Society

Wednesday

Will Straw

Another voice: Why the strike is right

If I were a teacher, I’d be on strike today. Public sector workers are being asked — in what is now a well-rehearsed soundbite — to work longer, receive less, and pay more. In these austere times, with deficit reduction a necessity,  two of those three aims might be reasonable. But doing all three at once, and conflating the package with the spurious notion that public sector pensions are ‘unsustainable’, justifies the direct action being taken today.   The rise in contribution rates — in effect a three per cent tax rise — will be especially hard to bear for those on modest salaries who are already facing a prolonged

Johnnie Kerr

In the middle of the march

Walking through Parliament Square this afternoon, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether some kind of bomb threat had been made on Westminster Palace. The fleets of police vans and hoards of fluorescent-jacketed officers seemed absurdly disproportionate to the motley pickets of public sector strikers gathered serenely outside parliament’s gates. ‘Actually, I shouldn’t be working today,’ one officer told me, chuckling. ‘It’s my day off. That’s ironic, isn’t it?’ As Pete remarked this morning, there wasn’t a huge amount to see along the Westminster picket lines, apart from the policemen. ‘There’d be more of us, but we’re only allowed to gather in groups of five or six,’ a woman from the

Matthew Sinclair

The unions’ pension myths

This morning I debated the President of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers live on Sky News.  It was incredible how few answers she had when confronted with the facts about the strike. According to research at the Office for National Statistics, public sector workers are paid 7.8 per cent more than those in the private sector after controlling for things like age and qualifications. And they get far more generous pensions, worth about a quarter of their pay (see here, p35), on top of that — with most of the cost paid for by taxpayers. But they striking and opposing quite modest reforms, creating yet more disruption for the

Jonathan Jones

Will the strikes exacerbate Cameron’s women problem?

We’ve already heard a lot about Dave’s problem with female voters. Melanie McDonagh wrote our cover piece on it in June, and in September there was that memo detailing Number 10’s efforts to respond. But, judging by the polls, we may well be hearing even more about it after today’s strikes. It seems that, while the government has men broadly on its side in the battle against the unions, women are far less supportive. 51 per cent of men told ComRes that public sector workers are wrong to strike today, but only 42 per cent of women agreed: TNS BMRB asked people whether they thought that the government was right

Peter Hoskin

A day of disruption

Another testing day for the government, as we shift from the autumn statement to a national strike. It will certainly be more noticeable than the industrial action in June. Some 2 million public sector workers will be involved. According to the schools minister Nick Gibb, around 75 per cent of state schools will be closed. And on top of that, airport queues will lengthen; non-emergency operations will be cancelled; and today’s parliamentary proceedings will go untranscribed. The government’s attitude towards the unions — or, rather, union bosses — appears to have been hardening. The brothers will not have liked yesterday’s forecast that 710,000 jobs will be shed from the public sector by

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Annals of Pointless security Theatre

There’s really no need to switch off your phones and iPods and iPads next time you are on a plane. Over to James Fallows: – 100% of the pilots making those landings and approaches have GPS receivers right there next to them in the cockpits, of the kind you would have to turn off if you had one in your lap in seat 38F; […]- More and more pilots have iPads turned on through the entire flight, including United pilots who are being switched en masse from paper to iPad navigational charts. I now use an iPad extensively when flying, because the program I use, Foreflight, is so much more

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Doctor Paul’s Splendid Isolation

Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Gail Collins makes the case for Ron Paul: Paul says he believes that the federal government (“the wealth-extracting leviathan state”) shouldn’t be doing anything that’s not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, which once caused him to vote against giving a Congressional medal to Mother Teresa. He doesn’t really believe in global warming, but, even if he did, he doesn’t think government is smart enough to be able to do anything about it. He also doesn’t believe in, well, let’s see: gun control, the death penalty, the C.I.A., the Civil Rights Act, prosecuting flag-burners, hate crime legislation, foreign aid, the military draft under any circumstances, campaign

Monday

The Spectator

Oh come, all ye Speccie readers

A brief post to alert CoffeeHousers to The Spectator’s carol concert, which is taking place next Wednesday in the beautiful St Bride’s Church on Fleet Street. It promises to be a suitably Christmassy affair. There will be carols from the choir of St Bride’s; readings from Jeremy Clarke, Rod Liddle, Rory Sutherland and the Mary behind ‘Dear Mary’; as well as Winter Pimm’s, mince pies and hot chestnuts served outside the church. All that remains is for you to buy one of the few remaining tickets. It would be wonderful to see you there, so please do get a-clicking.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Mitt vs Mitt

The Democrats come to the GOP party with this reminder that Mitt Romney’s the most credible general election candidate the Republicans have. That doesn’t make Mitt some kind of Captain Invincible. But this is not actually some kind of double-bluff. Democrats really would like to run against Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry. Mitt has his problems but he’s not, well, you know, Newt.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sifting through the rubble from the riots

Not many folk are aware of it, but there is an official riots inquiry and it has delivered its interim report today. Its conclusions are pretty clichéd and not really worth studying; David Lammy’s book is infinitely more instructive and readable. But it does produce a few figures about the rioters — or, I should say, those arrested mainly because they didn’t think to cover their face. I looked at this for my Telegraph column last week. Here’s my summary of today’s report:   1. Broken Britain. Some 46 per cent of those arrested live in the lowest ‘decile’. These guys are not working class, but welfare class. Abandoned by

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Preparing for the strike

Wednesday’s strike is going to be big — unlike the one in June, which I suspect most people didn’t really notice. You’re not going to be able to miss this one as 90 per cent plus of schools shut — compared to a third in June — and it takes half a day for anyone coming to Britain to pass through passport control. Michael Gove’s speech this morning is being widely seen as the government taking a more confrontational attitude to the strike. But I think that’s only half the story. What Gove was trying to do was appeal to the union membership while attacking those union leaders who really

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 28 November – 4 December 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

Peter Hoskin

Those gloomy OECD projections in full

Thanks to the tremors along Westminster’s grapevine, we already knew that today’s OECD Economic Outlook would make for pretty dreary reading. But now that the report is actually out, we can see the organisation’s numbers for ourselves. The headline point appears to be that the eurozone is in, or is facing, ‘mild recession’. Or to put it in graphic form: And the current situation isn’t look particularly encouraging for the UK either. The first heading in the section on us reads ‘The economy is weakening sharply’. And a subsequent pair of graphs predicts, first, that we’ll experience a mild recession of our own across the next two quarters, and then

Peter Hoskin

The trouble with the NHS’s working week

If you like your literature gloomy, then, at first, there may not be much to interest you in the latest Dr Foster Hospital Guide. A double-page diagram, across pages 10 and 11, is mostly about the positive trends of the past ten years: declining mortality rates and waiting times, that sort of thing. The only particularly sour note sounds out from the timeline at the bottom of the spread, which notes the creation of that big, galumphing NHS computer system in 2002, and then its abolition this year for not ‘achieving objectives’.   But keep pressing on, because there is much to be concerned about in the pages that follow

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Spotify Sunday: Cover stars

I lack the discipline to choose ten favourite songs, but here are ten favourite cover versions. We know songs by their title and singer, but they are so often made by their arrangement and production. Anyone could have sung anything to Giorgio Moroder’s mould-breaking ‘I Feel Love’, but Donna Summer takes the credit. By changing the production and arrangement, covers transform songs. And all the better on Spotify because you can compare versions — instantly. Anyway, to business:   Nobody Does It Better — Aimee Mann From a brilliant covers album: David Arnold’s James Bond Project. Rather than redo the original, this hams up its best qualities — especially the

Peter Hoskin

The shape of the Budget battleground

There are still two days and a couple of hours to go until George Osborne’s Pre-Budget Report — but, already, we have a good idea of what will be said. The emphasis, beyond just plain ol’ jobs and growth, will be on combatting youth unemployment; helping smaller businesses; and relaxing the squeeze on middle-income folk. Most of the measures either announced or suggested so far — from the Youth Contract to the credit easing scheme to the suspension of January’s fuel duty rise — fall into one of those compartments. Whether they’ll work or not is a different matter entirely.      As for Labour’s response, they’re already making it —

Saturday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern: Televising trials

English juries are warned to reach their decision exclusively on the evidence put before them. Would the proposed intrusion of TV into the courtroom (as in the USA) threaten this restriction by turning the trial into a public performance? The ancient Athenian case may be salutary. In Athens, all cases were privately brought, before a jury of (usually) 501 citizen males over 30 (no judge). Litigants pleaded their cases themselves (no barristers). Both parties spoke once, for equal periods. The evidence of witnesses was read out (no cross-questioning), and the jurors then passed their verdict (no discussion). And it all took one day. But while it is clear that the

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Food: Occupy dinner

What to say about Occupy London? I support it, because I always judge a movement by the quality of its enemies, and also because its position at St Paul’s cathedral makes a certain type of writer wander around, pondering, ‘What would Jesus do about Occupy?’ There have been many articles asking ‘What would Jesus do about Occupy?’ The answer, of course, is very simple. Jesus (or rather Joshua) of Nazareth was Jewish. So, when faced with any problem, including the implosion of the global financial system and the erection of lots of tents near St Paul’s cathedral, he’d eat something. He’d eat something anyway. The Bible is full of stories

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 26 November 2011

Q. Is it on to invite friends to a birthday dinner and, with no pre-arrangement, expect them to fork out for their meal? An acquaintance — let’s call him Ralphie — has done this for years. Responding to his always effusive invitation (‘I’d really like YOU to be there’), one arrives bearing a gift and, at the end of a convivial evening in a posh restaurant, with appropriate fine wines and liqueurs, the bill is divided between the guests, some of whom, being unprepared, cough up with fixed smiles. Those who pay cheerfully are Ralphie’s pals who, like him, are associated with boats. Ralphie is skipper of a millionaire’s ocean-going