Society

Saturday

David Blackburn

Hughes implies that the 50p rate could be dropped

The 50p rate is dominating the media backdrop to the Lib Dem conference. Simon Hughes has made the latest intervention, telling Sky News that the wealthy could and should be taxed in other ways if the 50p rate was “not very tax efficient”. He emphasised the importance of fairness by adding that you “don’t start (tax cuts) by taking the tax away from those who have the broadest shoulders.” Hughes’ position mirrors that of Clegg, as detailed in an interview with the Independent. This episode is a further indication that the economic arguments against the 50p rate are beginning to hold sway. Ed Miliband’s insistence that the rate be retained

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Foreign Policy Hogwash

As a general rule any time you read an article asking that foreign policy be recalibrated to take greater account of the “national interest” you can be sure that you’re dealing with blather and hokum and platitudes and a deliberate misrepresentation of whatever the other mob got up to when they were in power. Sadly Dominic Raab’s contribution to a new book, presumptiously titled After the Coalition, proves all this all too well. I say sadly because Raab, a freshman Tory MP, is sound on a good number of issues I care about, civil liberties most especially. Nevertheless, his piece, reprinted by the Telegraph, is rotten. Let’s count the ways.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Bleak Business of the Black Diamonds

The death of the four trapped miners in West Wales is obviously a desperate business. Desperate enough that some cads will try and use it to make political points, regardless of the nonsense of that.Anyway, here’s Richard Burton on mining and, in some sense, on a Britain we’d mainly thought had mainly vanished until these recent events reminded us that is lingers on yet. The voice and the presence, even late in his day, are still quite something:

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Allegory on the Nile

This was an enjoyable comp to judge: I have some sympathy with the actress Celia Imrie’s (who played Mrs M) view that, given the current trend towards the use of dull and overused verbal short cuts, the much-mocked Malaprop’s attempts to improve herself by expanding her vocabulary are actually rather creditable. Printed below are the best of an entry brimming with novelty and hilarity. They earn their authors £25 each; Chris O’Carroll gets £30. Amsterdam is crisscrossed by so many canards that it has become known as ‘the Venison of the North’.  No visit to the city is complicit without a cruise on its Pinteresque waterways. The Anatole France house

Julia Stephenson

The world’s worst flirts

Why can’t British men show a natural, healthy appreciation of women? Last week, on the Paris Métro, I had a marvellous boost. I’d been feeling wretched after a flaming row with my boyfriend on the station platform, when a charming man winked at me and offered me his seat. I gratefully accepted. My eyes sparkled and my pulse quickened. Suddenly the day seemed so much brighter.   I can’t remember the last time I saw this happen on the London Tube. Naturally timid British men have now become so terrified of causing offence that they’ve given up on flirting altogether — even that casual meeting of eyes that used to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Politics: Nick Clegg is in better political shape than anyone would have guessed

It is too early to call him the comeback kid of British politics, but Nick Clegg enters the party conference season in better shape than anyone expected him to be four months ago. Back then, his party did not dare put his face on its campaign leaflets. Even Liberal Democrat ministers didn’t expect Clegg to lead the party into the next election. This is beginning to change. Clegg looks happier than he has in months: the hunted look has gone from his face. Last week, watching him walk through the corridors of the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the way to a party for one of his aides, I was

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Snorting coke and whoring? It’s all part of the new, non-toxic Tory brand

It was in the autumn of 2005 that the Conservative party finally shed its allegedly ‘toxic’ image and embraced modernity and the values of today’s vibrant and inclusive Britain, all through a single photograph on the front page of a tabloid newspaper. The picture showed the future Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, with a black whore on his lap and three kilos of gak up his left nostril, allegedly. At a stroke, the popularly held image of the Conservative party was suddenly dispelled. No longer could Labour claim that this was a party out of touch with the mainstream, a convocation of desiccated backwoodsmen who thought hip-hop was simply

Peregrine Worsthorne

Are explicit sex scenes OK?

Yes! Philip Hensher In April, I published a novel, King of the Badgers, about a series of events in a small town in Devon called Hanmouth. It is, in a way, about private and public lives, and the surprising and sometimes deplorable events that happen between people when their front doors are closed. It got very enthusiastic reviews: the Sunday Times said it was ‘a really good old-fashioned novel: the sort of thing George Eliot might have written if she was interested in gay orgies and abducted chavs’. Though it doesn’t make a point of obscenity, it does contain one scene in which a group of overweight gay men meet,

Ian Buruma

Russian Notebook

It took me more than three hours by taxi to get from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport to the centre of town. My Bulgarian friend, Ivan Krastev, a shrewd political analyst, describes the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union as one between traffic jams and queues. Queues were tedious, freezing in winter, but sometimes convivial. Traffic jams are just as tedious, warmer, but often lonely. Compared with the last time I was here, in 2001, I notice more ethnic diversity in the streets: dark Middle Eastern-looking faces from the Caucasus, Chinese-looking people from the various Asian republics, an area which a well known American expert once described as Trashcanistan. Moscow is

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Absolute power corrupts one’s dress sense absolutely

If you’re near a laptop and in search of a giggle, go to http://tinyurl.com/6gamb73. Otherwise, let me explain in words: that links you to a gallery of scores of photographs of Muammar Gaddafi in silly clothes. There are images of him in absurd, invented, full military dress, festooned with the gilt and silverware of bogus medals; sashes of every kind, colour and cloth, all gaudy. There are images of the tinpot dictator decked out in purple like a Roman emperor, swathed in silk with turbans, in mid-desert in combat gear, taking the salute in braid and twill, or crowned in gold. Sunglasses of the most bizarre shape and size, a

James Delingpole James Delingpole

When the music stops, blame environmental madness

Even if, like me, you scarcely know the first thing about electric guitars, you’ll definitely be familiar with the Gibson. It’s the legendary American brand you can hear Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton playing on Cream’s ‘White Room’, and Mark Knopfler on Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’, and Dave Grohl on ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Paul McCartney uses a left-handed Les Paul Standard as his main stage guitar; John Lennon wrote most of his songs on The White Album on a Gibson he borrowed in India from Donovan; Bob Marley’s Les Paul Special is buried with him; U2’s The Edge is a fan, as is Bob Dylan, as were Muddy

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: The heavyweight champions of tennis

John McEnroe, who knows a thing or two about this sort of thing, said it was one of the best shots he had ever seen. The man who played it said it was a gamble, and it clearly broke the spirit of the man who received it. It was Novak Djokovic’s return of serve at 15-40 down, when Roger Federer was serving for the match in the deciding set of their utterly compelling semi-final at Flushing Meadow. Clearly thinking he had nothing to lose, and moving into some zen state of relaxation, Djokovic launched himself at a hard, fast serve wide to his forehand and unleashed a bullet that just

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 17 September 2011

Safer banking will mean the same rotten service at a higher price Cross-party support made the release of the Vickers report on banking reform less of an event than it might otherwise have been. Vince Cable looked almost benign on the Commons bench beside George Osborne. Ed Balls had nothing new to say. After all their lobbying beforehand, bankers got no sympathy for the £7 billion that Vickers says ring-fencing and re­capitalising their retail operations will cost, and barely bothered to protest. Ring-fencing, as I have repeatedly argued, is far from a complete defence against the full range of banking follies. But nor need it be a disaster for banks’

Victor Sebestyen

City of the dead

Russian officials today, much like the Soviet authorities of a past generation,  encourage a cult of the Great Patriotic War. In the national narrative, this was their Finest Hour, still invoked on significant anniversary days as an example of heroism and sacrifice by politicians such as Vladimir Putin. For Russians the most painful trauma in that conflict was the three-year-long siege of Leningrad. As Anna Reid points out in this  masterly and beautifully written account, the deadliest blockade of any city in history has received little attention in the West. Antony Beevor has been followed by a few historians who focused on the nightmare of the Eastern Front, where most

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

There With The Grace of God…

The good news is that Rod Dreher is blogging again, this time at the American Conservative; the sad news is that his sister Ruthie, pictured above with her daughter Claire, has just been killed by cancer. Rod – we email-know one another and have at least one good friend in common – has been blogging about the reaction to his sister’s death. It is, as it must be, emotional, passionate stuff. There’s no pressing need for me to write about this, I guess, save that blogging is most often a means of expressing frustration or unhappiness or outrage and it is not often that we – that is, people who

David Blackburn

From the archives: The doomed euro

It was doomed from the start; that’s the prognosis of those who think that the single currency’s crisis is near terminal, such are its structural and political weaknesses. People warned that it could be thus when the Euro was first launched. Bruce Anderson was among them:  Had Mr Blair been braver, he could have been in on this week’s euro euphoria, Bruce Anderson, The Spectator, 9 January 1999 The combined political will of 11 nations – or at least of their political elites – assured an easy birth for the euro. But the euphoria should not deceive us. Most thoughtful politicians and commentators throughout Euroland will acknowledge that the present

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Adam Curtis Is At It Again

  The great story-teller’s latest piece is a rum business indeed. Apparently: The guiding idea at the heart of today’s political system is freedom of choice. The belief that if you apply the ideals of the free market to all sorts of areas in society, people will be liberated from the dead hand of government. The wants and desires of individuals then become the primary motor of society. But this has led to a very peculiar paradox. In politics today we have no choice at all. Quite simply There Is No Alternative. That was fine when the system was working well. But since 2008 there has been a rolling economic

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

An afternoon to remember

  The strength of Coffee House lies in the quality of the arguments which follow our posts. Journalism today is about starting a conversation with readers, something we at The Spectator firmly believe in. So on Wednesday, we invited 250 subscribers around for a cup of tea. We have a wonderful garden here at 22 Old Queen St, overlooking St James’ Park. We served up sandwiches and tea (courtesy of the East India Company) and listened to our readers’ likes, loves and dislikes. A few questions kept recurring. Is Dear Mary a real person? Yes, Mary Killen is very real – as is her mailbag. She even organises writers’ trips

Matthew Sinclair

Let Them Eat Carbon

After a Spectator debate on climate change in March, Fraser Nelson wrote about whether or not we should try to engage in the debate ourselves or “trust the expert”. Simon Singh had argued in the debate that the most credible experts supported the view that the human contribution to potential global warming was real and serious. The response to my new book Let Them Eat Carbon shows how much that kind of debate is turned on its head when it comes to policy. The science is much less important than people make out. No argument about historical bristlecone pines is going to settle whether or not we should pay handsome subsidies to

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I’m the man to run Ofsted

At some media whore shindig early in the summer I bumped into Michael Gove and asked, politely, if he would mind very much making me the boss of Ofsted. After all, I had once employed him as a reporter – it seemed the least that he could do. He was sadly non-committal; I have waited for a letter of appointment, none has come. However, I like to think he absorbed some of my drunken rant that evening, because this week he has castigated Ofsted for giving hundreds of schools an “outstanding” when actually, as we all know, they’re utterly bloody useless. Schools often get very high marks from Ofsted if