It wasn’t until I was introduced by Jonathan Dimbleby that I realised why they’d called me so late. ‘Toby Young has heroically stepped into the breach after Kelvin Mackenzie dropped out,’ he said. It didn’t take long to realise why

Alan Judd

Motoring: Extreme driving

One week, two convertibles. The first, a 40-year-old held together by rust, with doors so warped I’ve taken them off, the windscreen secured by baler twine to keep out the rain when it stands but removed when we go anywhere, no lights, free road tax, cheap insurance, and a first-time starter that does all you ask of it, eventually. Neither old enough to be interesting nor rare enough to be valuable, it is of course my tractor, a Universal, a Romanian Fiat built under licence. It belonged to my father and I paid the man who bought his farm £200 for it. It is massively overengineered and quite wonderfully slow.

Melissa Kite

Real life | 19 November 2011

A wise man once said it is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves. I say never go on a trip that ends with you sealing your laundry into vacuum packs before disposing of it like nuclear waste. Honestly, these Kilimanjaro climbers are mental. My own team was dominated by six previously sensible family men who faced with a mountain peak were ready to trample women and children underfoot in order to get to the top first. Consequently, we took the second toughest route and went way too fast. I know we went too fast because we kept passing Mr Switzerland. Seriously. Mr Switzerland 2009 is now a top mountaineering

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 19 November 2011

My grandson Oscar, now nearly two, hardly says a word when he and I are out together. It’s like being out with a dog the conversation is so one-sided. He understands well enough. He’s attentive and interested and usually in favour of anything you care to mention. But he barely speaks. Which is strange because his parents are beginning to complain of his loquaciousness at home. ‘You’ve gone all quiet now grandad’s here, haven’t you?’ says his Mum, not without a touch of sarcasm at her child’s new-found gravitas the moment his grandad hoves into view. When Oscar and I went to the zoo last week, he hardly said a

Taki

High life | 19 November 2011

New York I had a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious week, and a weekend in Connecticut to recover from it. Let’s begin with the Norman Mailer benefit gala for which I had taken a table and filled it with swells and other such birds and creatures. The Mailer Centre is quite an extraordinary achievement only four years after the great man’s death. Larry Schiller, the human battery behind it, has turned Mailer’s Cape house into a young writers’ colony, handing out scholarships and shelter to them, and giving out prizes and 16-month-long fellowships to keep their literary ambitions running in top gear (32 Mailer fellowships and 225 writers have received scholarships to date). Dylan

The Spectator

Letters | 19 November 2011

• Not so magnifico Sir: To identify Silvio Berlusconi as Italy’s ‘best hope of cutting its astronomical sovereign debt’, as Nicholas Farrell does (‘Arrivederci il Magnifico,’ 12 November), would be laughable, if it didn’t show such deep ignorance of the damage Berlusconi’s rule has done economically, politically and morally. Mr Farrell suggests that Berlusconi is some kind of Thatcherite. Really? Could he point to any substantial reforms? Berlusconi promised to lower taxes, to reduce crime and to free up the labour market, but he did none of those things. His one major intervention in the economy was to scuttle a deal that would have seen Air France purchase Alitalia and

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: World of shadows

The French justified Greece’s entry into the EU by claiming that they ‘could not say no to the country of Plato’. You bet they couldn’t. In the Republic, Plato outlined his utopia. This was not a practical construct, but a vision of an imaginary, ideal community whose purpose was to act as a model for how things might be. He did this by sketching a picture of the educational and moral underpinning that went into making a good human and extrapolating from that an institutional programme that would create the good state. The consequence was twofold. First, Plato had to show up the deficiencies of existing constitutions, to demonstrate there

The Spectator

Barometer | 19 November 2011

• Found in the trash The Information Commissioner warned Oliver Letwin that he has broken the law by dumping documents, including letters from constituents, into litter bins in St James’s Park. Here are some things the world would never have had were it not for documents turning up in rubbish bins: —A letter suggesting that Elton John didn’t want ‘Candle in the Wind’ included on the tribute album to the Princess of Wales planned by Richard Branson —A memo showing that Tony Blair was already worried that he was out of touch with the public in May 2000 —The text of Euripides’ play Melanippe the Wise —The sketchbooks of the

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Diary – 19 November 2011

Athens The manner in which George Papandreou was ousted has shocked Greeks. ‘It’s a foreign invasion, a takeover, only without tanks’, says Calchas, an angry young man whom I find marching around Syntagma Square in front of the Greek parliament, with 100 or so others, all clutching rolled-up red flags. Other marchers mutter about ‘neo-colonialism’. They have a point. The ultimatum issued to Papandreou by Brussels bigwigs was extraordinary. After he made the fatal error of suggesting that the EU austerity package ought to be put to a referendum, Papandreou was told that he should step aside and allow the emergence of a ‘unity’ government whose purpose would be to

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 November 2011

•Home The crisis in the eurozone was ‘an opportunity to begin to refashion the EU so it better serves this nation’s interests’, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said in his Mansion House speech. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a television interview: ‘There’s got to be more integration — the kind of thing actually that Britain would not tolerate and is one of the reasons we didn’t go in the euro.’ Unemployment among those aged 16-24 rose above a million. Inflation fell by 0.2 percentage points, to 5 per cent (measured by the CPI) and 5.4 (by the RPI). Mr Cameron threw a fork at a mouse

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Riots and responsibilities

The riots are fast in danger of becoming the forgotten issue in our politics. The social and cultural problems that they laid bare have been knocked out of the news by the continuing financial and political drama in the Eurozone But if we, as a society, don’t work out how to address these problems then they will simply get worse. The essay by David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, on what happened this summer in The Guardian magazine today is thought-provoking even if I don’t agree with all of its conclusions. . Interestingly for a man of the left, Lammy accepts the points that the riots were about culture as much as

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What is it with the critics and Ricky Gervais?

I’ve had a sense of humour failure, in that I find something funny which nobody else does, apparently. I’ve been watching Ricky Gervais’s new comedy, Life’s Too Short, and thought the first episode, in particular, was hilarious. But people really hate Gervais, don’t they? I haven’t yet read a decent review of the programme and yet it’s probably funnier than anything else on our screens that’s new. This seems to get missed. My Sunday Times colleague, AA Gill, kicked the living hell out of the programme last week in typically elegant and cutting fashion, for example. And many of his observations (£) were right: it’s a comedy with a dwarf

Peter Hoskin

Assessing the sick

Should GPs determine whether people on long-term sick leave are too ill to work? Perhaps not, according to the draft copy of a government-commissioned review into sickness absence. It proposes setting up a new, separate and independent body to assess those on long-term sick leave, on the grounds that doctors have no incentive — nor, perhaps, the specific knowledge — to prod and coax them back towards employment. The new service, it is said, would advise sick leavers, and their employers, about just what they can and can’t manage. If the government does introduce this, it will be another sign of their intent to untangle the problems with sickness benefits.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Politics: Recovery begins at home

There’s a pattern emerging to George Osborne’s autumn. He gives a big domestic set piece speech on growth and then immediately leaves the country for a meeting of European finance ministers. It is what he did straight after his conference speech last month and what he will do after the growth review on 29 November. It is a reminder that the fate of the British economy is uncomfortably linked to the fortunes of the floundering eurozone. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor have never been more worried about the economic outlook than they are now. One Downing Street aide remarks: ‘it is not quite sleepless nights territory. But it is

The Spectator

Get it right, George!

Arthur Laffer Chairman, Laffer Associates Cut the 50p tax Reducing the burden which government places on the economy, through tax cuts, is the surest way to promote growth. I have never heard of a country that taxed itself into prosperity. Yet Britain last year raised the top rate of income tax from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. For more economic growth, and more tax revenue, this rate should be lowered immediately. This paradox — lower rates, but higher yield — has been demonstrated time and time again, the world over. Between 1980 and 2007, the US cut tax rates on every form of income, the highest, the lowest and all