Society

Saturday

Philip Delves-Broughton

A rich man for all seasons

Multibillionaire Warren Buffett may sound cuddly, but he’s talking from both sides of his mouth August was a typical month for Warren Buffett, America’s second richest man. While the leisure classes lolled, he called for higher tax rates for the rich. If America had a debt problem, he wrote in the New York Times, it was high time the rich paid a greater share of their earnings to the government. Then, two weeks later, he sank his fangs into the fleshy rump of Bank of America, one of the bailed-out giants still staggering three years since the start of the financial crisis. Buffett had been circling Bank of America for

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Convenience seems a small, mean word – but sometimes it’s all we’ve got

The reason why everybody gets so shrill over abortion, I’ve often thought, is that nobody is quite prepared to admit what they are talking about. By which I don’t mean ‘the slaughter of babies’. I mean the pros and cons of a system of morality that is coldly utilitarian, and nothing else. Oh God, you’re probably thinking. Not abortion. We’ve already read a cover article about that. Can’t you write about something else, with some laughs in it? British agents pretending not to realise when they hand people over to tyrants for torture, for example? And I won’t lie, I thought about that, and I had a particularly nice gag

Alex Brummer

Investment Special: The social network bubble

It’s an irritating daily occurrence. The names of two or three people I barely know pop up in my inbox asking me to join their ‘professional network’, LinkedIn. Early on, I was tempted by the idea that being part of this family might widen my range of contacts, and perhaps also my story-gathering capacity. But then I realised that anything that had grown so big and amorphous was hardly likely to be a source of exclusive information. Nevertheless, social networks from LinkedIn to Facebook are the new investment fad. Having been wrong about Google when it first floated — my view was that legal disputes over content meant that it

Tim Price

Investment Special: The doom boom

Not for nothing is economics known as the dismal science. Having failed to foresee the global bubbles in credit, banking and housing, mainstream economists have compounded the problem by advocating entirely the wrong solutions. Like generals fighting the last war, most economists (and leftists who think they understand economics) continue to bang the drum of Keynesian stimulus, evidently un-able or unwilling to understand that countries, like their citizens, cannot borrow their way out of debt. Cue the world’s largest ever sovereign-debt crisis. But not every economist got it lament-ably wrong. A number of financial thinkers anticipated both the bubble and the crash. Though few of them actually hail from Austria

Jonathan Davis

Investment Special: Bottom fishing

Here’s the good news. Share prices are falling. Investors are panicking. Talk of crisis dominates the headlines. These are precisely the conditions in which bargains tend to become available on the stock market. Just as history is written by the victors, so the day-to-day stock-market narrative is written from the perspective of those with most to lose: those who already have wealth, not those who need it in the future. Yet when it comes to investment, as all great investors know, what matters most is how cheaply you can buy, not whether the market is going up or down around the time you do so. The younger you are, the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 10 September 2011

A thunderous collapse could drown out the clamour over banking reform The banking lobby doth protest too much, methinks — to misquote Hamlet’s mother — and so doth its enemies, not to mention the opponents of planning reform. In fact, there’s a whole lot of grandstanding going on in the public arena which I fear may suddenly be silenced either by a thunderous collapse of the eurozone or the giant toilet-flush that will signal the onset of renewed global recession. Or both. And if that sounds unusually gloomy for this column, I refer you to this week’s news that in August the US economy generated no new jobs at all

Bruce Anderson

Drink: Rules of the game

We should all eat humbly. There is no sense in foraying to far-flung continents in search of fancy victuals. We should be content with the near-at-hand: the harvests of our fields, hills, rivers, seas and moors. The Chinaman has his bowl of rice, the Irishman his cauldron of potatoes. At this time of year, our equivalent ought to be a grouse. The grouse is a fascinating bird, and not just in the way that it swirls and swerves and, after a final jink, speeds by contemptuously. It can make even fine shots feel foolish, let alone those, such as your correspondent, whose marksmanship qualifies them for membership of the RSPB.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: The billionaires who no one seems to hate

Two interesting news items coincided the other week Two interesting news items coincided the other week. The growing debate about the relatively light tax burden shouldered by the massively rich and the partial retirement of Steve Jobs. One dog failed to bark in the night. No one, as far as I can see, dared name Mr Jobs as one of the people who should pay more tax. In fact, for a billionaire head of a vast, powerful US multinational, Jobs has enjoyed a special indulgence: to some people his is almost the only acceptable face of capitalism. Will Wilkinson, blogging for the Economist, suggests people are dazzled by the beauty

Aidan Hartley

Wild Life | 10 September 2011

Aidan Hartley’s Wild Life  Nairobi My friend Philip Coulson was shot at midnight while driving home after the theatre in Nairobi recently. He had slowed down to go over some rumble strips when a white car halted in front of him. ‘A man got out and I could see in silhouette that he had a gun,’ Philip tells me. He backed away in reverse but the man walked up and from a few feet away he fired his pistol at Philip’s face. The closed window exploded. Philip felt a tug in his stomach. ‘That was a bit over the top,’ he says. ‘I thought, “I’d better get out of here.”’

Deborah Ross

Fatal flaw

I love the story of Jane Eyre more than life itself, which has never been much cop but, infuriatingly, I could not love this adaptation. I say ‘infuriating’ because what it does right it does very right. It is stunningly mounted, for example, with ferocious landscapes and howling winds and the sort of storms that split skies open. But what it does wrong is fatal, and the error is this: it just isn’t passionate or sexy enough. It is Jane Eyre with all the awful weather but minus the throb of erotic impulse. Jane and Rochester’s first kiss must, surely, be the most longed-for kiss in all of English literature

Friday

Jonathan Jones

From the archives: 9/11

This Sunday marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Here is the article Stephen Glover wrote for The Spectator in response: “The terrorists want us to believe the world has ended. We must not fall into their trap.”, Stephen Glover, 15 September 2001 As those who are old enough remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was shot, so we will all recall what we were doing when we heard about the attack on New York. I was reading the controversial new book about Tina Brown and Harry Evans, which I had planned to write about for this column. Then my elder son rang

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Obama’s plan B: tax cuts

Washington, DC The clue is in the name. A stimulus is supposed to stimulate, and Obama’s first attempt stimulated nothing more than the American national debt. So he’s trying again, with a $447 billion package (he’s careful not to call it a “stimulus”) in what will probably be his last roll of the pre-election dice. But $245 billion of it would be debt-financed tax cuts.  Not sales tax cuts, the type of which Ed Balls is prescribing for Britain. It’s all payroll tax cuts: reducing the tax on jobs in the hope of encouraging more hiring. Given the temporary nature of the tax cuts, I doubt this will be the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

9.9.1513

The original and gravest episode of Disaster for Scotland. Today’s the 498th anniversary of Flodden. A bleak day for Scotland; bleaker still for King James himself and the Men of the Ettrick Forest. Legend has it only one man from these parts returned alive and the memory of that remains the centrepiece of Selkirk’s annual Common Riding. Jean Elliot’s lament, The Flowers of the Forest, dates from 1756. Here’s Ronnie Browne’s version:

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Blair returns to warn of the dangers of Iran

With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, Tony Blair has given an interview to The Times. What’s making news is his—to my mind, accurate–warnings about just how dangerous it would be for the Middle East for the Iranian regime to get a nuclear bomb. But what struck me about the interview was how much easier Blair believed things would be in Afghanistan and Iraq than they have been.  He tells the paper that: “What that means is that you can knock out, militarily, the regime, but then when you’re engaged in the process of nation building afterwards, it’s not like nation building was in, say, the Balkans or Eastern Europe.” “You know,

Thursday

The Spectator

Who cares about abortion?

Thanks to Nadine Dorries’ amendment to the Health and Social Care bill, abortion rights have been discussed a great deal this week – both inside and outside of Parliament. In her cover article for this week’s Spectator (out today), Mary Wakefield says that this debate has revealed a “strange and unpleasant consensus… that abortion is not just a necessary evil, but a jolly good thing.” In the piece, Mary asks “Why are we so keen on abortion?”: “The fact is that unless you’re a fan of infanticide you’ve got to agree that somewhere along the slippery ascent from that little Alka-Seltzer of pluripotent cells to the birth of an actual

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Arsenal Behaving Badly: Fancy That!

As world-class moaners it’s not a surprise that Arsenal football club behave in this fashion but it’s depressing to see their groundless whingeing tolerated by a judge, even a Spanish judge: The Gunners have won their case against Seville resident Alicia Simon, who has now been told by the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office to change the name of her hat shop ‘Arsenale’. Simon registered the name of her shop before she even opened it in 2007 despite protestations from the club, but Arsenal’s lawyers have been petitioning the Spanish authorities ever since, trying to convince them that she has infringed their trademark. The stunned shopkeeper, who admits to having

Daniel Korski

Newsflash: Americans and Europeans like each other

A decade has passed since the attacks of 9/11 and so much water has flown under the proverbial bridge. Today, ordinary Americans don’t want to have a leadership role in the world, and Europeans aren’t too keen on it either. And having dithered over what to do about Guantanamo Bay, most people in the US and Europe don’t trust President Obama’s counter-terrorist policies. Right? No, actually wrong. According to the tenth-annual public opinion survey of the general public in the United States, Turkey, and 12 European Union member states – the Transatlantic Trends – 54 per cent of respondents from European countries surveyed want the United States to show strong leadership in world

Wednesday

Vidhya Alakeson

Willetts plays snakes and ladders

Social mobility has become something of a hot topic for the coalition. February’s Social Mobility White Paper made it the government’s number one social policy goal. Yet arguments over tuition fees have rather drowned out much of what they have to say on the topic, particularly when it comes to education and skills. So it was interesting to hear Higher Education Minister David Willetts restate the government’s case with a speech at the Resolution Foundation yesterday. Willetts, who has been called the poster boy of the think tank community, was as thoughtful as ever – and he didn’t mince his words. In a dig at much of the research on

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

50p tax isn’t just hurting the economy, but Treasury revenues too

So where were these 20 economists when Gordon Brown first set the 50p trap for George Osborne? Then, Brown’s gamble was that the Shadow Chancellor was a political strategist with little interest or expertise in economics, so he’d be unlikely to work out just how much the 50p tax would lose the Exchequer, or guess it could be more than £3 billion a year – with further, less calculable damage on Britain’s reputation as a home for entrepreneurs. This was when we needed those economists. At the time, all Osborne had to go on was the IFS which calculated it would cost £800m – assuming the rich were no more

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A growing argument about the 50p rate

With the Eurozone and American economies both at risk of a double dip recession, how to get the British economy moving again is going to be one of the defining political arguments of the autumn. A first salvo in that fight has been fired this morning with a letter to the FT from 20 economists calling for the immediate scrapping of the 50p rate because of the harm that it is doing to the economy as a whole. This letter will, one suspects, be privately welcomed by the Chancellor who is looking for ways to, at the very least, cut the rate. He has become increasingly convinced that it is