Society

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

Tuesday

Blair Gibbs

Clarke is right to focus on reoffenders

The Justice Secretary Ken Clarke – who was away during the disturbances last month – has signalled his return with an uncharacteristically tough piece in today’s Guardian. The reference to the rioters as a “feral underclass” is not language that the penal reform lobby will welcome from their favourite Minister, but it does signal a firmer line from the Justice Secretary: “In my view, the riots can be seen in part as an outburst of outrageous behaviour by the criminal classes – individuals and families familiar with the justice system, who haven’t been changed by their past punishments.” This reference to the criminal classes is what police officers will recognise

Jonathan Jones

Public reject Dorries’ abortion proposal

Tomorrow, MPs will debate whether to prevent abortion providers from counselling women seeking an abortion. The motion – put forward by Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries as an amendment to the Health and Social Care bill – is being opposed by the government, and pro-choice groups are backing a rival amendment, which reinforces the status quo. The amendement’s author, Lib Dem MP Julian Huppert says: “The present system which allows women access to evidence-based guidance works, therefore I cannot see why we need to change it. I do not want to see us opening the door to anti choice organisations which could prevent women making their own decision on such a

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The riots, one month on

A month has passed since the riots, and it still feels as if nobody has grasped what really happened. The media debate has been limited, to say the least: lots of self-appointed community leaders and youth experts talking about giving kids a “voice” or “stake” in society, or calling the likes of David Starkey racist. The BBC “riots debate” last night, featuring Dame Claire Tickell, Liam Nolan, Shaun Bailey and former gang member Sheldon Thomas was particularly frustrating. Every time somebody came close to making a good point – Bailey, for instance, issued strong remarks about the commercialisation and sexualisation of children – someone else would drown it in bien-pensant

Monday

Edward Boyd

Do we have the best police service in the world?

As the wave of rioting and looting swept through London earlier this month it was disturbing to see how the actions of a minority could engender fear and disorder on such a grand scale. As the dust settles and the reality of this episode fades away, there is a simple fact that is at risk of being buried under the heap of condemnation of criminals and praise for the police – namely, that such a relatively small number (just over 2,000 were arrested in London out of a population of 8 million) of people deployed themselves so effectively as to bring London to its knees.  Yet thankfully effective deployment is

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 5-11 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

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Darling lifts lid on Brown’s chaotic government

Tieless, Alistair Darling appeared on Marr this morning to discuss his memoir. As with so many of these New Labour autobiographies, there was the strong whiff of a therapy session. At one point, Darling said “if Gordon is listening to this” before remarking that he still felt a huge amount of “residual loyalty” to him. It is not news that the Brown government was dysfunctional. But it was striking that Darling did not dissent when Marr suggested that under Brown, Labour had – collectively – not been fit to govern. In the serialisation of the book in The Sunday Times, the detail that stands out to me is that Darling and David Miliband met

Saturday

Charles Spencer

Musical heaven

Here in suburban Surrey it is already the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. The damson tree in our front garden is so weighed down with fruit that the branches almost reach the ground, as if it were impersonating a weeping willow, and my dear old mum has made two jars of delicious jam, with the promise of many more to come. The leaves on the great chestnut I see from my study window are beginning to turn, the lawn is sodden with rain and the summer holidays already seem a distant memory. I find that it is always this time of year, rather than 1 January, that brings on

The Spectator

Letters | 3 September 2011

We had no choice Sir: ‘Britain remains an expeditionary nation keen on shaping the world,’ says James Forsyth (Politics, 27 August). Come off it, James. We weren’t consulted about Libya any more than we were about Iraq (a referendum would have been nice), but if ‘the nation’ means ‘the people’ then I’m sure that if we’d been told how many hundreds of millions of pounds would be involved, we’d have been considerably keener to spend them on job creation in our own country than on killing people and trashing the infrastructure in someone else’s. We elected Dave and Nick to make prudent cuts in public spending, not to make things

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Food: Bistro battleground

The Hotel du Vin is a mini chain of tasteful hotels, usually found in ‘heritage’ cities — Henley, Cambridge, wretched Tunbridge Wells. The Hotel du Vin is a mini chain of tasteful hotels, usually found in ‘heritage’ cities — Henley, Cambridge, wretched Tunbridge Wells. They have baths in bedrooms, rush-matting and white linen, and, although the name is French, they feel amazingly class-conscious, and therefore English. I like them, principally because of what they are not — neither unknown and dangerous boutique hotels, nor the dreaded Marriott. I fear the Marriott, because its ancient founder, J.W. Marriott, who looks like a cadaverous gnome, has his own in-house TV channel, on which he

Dot Wordsworth

Rat

Libyan rebels called Colonel Gaddafi a ‘rat’ before he lost power — not because he was in a hole, but just as an all-purpose insult. And he had called them rats too in a similar spirit. Yet the only Arabist I have been able to catch told me that rat is not a usual animal insult in Arabic, dog being the standard strong term, or donkey, which would scarcely occur to an English speaker. English is uneven in its animal insults. Dirtiness seems to be the key. Pigs, which we like to eat, show at Blandings and happily turn into children’s characters, from Pinky and Perky to Peppa, still remain available

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 3 September 2011

Q. We have friends who we would like to see much more of but when they come to dinner they always stay until 1 a.m. — often a full three hours after we have got down. This even when all other guests have left, saying they have to be up early and they know we do too. This couple (who were brought up in another country) show absolutely no qualms about keeping us up. Although we like them enormously, they are a rather grand and formal couple, and we are not yet on the sort of terms where we could speak plainly and just ask them to go home. They

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: The Etonian difference

Next Friday, Boris Johnson will officially open the West London Free School. I’m particularly pleased that the ribbon is being cut by a former editor of this magazine. Next Friday, Boris Johnson will officially open the West London Free School. I’m particularly pleased that the ribbon is being cut by a former editor of this magazine. Not only is The Spectator my longest-standing employer and my spiritual home — I’ve been a columnist for 13 years — but many of the ideas that have informed the set-up of the school were first rehearsed in these pages. It’s also appropriate in another respect, because it was encountering Boris at Oxford that

Robin Oakley

The turf: Winning women

The lovely thing about Hayley Turner is the girl-next-door quality which she retains despite having become Britain’s highest-profile woman jockey. But while she still sounds genuinely surprised about her achievements her steady gaze reflects the inner confidence she has always needed to mix it with the boys. Most stables in the country would have to shut down if they lost their female staff overnight, and this column has banged on for years about giving women riders the opportunities they deserve. Now Hayley has added a second Group One, the Nunthorpe on Margot Did, to her breakthrough July Cup victory earlier this season. Cathy Gannon, too, has already matched her 60

Melissa Kite

Real life | 3 September 2011

‘What are you doing on Sunday evening?’ asked my friend Colin. ‘The usual,’ I said. ‘Feed the horses, drive back into town, have a bath, make cheese on toast, go to bed.’ I’m all about the glamour. ‘Well, come over for dinner. It’s just a few friends hanging out. I’m cooking chilli.’ My friend is a clever man. He managed to make it all sound so innocuous. But as soon as I got to his neat, suburban house I knew I was about to be roped into something. A collection of very fit, very selfless-looking people were sitting in his living room. I could tell from one look at them