Society

CoffeeHousers may remember an odd New York Times editorial recently where they tried to blame the evaporation of British economic growth on austerity. Perhaps the newspapers’s famed fact-checkers had taken the day off, because the slightest piece of research would have exposed the premises of the piece as bunkum. This morning, the ONS has produced monthly public finance figures, showing current spending is still rising in Britain. But first, let’s get to the New York Times editorial: “Greece, which has been forced into induced recession by misguided European Union creditors, Britain has inflicted this harmful quack cure on itself… Austerity was a deliberate ideological choice by Prime Minister David Cameron’s

In order to commemorate the death of Colonel Gaddafi properly, here’s a quiz about various deceased (with one exception) murderous megalomaniacs. No googling, or I’ll boil you in a vat for supper. Answers later today. 1. Which Muslim headcases wrote the following novels: a) Escape To Hellb) Begone Demons! 2. According to a popular conspiracy theory, from whose frozen semen was German Chancellor Angela Merkel created? 3. Who ordered The Night of the Murdered Poets? 4. Which friend of ol’Muammar may well have served up his other friend, Giscard D’Estaing, with poached loin of human being at a presidential dinner? 5. Which murderous black nationalist nutjob reportedly modelled himself on Baron Samedi? 6. Who wrote to the Queen

It’s been a year since the Coalition’s Comprehensive Spending Review, but the public is in no mood to celebrate its anniversary. As the economy has failed to recover – GDP was no higher in June this year than at the time of the Review – sentiment has turned against the government. The latest YouGov polling shows that just one-in-three think the government is handling the economy well, against 58 per cent who say “badly”. At the time of the Spending Review, the public was split evenly on this question. Similarly, just 33 per cent think the government’s spending cuts are good for the economy, while half say they’re bad. But

We tweeted a link to this earlier, but thought CoffeeHousers would appreciate this Spectator article from August on the future of Libya. The question for Libyans, as they take their first momentous steps into the post-Gaddafi era, is whether they can now build a government and country worthy of their heroic struggle against one of the world’s worst tyrants. For decades, conventional thinking about Arab nations, especially among the experts, argued that they were best ruled by ‘strongmen’, a western euphemism for pro-western dictators such as the deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his former counterpart in Tunisia Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. According to this line of thought, Arabs

“7m caught in tax blunder,” trumpets the cover of this morning’s Daily Mail. “After a series of errors, six million will get an average £400 rebate, while a million face demand to pay £600.” It’s a good story — but it’s also sadly, wearily familiar. Rewind the tape to last November, and the Telegraph was running with the headline, “New HMRC tax blunder means thousands face demands to repay”. Last September, the Guardian had an article about the 10 million people who might be owed rebates. Last August … oh, you get the point. Nary a month has passed without some tale of how HMRC has screwed up once again.

Here’s a conversation I had with an elderly Afrikaaner lady (EAL) in the main street of the whites-only town, Orania, in South Africa. Me: Hello, do you live here? EAL: No, but I am thinking of moving here. Me: Why would you want to do that? EAL: There is no crime here, it is secure. The people are friendly and welcoming, and the shops are good. Me: There’s also a complete and utter absence of black people. EAL (jabbing her finger into my chest): Yis! And lit me tell you. That is the best thing of all! That is the best thing in the world! More snapshots from this neck

Yesterday, Lord Wolfson — the new Tory peer and CEO of Next — made an extraordinary offer: £250,000 of his own money to whoever comes up with the best plan to break up the Euro. It’s the second biggest prize in economics, after the Nobel, and a great and patriotic idea from Wolfson, an original and forceful thinker with plenty real world experience from whom I hope we’ll hear more. Inspired by this, we at Coffee House would like to make our own offer: a bottle of Pol Roger, our house champagne, to whoever can explain George Osborne’s growth strategy. The chancellor needs some help on this front, with some unkind