Society

The A4e scandal is getting worse. Emma Harrison has quit as David Cameron’s back-to-work tsar, the police are still investigating a case discovered last year and there’s a suggestion their investigation is widening. This is, for David Cameron, the dark side of the Big Society. In my Daily Telegraph column today, I explain why. ‘The Big Society’ is a silly name for a good idea: that lots of companies, charities, etc will help provide government services. They are given freedom to innovate, to create — and the freedom to get things badly wrong. This is the freedom which A4e seems to have availed itself of. It grew like crazy, perhaps

When Tim Montgomerie first started calling for new wealth taxes I was horrified. Sweden has only just abolished its wealth tax after seeing hundreds of billions of kroner leave the country in capital flight over a number of years. Other countries have found wealth taxes are associated with narrow bases, high costs of collection and often very unfair treatment for different classes of assets. We should not replicate that here. As his proposals have been refined though, it isn’t that bad. More bands would be a relatively reasonable way of making the Council Tax system more progressive. It might require a revaluation which would be politically toxic, and it would

Nick Clegg, Ed Balls, Liam Fox, David Davis, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Centre for Social Justice and the Sun. It seems almost everyone thinks George Osborne should cut taxes in his Budget next month — the only disagreements are over how. Here’s a quick guide to the main proposals so far: There will doubtless be other suggestions before 21 March when we will finally learn which, if any, Osborne has chosen. UPDATE: The table originally gave the cost of the CPS’ corporation tax cut as £8.5bn. This is their ‘static’ estimate of the cost, but a more realistic estimate, derived from the Treasury’s ready reckoner, is £4bn.

A short observation on terminologies. You will be aware that whatever is happening to our weather was originally designated as a consequence of ‘global warming’. This then became ‘climate change’ when it was evident that freezing winters did not fit easily into the original thesis. Later, the phrase ‘climate change denier’ was popularised to demonise those who disagreed with the notion that the earth was getting warmer as a consequence of man’s stupidity. This had deliberate connotations of ‘holocaust denier’. Now I’ve noticed a new one. Opponents of the dominant paradigm are no longer called climate change deniers, they are now called ‘opponents of climate science’. The implication is that

Michael Gove’s latest prognosis for schools was delivered at a lunch in Westminster yesterday, but it’s important enough to repeat the morning after. The Independent has a full report here, but the key quotation is this: ’Education is like trying to run up a down escalator. There are some uncomfortable decisions that will have to be taken. There will be years when, because we are going to make exams tougher, the number of people passing will fall. There are headteachers who have been peddling the wrong sort of approach to teaching for too long, who are going to lose their jobs.’ Just read that bit again: ‘the number of people

Articles by politicians are often flat and passionless. Not so Iain Duncan Smith’s effort for the Daily Mail today. The welfare secretary sets about defending the government’s Work Experience scheme for unemployed young people, but it soon turns into a full-blooded attack on its detractors. ‘I doubt I’m the only person who thinks supermarket shelf-stackers add more value to our society than many of those “job snobs” who are busy pontificating about the Government’s employment policies,’ he bristles, ‘They should learn to value work and not sneer at it.’ And there’s much more besides, including a warning against ‘a twisted culture that thinks being a celebrity or appearing on The

How does Quentin Letts for Director General of the BBC sound to CoffeeHousers? He’s certainly putting himself forward, and in the latest issue of The Spectator he lays out what he’d bring to the role. His seventeen-point manifesto includes such proposals as ‘Cut the DG’s pay to 10 per cent of its current value’ and ‘Sack Jeremy Clarkson’. We’ve pasted the whole thing below. Do add your own ideas for the Beeb in the comments section. Messrs Egon Zehnder, ­headhunters, are helping the BBC find its next director general. The involvement of these swanky international executive search agents is depressing. Their ­American-‘flavored’ website brags about helping companies seek ‘competitive advantage’

It’s not too surprising that people trust ‘organisations representing doctors nurses and other health professionals,’ well above David Cameron and Andrew Lansley, when it comes to the NHS reforms. People are sceptical of politicians in a way that they aren’t of the health service, its unions and its workers. 64 years of ‘national religion’ status for the NHS, and many more years of gross political let-down, have made sure of that. But today’s YouGov findings still shine a fresh light on Cameron and Lansley’s changing approach to the reforms. A year ago, they clearly looked at charts such as that above and thought, ‘Woah, we’d better get those organisations on

A rotten week for Richard Dawkins in his battle against God. He began it by being kebabed on the Today programme by the former Dean of St Paul’s, Giles Fraser and ended it skewered by Camilla Long in an interview (£) for The Sunday Times. Long cannily exposed his shrillness, his monumental arrogance, his tetchiness. It is a huge shame in a way, because he is a clever chap who has done an awful lot to popularise science; he has been far more a force of good than ill and it would be nice if we could remember him for his contribution to science. But we won’t. We will remember him