Society

Saturday

Tom Stacey

African Adventure

Every day in Kensington Gardens I jog round the bleak granite obelisk inscribed IN MEMORY OF SPEKE. VICTORIA NYANZA AND THE NILE 1864, which my family calls ‘Speke’s Spike’. That river is known to me a bit: I have stood on the glaciers of Ruwenzori at 16,000 feet, which feed it via Lake Albert. I was the first (with two others) to descend for 100 miles the water of the Blue Nile from its Ethiopian source. I have waded the Sudd with Anuak guerrillas.   Tim Jeal’s gripping book pulls the whole astonishing story together. Many a red-blooded Spectator reader will relish it, and buy it, since it’s as intricate

William Leith

Chaos and the tidy mind

In this book, Alexander Masters, the unusual biographer, is living in Cambridge, having written Stuart: A Life Backwards, the story of a homeless man with a disordered mind. Masters lives on the ground floor of a house on Jesus Green; below him, in the basement flat, is Simon Norton, who owns the building. Norton’s flat is so incredibly untidy, so absolutely revoltingly messy, that I can’t go into it now; I’ll spend a couple of paragraphs on it in due course. More importantly, Norton is one of the cleverest mathematicians in the world. Possibly the cleverest. So Masters decides to write his biography. Stuart, who lived his life backwards, had

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Telegraph reports that Wallis was paid for stories by the News of the World while working for Scotland Yard

The Daily Telegraph is tonight alleging that Neil Wallis was paid by the News of the World to provide crime exclusives while working as a consultant for the Metropolitan police. The paper claims that the News of the World paid Wallis £25,000 for information including the details of Scotland Yard operations during this period. According to the Telegraph, £10,000 of the £25,000 was for a single story. This revelation will increase the pressure on the police to reveal fully the extent of contacts between it and News International. But with Paul Stephenson already having resigned over the hiring of Wallis as a consultant, further resignations are unlikely. The other hack-gate

Martin Bright

What Ed Miliband should say at Labour conference, but won’t

It is now beyond question that Ed Miliband is moving his party to the left, or redefining the centre ground if you prefer, or drawing a line under the New Labour era. Or whatever. The latest symbolic move has been to back Palestinian statehood in advance of a vote at the UN. This is a peculiar decision that makes no real sense before knowing what the Palestinians are putting on the table, except to send a strong message to the party faithful that Ed Miliband is shifting policy on the Middle East. This line on Israel/Palestine is one that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would never have countenanced and that

Daniel Korski

Texting times

After the education email furore earlier this week, discussions are underway in ministerial offices about private emails: are they subject to the freedom of information act? The answer is probably yes, which may not be what the government wants to hear. But the problems that this will cause are nothing compared to what might happen next, when attention moves on to text messages. Whitehall buzzes with texts: Ministers text SpAds; SpAds text journalists; journalists text ministers, and so on. Often the messages are short and inconsequential, but not always. There is the potential for even greater embarrassment than exists with emails.

Thursday

Bounderby

Learning from the American QE debate

The City of London’s financial market gurus threw their toys out of the pram again this morning, following the US Federal Reserve’s decision last night not to launch more quantitative easing. The stock markets have slumped as a result. Why aren’t they happy? Even Bank of England research admits that QE gives the stock market a temporary lift (very good for year-end bonuses) at the cost of higher inflation.. That’s why traders want it, but central banks like the Fed and the Bank of England are reluctant. But it looks like conservatives are now succeeding in preventing more QE in the US. The US Congress Republican leadership yesterday issued a

Peter Oborne

In this week’s Spectator: The great euro swindle

Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse. Meanwhile the pro-Europeans find themselves in the same situation as appeasers in 1940, or communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are utterly busted. Let’s examine the case of the Financial Times, which claims to be Britain’s premier

Wednesday

David Blackburn

What Clegg failed to mention

Nick Clegg’s speech will be remembered for its visceral attack on Labour. But it was remarkable for other reasons, notably for what he neglected to say. Clegg said next to nothing about his government’s flagship education and welfare reforms. Only the increase in the pupil premium budget received a mention, as did the new ambition to send “at risk” children to a two week summer camp. This oversight was odd, especially for a leader who talks so much about social mobility. As Coffee House has illustrated on numerous occasions, the academies programme (which was supported by the Liberal Democrats in opposition and throughout the coalition’s opening negotiations) is dramatically improving

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Who Benefits from School Choice? The Poor.

Responding to research that finds school-voucher lottery winners from poorly-performing school districts in North Carolina do much better than the beleaguered kids who don’t get a winning ticket, Matt Yglesias makes the vital point: Note that this is consistent with charter skeptics’ favorite research finding that, on average, public charter schools are about the same as traditional public schools. Many schools and school districts are above average. If kids with low-quality neighborhood schools are able to attend charter schools that are about as good on average as average public schools, then those kids are going to see huge benefits. By the same token, you wouldn’t expect there to be a

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Annals of Self-Awareness: Cristina Odone Edition

I don’t think “squeezed middle” means what the lovely Mrs Odone thinks it means: For the past decade, our parental angst, which had my husband tossing and turning at night and me frantic about freelance work (I remember dashing out of hospital within three days of an emergency caesarian to write an article), could be summed up in two little words: school fees. For most of us “squeezed” middle-class parents, our little treasure’s education will set us back £30,000 a year (the average* private school bill). For many of us this means not only giving up on luxuries such as exotic holidays and theatre outings, but also remortgaging our home,

Matthew Sinclair

Huhne, the Lib Dems’ black comedian

Today we got the black comedy follow up to Sarah Teather’s stand-up routine.  Chris Huhne is going to drive down our energy bills! For those of us wondering how families and businesses can afford his expensive climate policies, it is a bit of a joke. The basic issue – as I set out in the new book Let them eat carbon – is that we need to invest an absolute fortune to meet the range of environmental targets that the government has put in place. Citigroup estimated last September that we need to invest about €229 billion (about £200 billion) in the energy sector this decade.  That is far more

Monday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Novelists can be shits (and may be the better for it)

Writers of my generation are comparing the BBC’s version of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy – the highpoint of the golden age of British television drama in my view – against the new film.  You can see the 1979 series now because rather magnificently, if not perhaps legally, someone has put it on YouTube. The film, which is also well worth seeing, is hours shorter and has less time to develop characters. Most strikingly, although it tries to be faithful to the novel, the atmosphere is different in subtle ways. When the BBC adapted le Carré, we were still living in the novel’s world.  Today’s film is historical fiction. That it

Siobhan Courtney

Another voice: Dale Farm reprieved

This is the second of our occasional ‘another voice’ series. Siobhan Courtney reports again from Dale Farm. The outcome was not what anyone expected: the bailiffs are not getting into Dale Farm. The atmosphere here now is very different to that of the weekend, when I was able to see what life was like inside Dale Farm. The travellers, cheering with joy and hugging each other have just won an injunction preventing Basildon Council from clearing the site pending a further hearing on Friday. Blockades, scaffolding and walls erected by the travellers and protestors stand defiant. Behind this structure, I’m standing in front of two protestors who have concreted themselves

David Blackburn

Residents of Dale Farm win injunction

The residents of Dale Farm have been granted a last gasp reprieve by the High Court. The BBC reports: ‘Mr Justice Edwards-Stuart granted the injunction at London’s High Court on the basis that there was a realistic apprehension that the measures to be taken – while genuinely believed in by the council – “may go further” than the terms of the enforcement notices. He said: “Having regard to the fact there is no fixed date for starting these – but they are imminent – I do not see that any serious injustice will be caused if the actual implementation of any measures will not take place before the end of

Martin Bright

A piece of illiberal silliness

Memories are short in journalism, but reading about the attempts by the Met to force the Guardian to hand over source material in the Hackgate case, reminded me of a case the same newspaper group fought over a decade ago. Bizarrely, the story isn’t in the Guardian’s online archive, which doesn’t go back far enough. But here’s the report of the original hearing in The Independent. Libya, spooks and a renegade MI5 officer: the story had it all. “In a further crackdown on leaks from the renegade MI5 officer David Shayler, the Government launched a court action yesterday against two newspapers. It is part of the most aggressive legal campaign

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

JFK: a tax-cutting headbanger

Given that Vince Cable was once a lecturer in economics, it’s odd to see him feign ignorance over its basic concepts. Listen to his speech today.”There are politicians on both left and right who don’t [get it]. Some believe government is Father Christmas. They draw up lists of tax cuts and giveaways and assume that Santa will pop down the chimney and leave presents under the tree. This is childish fantasy. Some believe that if taxes on the wealthy are cut, new revenue will miraculously appear.” It’s perhaps worth quoting one such ‘childish’ politician who was articulating this long before Art Laffer doodled on a cocktail napkin. In 1962, John F

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 19 September – 25 September

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

Sunday

Siobhan Courtney

Another voice: An afternoon inside Dale Farm

Siobhan Courtney, who blogged for us last week, is part of our ‘another voice’ series – occasional posts from writing from lines of argument different to the ones we normally take on Coffee House. She has sent this report from Dale Farm, where hundreds of travellers are due to be evicted tomorrow. Siobhan was granted access to the site, on what will probably be its last day of existence. Irish folk music pounds out from one chalet. Women vigorously scrub the outsides of neighbouring caravans, while their children bring tea to the men who are fixing their vans. Around them, plastic statues of Mary Magdalene are firmly rooted into the

Gordon Hector

The right to own is not all right

There was much to commend in Chris Skidmore’s article in the Telegraph earlier this week, calling for a radical approach to public services. But there’s one bit that’s worth dissecting: his idea that people in social housing might sell their homes to invest in shared equity, if they behave well. Here’s what he says: ‘Any social housing tenant, under certain conditions of tenure and behaviour, would be able to sell their property and retain a proportion of the equity, reserved for investing in a shared equity programme, giving them a first step onto the housing ladder. The remaining equity would be used to build more affordable housing to meet demand.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The real 50p split

Nick Clegg’s interview on Andrew Marr this morning subtly shifted the Lib Dem position on the 50p tax rate. When Marr asked him what he would do if the George Osborne commissioned HMRC study showed that it raised no money, Clegg replied ‘then I of course think we should look at other ways in which the wealthiest pay the amount that we’d expected through the 50p rate.’ So, in other words, he’ll accept its abolition if something else is put in its place. But, crucially, Clegg wants any replacement to raise not what the 50p rate actually raises but what it was supposed to raise. This presages the next debate