Society

James Forsyth

The advent of social impact bonds

Today’s announcement of social impact bonds is one of the best things that the government has done. These bonds offer a chance to deal with some of this country’s most difficult social problems at no cost and no risk to the taxpayer. The bonds see money raised from the private and voluntary sectors to fund local government’s work with problem families. The idea is that the bond holders earn their money back and some through the savings made by sorting the lives of these households out. Considering that close to £100,000 a year is spent on some of these families, the opportunities here are considerable. At the moment, only ‘social

Need Libya be another Iraq?

“It’s not over yet.” That has become the government’s Libyan mantra, delivered with a tone of sombre sobriety. However, James Kirkup reports that, in private, ministers are cock-a-hoop, already dreaming of photo-ops and triumphant flyovers. You wonder what Ed Llewellyn makes of the celebrations. Allegra Stratton has written a revealing profile of David Cameron’s chief-of-staff, ‘the most powerful man you rarely hear about’. Llewellyn is a foreign policy expert, a veteran of tours in the Balkans and the Far East. Stratton says he is: ‘Discreet personally and cautious politically, he will have insisted on megaphone caution from the PM and his cabinet ministers who duly took to the airwaves.’ I’m told that diplomats share

Rod Liddle

Polish questions

On one of those phone-in quiz shows, as reported by Private Eye, a contestant, when asked to name the capital of Poland, replied with great confidence: “Auschwitz”. I don’t know exactly what proportion of the British public would subscribe to this notion, but I would guess that it is largish. The ignorance compounded, of course, by referring to the place by its German, rather than Polish, name. The problem is we do not know enough about the Poles now working in our country; despite having their exiled government here during the last world war, and plenty of Poles zipping over to the continent in Spitfires, we still do not know

France’s rich: tax us more

Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Fillon are delivering emergency economic measures today, in order to ward off the ravening credit rating agencies that are questioning France’s AAA rating. As a prelude to this act of political drama, a group of France’s super-rich sent a letter to the government urging it to tax them more. In the spirit of solidarity, they said, they were willing to make a “special contribution” to ensure that France’s budget deficit was brought under control. This Gallic gesture might surprise some Anglo-Saxons and it’s rather touching. But it’s is pre-emptive in many ways. The rich are likely to be asked to lie back and think of France and the letter has the air of an affirmation of

James Forsyth

Mentoring deserves an audience

It is easy to mock the idea of ministers and Downing Street advisers ‘mentoring’ problem families. But the idea is onto something important. First of all, a lot of what these families need is help from someone who understands how to get on in the world. Someone there pushing and prodding them to start applying for jobs would be a healthy development. Second, as Alice Thomson points out in The Times today (£), it would act as a social bridge between the two nations of modern Britain.  As with so many ‘big society’ schemes, this idea runs slap bang into the problem of how time poor most professional people are. But

The riots, Whitehall and universality

Away from the excitement of Libya and Colonel Gaddafi’s singular definition of ‘tactical retreat’, the post-riots debate continues. The government has announced that unemployed offenders will have to work a minimum 28 hours in their communities for four days per week and spend a fifth day looking for a job. This is part of the plan to bolster the Community Payback Scheme, signalled by Nick Clegg last week. Crispin Blunt, the prisons minister, has described the riots as a “one-off” and said it was vital that community sentences were sufficiently firm and constructive to “break the cycle of crime and encourage a law-abiding life.” Tim Montgomerie argues that the Tories are trying to reassert their credentials

Petrol problems

As a coda to Robert Halfon’s piece on the relationship between tax and petrol prices, it’s worth noting that a substantial proportion of European sweet crude (the type of crude oil commonly refined into petrol) originated in Libya. Soon after civil war broke out in Libya, Saudi Arabia increased its oil production and the IEA released some of its reserves to cover lost Libyan production in order stop a spike in the wholesale oil price, which benefits rogue members of OPEC like Iran and Venezuela. But not all of that output was sweet crude, so the collapse of Libyan exports has had a deleterious effect on petrol prices, which have reached 150p/litre in some British garages. Once the Libyan

Beating fuel poverty

As Tim Montgomerie has noted, a growing priority for voters is the astronomical cost of petrol. In fact, according to a Populous poll conducted outside the Westminster bubble, people are far more concerned about energy prices than almost any other issue, even public sector spending cuts. With prices hitting 150p per litre at some garages, many fear that petrol and diesel is becoming part of the poverty trap. For example, in my constituency of Harlow, figures show that the average motorist is now paying something like £1,700 a year just to fill up the family car. This is a tenth of the average income in our town. Experts have ruled

James Forsyth

An encouraging start for the new Libya

The press conference by Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the head of the National Transitional Council, was encouraging. Jalil stressed that he wished Libya to be a country governed by the rule of law and urged his supporters not to indulge in revenge attacks. He also stressed that Gaddafi will be given a ‘fair’ trial. In an echo of the text message that the rebels sent out last night, Jalil encouraged Libyans to protect both private and public property. There is clearly a desire to avoid the kind of post-liberation looting that was so corrosive to public order in Baghdad. In terms of the broader political framework, Jalil emphasised that he wanted

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 22 August – 28 August 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

Rod Liddle

A great victory

Things are looking a little ticklish for Muammar Gaddafi. It would seem that the maniacal and disorganised coalition of rebels, which occasionally breaks off from fighting the tyrant to murder its own leaders, is poised for a famous victory. A consequence, one supposes, of the heavy ordinance expended by the various western allies. Had ol’ Muammar been able to hold out for a while longer the resolve of the west would have collapsed altogether; already the French were whining about their involvement and were thinking about running away again. I assume that once Gaddafi has been chucked out the western military presence will be shuffled a few hundred miles along

A victory for the Libyan rebellion, and for NATO

The regime of Colonel Gaddafi appears to be over. In a matter of hours, we hope, the Libyan dictator will be located and captured, assuming he does not flee Libya. Finally, after 42 of evil rule, the Libyans can build a free nation. The tumultuous events of recent days are, first of all, a victory for the brave Libyan rebels who took arms against Gaddafi. They defied the odds, underwent setbacks but carried on. But, secondly, today’s events are a vindication for David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy. Keen to learn the lessons of Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda, they saved Benghazi from a massacre and helped to build up the Transitional National

Blair on the riots

Tony Blair has dropped in to write an article on the social context to the recent riots. It’s insightful, especially as a testament of his failings in government. At the close of his premiership, he says, he’d realised that the acute social problems in Britain’s inner cities were “specific” and could not be solved with “conventional policy”. So much for ‘education, education, education’, Blair’s favoured solution was a mixture of early intervention on a family by family basis to militate against the “profoundly dysfunctional” upbringings these young people endure and a draconian response to antisocial behaviour. Alas, he was forced from office for before implementing the plan. The present government

The turf | 20 August 2011

I could not understand on Saturday why a fairly standard Newbury card had brought so many vehicles on to the approach roads. All was explained when I saw a group of merry ladies pulling knickers out of their handbags and comparing them. The old Welsh belter Tom Jones was appearing on stage after the day’s racing and he still gets ladies of a certain age waving their underwear at him. I do hope, though, that on such a breezy day those were spare pairs on display. The so-called ‘Party in the Paddock’ went with a zing, rather more so than the dinner party reported on last week by one of

Low life | 20 August 2011

I open my eyes. I’m on my back looking up at the neat joinery of a wooden roof. Resting between two of the cross trees is a row of handmade longbows. Green daylight filters through bushes and trees outside the window. I’m half in and half out of a sleeping bag on the floor of a cabin, next to an old-fashioned pot-bellied stove. I don’t know how I got here, or exactly where this is. But I’m assuming it can only be Ted’s place, the hideaway in the woods where he practises and teaches survival skills and makes love to all the ladies who continuously parade through his life. I

High life | 20 August 2011

Gstaad Blah, blah, blah! I’ve heard it all before. We are all swivel-eyed fanatics, racists and right-wing extremists. And we’re also bigots because we believe in Jesus Christ. Today is my name day, the Day of the Assumption, but please don’t ask me how my parents got Taki out of it — Panagia, Panagiotaki, Taki — that is all I can tell you in my limited English. So I stepped out into my garden overlooking the wooded hills of Gstaad early this morning and began yelling Allahu Akbar at the top of my voice, like those nice guys do down south and also in London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen

Dear Mary | 20 August 2011

Q. I recently attended a house-cooling party. There were haybales around bonfires, barbecues and dancing to iPods with speakers. The house was open — although most of the furniture had gone — and we were invited to bring our own bedding if we wanted to sleep over. My 16-year-old daughter and I had a plane to catch so we left in a hurry the next morning. On the plane she remembered she had left two of her favourite pieces of vintage clothing at the party. As soon as we landed, I emailed our host to ask her to hold onto these precious items — a Hermès scarf and an Austrian

Criminality

‘He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city,’ Sherlock Holmes said of Moriarty. ‘He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.’ Holmes did not say: ‘He is the Napoleon of criminality.’ Nor did T.S. Eliot of Macavity, who was accorded the same sobriquet as Moriarty. In the past week or so I have been surprised by the widespread strength of feeling against the term criminality. At first I did not see the objection. As soon as he came back from his holidays to the riots, David Cameron spoke of ‘criminality, pure and simple’. He soon afterwards said he had

Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Let’s talk about race

As I write this, my face and hands are covered in scabs. I’d love to say I sustained these injuries while trying to save the Oxfam shop on Ealing Green from looters. (It was looted, by the way.) But the truth is I fell off my bike on the way to lunch with another journalist. The brake cable got tangled up in the front wheel and the bike came to an abrupt halt. No stitches, but I look terrible, as though someone has tried to carve a map of the world into my face. This was a blessing in disguise because it meant I turned down an opportunity to appear