Society

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

“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

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

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

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

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