Society

Friday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: the Queen’s Birthday

It was, I’m sure CoffeeHousers noticed, the Queen’s 85th Birthday yesterday. So here, as a belated commemoration, is an item from the archives that is a even more archival than usual. You see, it’s an article that was written on the event of the Queen’s 80th Birthday in 2006 — and it looks back at the issue of The Spectator that was published when the Queen was actually born, in 1926. Mary Wakefield, our deputy editor, is the author: The week the Queen was born, Mary Wakefield, The Spectator, 8 April 2006 It was press day at The Spectator when Queen Elizabeth II was born. The printers had set the

The Spectator

The week that was | 22 April 2011

Here are some of the posts that were published on Spectator over the past week: Fraser Nelson makes an appeal for Easter reading suggestions. James Forsyth reveals that Ed Miliband will hire tails for the Royal Wedding, and says that there are more attacks on Clegg to come. Peter Hoskin watches the NHS furore rumble on, and notices Nick Clegg reaffirming the coalition’s wedding vows. Peter Hoskin and Jonathan Jones compare Osborne’s and Obama’s cuts. David Blackburn says that tuition fees are set to spoil the government’s summer, and reports on the latest EU budget row. Daniel Korski argues that the Libya intervention needs to be stepped up. Rod Liddle

Thursday

Daniel Korski

The Libyan intervention needs to be stepped up

The government is rightly proud of the Libya intervention. Not only did it save thousands of lives in Benghazi but it was conducted in way that learnt the lessons of the past. The Foreign Secretary took pains to get a UN resolution, making the mission legal, and kept the shape-shifting Arab League committed throughout. But unless the government is now  willing to unlearn the lessons of the past, and act both more unilaterally and even illegally, its multilateral, UN-sanctioned action may have been for nothing. For Misrata is now getting the punishment that had been planned for Benghazi. The town is being destroyed in a seige that looks like the

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

The NHS furore rumbles on

Another story to sour Andrew Lansley’s cornflakes this morning: the King’s Fund has released a “monitoring report” into the NHS which highlights, among other things, that hospital waiting times are at a 3-year high. The figures they have used are available on the Department of Health website — but unshackled from Excel files, and transcribed into graph form (see above, click for a larger version), they are now, it seems, a discussion point. The Today Programme tried to bait a couple of NHS chieftains on the matter earlier. The worst they could extract from either of them was that, “[waiting times] haven’t got massively longer now, but people are worried

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Billy Boys are Back in Town

Neil Lennon, the Celtic manager, is not normally an especially sympathetic figure. But so what? Here’s the big news from Scotland today: Three prominent figures associated with Celtic Football Club have been sent potentially lethal home-made letter bombs. Celtic manager Neil Lennon, his QC Paul McBride and the politician Trish Godman, a Celtic supporter, were each sent a package containing improvised explosives with the power to kill or severely wound the recipient. Can we agree that this is getting out of hand? Assassination attempts – which is what this is – open a new front in football’s most depressing rivalry. At this point it’s customary to blame both sides and

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

An appeal for reading suggestions

Inspired by Cameron, I’m off on an EasyJet holiday to Spain this week — and would like to make an appeal to CoffeeHousers for Easter reading suggestions. When I did likewise before, the suggestions were good enough to keep me in reading material for the rest of the year (especially The Sixty Minute Father, which I now keep close-to-hand in case I ever believe what it says is The Fundamental Lie: that “a quieter time is coming”). Anyway, I’m on a political (and digital) detox session, and I’ve read almost every Scandi crime book going — so suggestions outside of that would be appreciated. As it stands, I’ve already packed

David Blackburn

Councils can seriously damage your health

There’s a fantastic post by Nicholas Timmins at the FT’s Westminster blog. Using the example of Enfield Council, which has just blocked moves to close failing wards in a local hospital, Timmins argues that councils commissioning healthcare is a recipe for disaster: ‘The reason council commissioning of care is a not a good idea is that it mixes representation without taxation. Councillors have democratic legitimacy. But they don’t raise the money for the NHS. So over the long term, giving them responsibility for commissioning is simply a recipe for councils to say there is not enough money in the system and to blame central government for the NHS’s deficiencies, rather

Alex Massie Alex Massie

We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Mini-Van

Sure, the Scottish edition of the Sun splashes with Play It Again Salm as it endorses the SNP but its Irish sibling has a much better story:   River Beast’s Rampage and Farmer Attacked by Furbag are just extra, glorious, titillating teasers. But this is what happens when you forsake the Horse Outside for a van… [Thanks to my old friend Ciaran Byrne]

Monday

David Blackburn

Lansley needs to get his quiet friends talking

Is Andrew Lansley hearing rather than listening? Dame Barbara Hakin, one of the Department of Health’s national managing directors, has written a letter to some GPs that suggests the pace of health reform will not be affected by the ‘legislative pause’. Hakin writes: ‘Everyone within the Department of Health is very aware of the support shown by the GP community to date and we have been struck by the energy and enthusiasm demonstrated in pathfinders across the country. Therefore, although the Government has taken the opportunity of a natural break in the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill, we are very keen that the momentum we have built

David Blackburn

Standard & Poor’s bombshell

A mute, almost disbelieving response (except on the Markets) has met Standard & Poor’s announcement that the US government’s fiscal profile may become ‘measurably weaker’. The credit rating agency has put a ‘negative outlook’ on the US’s AAA rating; the accompanying report said:    “We believe there is a material risk that U.S. policy makers might not reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary challenges by 2013. If an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation does not begin by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns.” Robert Peston tweets, “S&P’s announcement that outlook

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 18 April – 24 April

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

Saturday

Robin Oakley

The turf: National favourite

Over the years I have made a habit of starting Grand National Day by visiting Red Rum’s grave near the visiting post and then walking the course to remind myself just how big those obstacles are. Over the years I have made a habit of starting Grand National Day by visiting Red Rum’s grave near the visiting post and then walking the course to remind myself just how big those obstacles are. (Yes, even the open ditches with their sloping spruce fronts require horse and jockey to clear an obstacle 5ft 6ins high and 10ft 6ins wide from the sighting board to the turf on the other side.) I like

Melissa Kite

Real life | 16 April 2011

That it should come to this. I suddenly realised I was bent double over my wheelie bin, my head inside it, riffling for rogue bits of plastic or cardboard thrown in by neighbours or passing drunks, or passing drunk neighbours. ‘I’m a civilised person, reduced to the status of a bum!’ I screamed in outrage when I realised what I was doing. If you had written a sci-fi novel in the Sixties you could not have predicted that the year 2011 would see law-abiding, middle-class people riffling desperately through garbage. But as macabre as it sounds, it’s actually worth doing for the amount of money I could save. Despite government

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 16 April 2011

I rang my boy. He was in the supermarket with Oscar, my 15-month-old grandson, spending his last 50p on four ‘basics’ toilet rolls, he said. The toilet rolls cost 48p. It was a good job, he said, that he had nine cigarettes left in his packet to last him until his partner’s pay cheque from the government arrived. Ten minutes later, I received a text from him. The usual one — ‘can u ring me pls’. He’s never got any credit on his phone so he texts me and I call him right back. I called him. He and Oscar were in the back of a police car, he said.

Taki

High life | 16 April 2011

New York On Tuesday last, 12 April, 150 years ago, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired the first shots on Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour, South Carolina. The bombardment lasted 36 hours, with Fort Sumter occasionally replying with fire of its own. Then the white flag went up and the Union troops within the fort surrendered. Not a single man had a scratch on either side. It looked as if both sides had gangs fighting that couldn’t shoot straight. If only. In the next four years, 620,000 American lives were lost, from Bull Run to Petersburg, before the unequal contest came to an end at Appomattox, Virginia,

The Spectator

Letters | 16 April 2011

Short memories Sir: Matt Cavanagh’s razor-sharp analysis (‘Operation Amnesia’, 9 April) chimes with the anecdotal evidence borne by friends returning from Afghanistan. But it is not just the soldiers who have made mistakes. Their political masters bear primary responsibility for initiating, in the first place, the unfunded strategic overstretch which goes beyond Afghanistan. The result is that our Armed Forces are now unable to respond effectively to new, unexpected (and potentially more serious) crises such as the ones which have erupted recently in the Maghreb and the Middle East — as well as the ones which are surely yet to come. We seem to be suffering from strategic, as well

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 16 April 2011

In reply to a telephoned invitation to dinner, I heard my husband ask, in an attempt at a relaxed and modern register of speech, ‘What time’s kick-off?’ His image came from Association Football. In reply to a telephoned invitation to dinner, I heard my husband ask, in an attempt at a relaxed and modern register of speech, ‘What time’s kick-off?’ His image came from Association Football. But kick off has recently developed a quite different meaning, exemplified in an online discussion that I stumbled across, about community therapy, where one woman mentioned an incident ‘at about the age of 13, when a lot of my mental health problems really began to

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 16 April 2011

The war in Afghanistan began on 7 October 2001. Its purpose was to clear the land of al-Qa’eda and Taleban and establish a democratic state. Last week’s Spectator questioned the current military strategy. Alexander the Great could have expanded on the matter. When by 329 bc Alexander had dealt with the Persian king Darius — the main object of his mission — he pushed on into Bactria/Sogdia, a tribal area roughly equal to northern Afghanistan and its borders, to pursue Darius’ successor, Bessus. He met with immediate success, and Bessus was captured and executed. The Americans, too, in 2001 soon drove the Taleban into Pakistan. But an insurgency then developed behind the Americans’ back,

The Spectator

Barometer | 16 April 2011

Prince of cars It was revealed that Audi has been enticing royal customers with 60 per cent discounts. It is not the first car company to target royalty to build its image. — In 1898 the Daimler Motor Company of Coventry offered the Prince of Wales the use of five cars on a visit to Warwick Castle. — The generosity was richly rewarded: in 1902, as King Edward VII, he ordered a 22 HP model from the company and bestowed a royal warrant. — Daimler remained the sole supplier of vehicles to the Royal Family until 1949 when, after a gearbox failure in a Daimler given to him as a

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 16 April 2011

The justification for banning the burqa and the niqab in France surely has nothing to do with the French ‘separation of Church and State’. The justification for banning the burqa and the niqab in France surely has nothing to do with the French ‘separation of Church and State’. If it is justified — I would rather hesitantly argue that it is — it is solely because the veil hides identity. Common citizenship involves trust, and trust cannot exist where one cannot see people’s faces in public. Obviously there can be necessary functional reasons for concealment — surgical masks, beekeepers’ helmets, extremes of cold — but concealment in normal circumstances in