Society

Investment special: Flying through storms

The financial crisis has unleashed a great debate about rebalancing Britain’s economy. The conventional wisdom is that our prosperity during the Nice decade (non-inflationary continuous expansion, that is) was over-dependent on finance and that we need to refocus our attention on high-quality manufacturing. Under New Labour, and the Tories before them, manufacturing was allowed to wither, declining from 18 per cent of GDP in 1996 to just 12 per cent now. The better news, however, is that what’s left behind is much better than what was lost. In certain sectors, including high-end engineering and aerospace, Britain has managed to retain a strong competitive edge. And unlike in previous decades, this

The week that was | 14 October 2011

A selection of posts from the past seven days at spectator.co.uk: Fraser Nelson says it might be time to scrap the minimum wage for young workers and calls Andrew Lansley’s handling of the NHS reforms historically bad. James Forsyth explains how Lansley got his health bill through the Lords and says Adam Werritty’s no Walter Mitty. Pete Hoskin reports on the threat from Iran and the Miliband and Balls double act. Daniel Korski calls Sarkozy’s likely opponent dull and says ministers need their Werrittys. Jonathan Jones says the middle ground’s there for the taking and reports on the latest Republican debate. David Blackburn reports on Cameron’s immigration speech and his

Local interest | 14 October 2011

A tourist from Crystal Palace, south London, rescued an 11-month-old boy from the River Yare, in Norfolk, after his pushchair was swept into the water by a freak gust of wind. (Eastern Daily Press) Four men have admitted possession and use of criminal property after finding £750,000 buried beneath a pigsty in Worcestershire. (Worcester News) A 12-week-old German Shepherd cross puppy has been found in a recycling bin in Lincoln Road, Basildon. (Echo, Southend) Police have told a bar in Stockton-on-Tees that, if it goes ahead with a plan to offer shots of spirits for 1p on Halloween, they will attempt to have its licence withdrawn. (Gazette, Middlesbrough) A teenager

Switching off the spotlight

Having tea with Gillian Anderson is a thoroughly pleasant business — a splash of muted glamour in a fairly drab London autumn. I thoroughly recommend it, as a more engaging companion it would be a challenge to find. We meet in the studiously bijou surroundings of the Zetter Townhouse in St John’s Square, chosen, I suspect, because no one there has the slightest clue who she is. She is wearing the no-make-up disguise, and glides serenely under London’s radar, something she clearly enjoys. She is a tad jetlagged, she says, having just arrived home from a three-week stint ‘doing press’ in LA. We are talking in the Games Room downstairs

Fraser Nelson

Lansley’s historic debacle

I’ve just come back from a Health Service Journal conference of medics, where all manner of subjects came up. One audience member asked what historical event stood comparison to Lansley’s mishandling of the Health Bill. What else has caused so much controversy, to such little purpose? No one knew. Many of those present — senior doctors, NHS executives, etc — knew Lansley, and everyone seemed to agree that he is a policy wonk fatally miscast as Health Secretary. Politics is about making and winning arguments; whereas Lansley wanted to work on details so complex that, even now, almost no one in government can explain what is being done. The Bill

James Forsyth

The Fox story rumbles on

It has been a relatively quiet day on the Liam Fox front today. It now seems that the report into this whole affair will not be ready until next week; Adam Werritty has not yet had a second interview with Cabinet Office. For his part, Fox has looked more confident today and by all accounts was impressively calm as he sat on the front bench today. Interestingly, one ministerial ally of Doctor Fox feels that last night’s report by Nick Robinson was more damaging for the defence secretary than most people have realised. His fear is that having people pay Werritty to push a specific agenda, even if it was

James Forsyth

How Lansley won over the Lords

As Ben Brogan wrote this week, the House of Lords is threatening to become one of the biggest obstacles to the coalition’s reform agenda. But the way in which the Health and Social Care Bill was steered through its second reading in the upper house does provide a model for how even the trickiest votes can be won. Andrew Lansley’s much derided operation got this one right. It realised months ago that the crucial thing was to stop the crossbenchers voting against the bill en masse. So, the health minister in the Lords, Earl Howe, and Lansley’s long-serving aide Jenny Jackson have been on a cup of tea offensive for

Happy Birthday, Mrs T

It is, you may have heard, Margaret Thatcher’s 86th Birthday today. By way of a congratulatory toast to the Iron Lady, here’s a thought-filled article that T.E. Utley wrote about her politics, for The Spectator, some 25 years ago: Don’t call it Thatcherism, T.E. Utley, The Spectator, 19 August 1986 There is no such thing as Thatcherism. The illusion that there is is in part a deliberate creation of Mrs Thatcher’s enemies. They have proceeded on the age-old maxim that there is nothing (certainly not private scandal) more likely to injure the reputation of a British politician than the suggest that he has an inflexible devotion to principle. This maxim

The ongoing NHS scandal

Shock! Horror! Another report reveals the shameful care given to the elderly in British hospitals. People in the twilight of their life reduced to begging for food and rattling the bars of their beds in a desperate attempt to get the attention of medical staff paid to care for them. The findings came in reports of random inspections by the Care Quality Commission watchdog that found concerns in 55 of the 100 hospitals visited, with 20 of them — one in five — breaking the law in its levels of neglect. They found patients starved of food, denied water, spoken to rudely or simply ignored. It is sickening stuff. But

In it together | 13 October 2011

Governments worth their salt know that a single young person out of work is a tragedy, but a million young people being on the dole is a political catastrophe.   This week’s unemployment figures fall just short of that symbolically important figure. But they also put the coalition’s solutions in sharp focus. Ed Miliband did well in PMQs this week because he could see the panic in David Cameron’s eyes.   It isn’t that the government doesn’t have a solution. It has a solution for all the country’s ills: the riots, social dislocation, worklessness. It is called the Work Programme. According to its champions it will deliver on every front.

Lansley’s real fight

Yesterday was a rare good day for Andrew Lansley: the Health Bill survived its trial in the House of Lords. But there are no fanfares in this morning’s press for the near-moribund health secretary. The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent and The Mail all lead with the story that 50 per cent of English hospitals fail elderly patients according to the Quality Care Commission. Lansley may have thought that his struggle was with nit-picking peers, who are determined that he, as the secretary state, remains ultimately accountable for the NHS in the letter of the law. But, maintaining the standard of NHS care is his real battle. The irony of the

Alex Massie

The Human Rights Act Protects the Innocent

Meanwhile, in the day’s other Supreme Court judgement, the justices struck down the government’s ban on non-EU spouses under the age of 21 coming to live in Britain. This legislation was, it should be noted, well-intentioned and aimed to make it harder to arrange forced marriages in this country. So far so admirable. But, as is so often the case, the law cheerfully entrapped the innocent as well as the guilty. And so, as is so often the case, there’s a balance. Mitigating against forced marriages is a worthy endeavour and one that Lord Brown, dissenting, suggested should be given greater priority: The extent to which the rule will help

Fraser Nelson

Time to scrap the minimum wage?

Today’s youth unemployment figures are simply appalling. It’s now 21 per cent amongst the under-25s, above the peak of 18 per cent seen under the 1990s recession. For the first time since then, Britain’s youth joblessness is worse than the European average. This is a tragedy, and not one we should accept as being a grimly inevitable aspect of the recession. Ed Miliband said in PMQs that a million young people are on the dole: a statistic everyone should get angry about. And we can think of what has gone wrong. The above graph shows how Britain has nothing left to boast about in unemployment. Blair used to love heading

Alex Massie

Three Cheers for the House of Lords | 12 October 2011

As a general rule complaints that the opposition are too beastly for words should not be taken too seriously. They reflect a sense of entitlement on the part of the governing party that, whenever it may be modestly frustrated, quickly becomes peevish, sour and silly. If this is true of parliamentarians it is even truer when considering the bleatings of partisan pundits cheering on Team Red or Team Blue. Again, if you judge these squabbling teams by different criteria then you forfeit some right to be taken seriously. So it’s depressing to see a commentator as urbane and generally sensible as Benedict Brogan make such an ass of himself in

Right to reply: The truth behind the poverty figures

This morning, Fraser published a piece criticising the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ definition of poverty. Here is a counterpunch from Julia Unwin, Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which is the organisation that funds the IFS. This article is the latest post in our Right to Reply series.  Do we really need another debate about the usefulness of a poverty measure? Of course, no definition is perfect. One of the hardy perennials of the poverty debate is the question of measurement. I wonder what it says about us as a country: why do we spend so much effort thinking about definitions of poverty, and so little responding to the

Which amendments to the NHS bill would the government accept?

The Lords has been debating the Owen/Hennessy amendment to the NHS bill, which threatens to upset the coalition. Owen and Hennessy have called for the bill to be referred to an extraordinary committee, which would report by 19 December, and they insist that the secretary of state must remain ultimately responsible for services.  Lord Howe opened for the government and spoke of the need to delegate power away from the secretary of state. The he added: ‘We are unequivocally clear that the Bill safeguards the Secretary of State’s accountability. However we are willing to listen to and consider the concerns that have been raised and make any necessary amendment to put

James Forsyth

BREAKING: Jeremy Heywood to be new Cabinet Secretary

Gus O’Donnell has just emailed colleagues to say that he is announcing his retirement today. He will be leaving the civil service at the end of this year. His successor as Cabinet Secretary will be Jeremy Heywood, the current permanent secretary at Number 10 who has managed to make himself indispensable to David Cameron. But Heywood, who is not overly popular with the departmental permanent secretaries, will not become head of the home civil service. That job will instead go to one of the other permanent secretaries who will take this on in addition to their current role. Ian Watmore, of Football Association fame, will become the permanent secretary at